Being of short stature, I was often the recipient of the reassuring sentiment that good things come in small packages. This timeless cliché came to mind again when I was comparing various museums during a recent visit to Paris. Smaller, more intimate museums can be as enriching as some of the oversized museums-cum-art warehouses which should provide golf carts along with every entrance ticket.

It is common knowledge that Paris is the destination for lovers. But that deserving reputation could just as easily read art lovers. The city’s art offerings are truly mind-boggling. The primary objective of my recent trip to Paris was to soak up as much art as possible in between visits with friends, surreptitious people-watching and the ubiquitous wining and dining.

"How lucky you are!" said Guy Cogeval, director of Paris's renowned Musee d'Orsay, referring to the two back-to-back exhibitions of French Impressionist paintings on loan to the de Young Museum.

What does architect Antoine Grumbach have in common with Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro? For the record, Antoine Grumbach is one of the ten architects invited by President Sarkozy in 2009 to come up with projects for a future "Grand Paris". Remarkably, his "Grand Paris" is a blueprint of the territory the Impressionist artists had carved for themselves, cutting deep into Normandy, along the Seine, past Rouen to its estuary at Le Havre, the natural port of Paris, Grumbach claims.

Just days before the latest heist of priceless artworks in Paris, I read about another type of art theft disguised as anti-establishment conceptual art. The Washington Post reported that the Postmaster's Gallery in New York is currently exhibiting a controversial work entitled Stolen Pieces by Eva and Franco Mattes. Essentially this work is a collection of a dozen or so fragments stolen from major artworks around the world by the self-proclaimed artists. Tiny bits and pieces from works by no less than Koons, Kandinsky, Raushenberg and Warhol—to name a few—are encased under glass and marketed as art with a capital 'A'.

I suspect that many of us have experienced those quirky incidents where a hitherto unfamiliar subject is brought to our attention and then it suddenly seems to pop up everywhere. And I mean everywhere. We keep tripping over the now-familiar subject as if making up for lost time.

What three-letter word do naked women, chocolate, cheese and bread have in common?

ART!

About ten days into my stint as a copiste at the d’Orsay museum copying Gustave Courbet’s L’origine du monde, I had an epiphany. L’origine du monde is not a painting of a nude woman. It is a painting of a naked woman. Not the same thing at all. This revelation might help explain the public’s intense and emotional reactions to this particular work of art.