museum guide
After spending Sunday with my five year old at the Getty Museum, not the villa, the museum, I have to write this anti-museum going guide as a public service.
Museum goers, please forego the audio guide and the guided tour if you want to really have a visual experience. Walk at random through any room, begin anywhere you like. Find an object you like and stand in front of it for five seconds, but no more. Do not stop if you do not want to. Find anything engaging, say something to yourself about it that might be of interest and then read the artist's name, date of production and other signage.
If you're like Leo, you'll like the Courbet paintings of a hunter and deer dying in the snow. That's fine. Do not, whatever you do, mill about in a large group of people like yourself, waiting to be prompted to contemplate the next significant work.
Leave whenever you like. Have a coffee and then returrn with eyes refreshed. Be respectful, but be impious. It's art for god's sake!
Museum goers, please forego the audio guide and the guided tour if you want to really have a visual experience. Walk at random through any room, begin anywhere you like. Find an object you like and stand in front of it for five seconds, but no more. Do not stop if you do not want to. Find anything engaging, say something to yourself about it that might be of interest and then read the artist's name, date of production and other signage.
If you're like Leo, you'll like the Courbet paintings of a hunter and deer dying in the snow. That's fine. Do not, whatever you do, mill about in a large group of people like yourself, waiting to be prompted to contemplate the next significant work.
Leave whenever you like. Have a coffee and then returrn with eyes refreshed. Be respectful, but be impious. It's art for god's sake!
6 Comments:
These audio guides are almost always unbearable. They are supposed to make the museum experience more interesting for people who have little experience with art or who don't like to read pamphlets. I tend to find them an obnoxious imposition.
I can report one fantastic counter example to this however, which was in the Musical Instrument Museum in Paris. The ear phone tour had recordings for most of the instruments, and furthermore they were such good recordings that it was hard to get through the museum in an afternoon. They also had some young students giving a charming live performance of medieval poetry acompanied by bowed instruments. I highly recommend it.
Watching large groups of Getty Museum visitors wander around jacked into the audio guides was a sad experience.
What happens if you just wander around the museum and have no idea what you're seeing?
"Be respectful, but be impious." I like that. The worst thing about those audio tours (aside from the fact that they're usually boring) is that they demand piety towards selected pieces of art. I'm not so sure about your proposed five second rule though. I could be convinced otherwise -- and maybe this is necessarily pious -- but it seems to me that there's value in taking a good long look at a piece of art and struggling with the question of what its meaning is. Of course, one should feel free to arrive at impious conclusions, but those conclusions should be earned with critical reflection. A lot of Americans pick who they're going to vote for by looking for five seconds and declaring "I like him!" Maybe if we can get people to realize that "I like it!" or "I don't like it!" aren't satisfactory conclusions to come to about a piece of art, then that notion will creep into other arenas as well.
Nick,
Five seconds may be too little, but I thought that offering a limit in the beginning will build up viewing stamina and capacity-- remember, I'm using my five year old's capacities as a measure here.
After each trip to the museum, add another 10 seconds of viewing time on to the five seconds and soon you'll be a marathoner!
Maybe I should be an art coach!
You may be on to something. If yuppies are paying for "lifestyle coaches," maybe they'll also pay for an art coach. Just wait five years.
Coaching, yes, it's a very strange idea. I wouldn't call them yuppies, I would call them desperate white collar types, and they do seem to go for this.
Culture coach...thanks Nick! It's brilliant! I'll have to credit you somehow for the idea.
And yet, one does want to free people from the audio guides, so perhaps this is only way to do it.
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