Sebastian Smee: “I realize the claim sounds odd. After all, they weren’t really intended as high art. They’re television documentaries. They were created primarily to educate and to entertain. And yet a lot of things we now display in our museums and think of as art were never intended as such. African carvings. Russian icons. Minoan ceramics. Egyptian statues. … The best nature documentaries … [are] great in this important sense, too: Like those Impressionist paintings, they are ahead of their time. We are not yet ready to see them from the perspective of the future. But soon we will be.” – The Washington Post