Can doodles be art?

♪ (harpsichord plays) ♪ Hi, I'm Matilda. I'm ten years old. I'm Melanie Hokum and I'm a curator in the department of medieval art. - Are you a doodler? - Yes. - You are? - I am. What kinds of things do you doodle? Sometimes just circles, faces, dresses, squares, a lot of things. Cats, impractical things. Whimsical things. Mm hmm. Would it surprise you to know that people, 800 years ago, were doodlers too? It wouldn't, actually. I think that plenty of people are just doodlers like us. - Want to look at some stuff? - Sure! This is a Bible. It'a little, tiny Bible that was made in Paris in the 1200s so we keep it in a nice box so that it can be protected. As you can see, somebody's just done a little -- I don't even know what that is. What do you think that is over there on the left? This little-- - A tree maybe? - A little tree... - A candle? - Yeah! I don't know <i>what</i> it is but I'll tell you what it is most of the time. Most of the time, it's actually correcting mistakes because this is a handwritten book and you can imagine you're copying, copying, copying, sometimes things get left out and then another reader comes along and says, "Well, where's the end of that sentence?" Do you see these great little hands? Yes, so they look really different from others. One of them is really lifelike. They're like little Post-It notes inside a book pointing out things that either need to be corrected or noticed. Here is an example of an exceptionally tiny book. Do you want to hold this in your hand? It's surprisingly light. Yes, this is what we call a facsimile. A very specially, carefully crafted modern book that is made in the tradition of medieval books and it's made to look exactly like another book that already exists. That book, which is a little prayer book for a French queen named Jeanne d'Évreux. Actually, it sits up at the cloisters. It's this tiny, so this is the kind of thing you can get a look inside. That's a lot of doodles! The technical term for this kind of doodling is <i>marginalia</i>. It's not the main illustrations; they're special drawings done in the margins. I will now then have nightmares [inaudible] (laughs) ♪ (harpsichord plays) ♪ At the Met there's art everywhere, even on the back, on the margins, so remember to look and soak up everything. Don't just look at one thing. This is Matilda, signing off from medieval art. ♪ (harpsichord playing ends) ♪