'About suffering they were never wrong'

Musée des Bea Arthur by BJ Ward

One way to look at BJ Ward’s “Musée des Bea Arthur” is as a twenty-first century parody of a classic poem by W.H. Auden.

Famously, in his 1938 poem “Musée des Beaux Arts,” Auden encounters a sixteenth century painting attributed to Brueghel the Elder (the attribution is contested by contemporary scholars) that recreates the fall of Icarus, a tragedy tha…