Best of Boston

Last year, Harvard showed us that melding three museums—the Fogg, the Busch-Reisinger, and the Arthur M. Sackler—into a five-level palace of scholarly eye candy is doable indeed. After a six-year renovation, Harvard Art Museums opened in November, and the project handily lives up to its reported $350 million price tag. One needs only a layman’s knowledge of art and history—enough to get psyched about Van Gogh’s self-portrait, Warhol’s electric-chair silkscreens, and portraits of George Washington—to spend an afternoon wandering the museum’s halls in awe.