Subway Reads: Life Studies

To extrapolate from the epigraph (below) chosen for Life Studies, this collection of short stories intends to explore the questions, "What is art?" and "To whom does it belong?" Four stories in, I have yet to find the answers here.
The lives that Susan Vreeland portrays are those that circle the periphery of Western art's great masters--Renoir, Manet, Monet, among others. And despite the characters' often dire circumstances, at least the first few of the collection are perhaps too awash in imagined awe and rarefied nostalgia to allow the reader to answer those questions in truth. Yet moments of beauty do glimmer on the page and, like a moment captured in paint and canvas, live on in the memory. Favorite quotes to come all week.

"The real question is: To whom does the meaning of the art of the past properly belong? To those who can apply it to their own lives, or to a cultural hierarchy of relic specialists?" --John Berger, Ways of Seeing, 1977.