Elizabeth Harding's Blog - Posts Tagged "museums-crowded-paintings"
Cities, Museums and the Summer Crush
Summer is now upon us although you really wouldn’t think so as the cold rain is hammering on the window panes. For many it is a time to migrate south for the summer and visit the cities visit the great museums. But the well-known museums and galleries are suffocatingly crowded at this time of the year.
I don’t think I shall visit Florence again, ever. Which is a pity as I have some happy memories of the city. But I have to accept the fact that the days are gone when we back-packed and camped and went time and again to the Florentine museums and churches (free for students then). Now they charge for every damned thing and the centre of Florence is horrible, swarming as it does with our species.
So what’s to be done? I too am part of that seemingly globulous mass of protoplasm that slithers its amoeboid way to art and culture. None of us are above it all. In the Middle Ages we would have gone on a pilgrimage. People of all classes and casts did. And the idea of the pilgrimage is very old. In the time of Herodotus the caves on Crete associated with Zeus were at the very focus of tourist-pilgrim razzamatazz. Holy caves and oracular shrines drew people from near and far. And latterly, visiting a church, even a secularised one and a museum has something of spiritual hunger about it.
Yet even the Northern cities are not free from crowding. A few weeks ago, Wim Pijbes, the Director of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam responded to complaints about how crowded the museum was in a somewhat unimaginative and high-handed way by telling visitors to ‘buy a Rembrandt yourself.’ Now this is a cheeky-bugger sort of remark that I find a tad irritating. ‘tis true that there is nothing much to be done about the problem in an administrative way. Heaven forfend that we should have quota system. Imagine going to a museum and discovering that it filled up within the first five minutes and that you had to make an appointment for one hour in the afternoon of Tuesday week.
The only thing that I as an individual can do is not to go to the local museums in summer. By ‘local’ I mean the Rijksmuseum and the Vincent Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam. People come from all over the world to visit them and they really ought to have a fair chance to see the paintings. I can go in the winter to see the permanent exhibitions. Perhaps Romans, Florentines and Parisians have already made a similar decision. Leave the city to the visitors in Summer.
Yet, that decision isn’t foolproof. When I was in Rome on a chill February day a year or two back, the queues to the visit the Vatican museums were long and serpentine. So what is a proper solution to the problem of overcrowding? Anyone?
I don’t think I shall visit Florence again, ever. Which is a pity as I have some happy memories of the city. But I have to accept the fact that the days are gone when we back-packed and camped and went time and again to the Florentine museums and churches (free for students then). Now they charge for every damned thing and the centre of Florence is horrible, swarming as it does with our species.
So what’s to be done? I too am part of that seemingly globulous mass of protoplasm that slithers its amoeboid way to art and culture. None of us are above it all. In the Middle Ages we would have gone on a pilgrimage. People of all classes and casts did. And the idea of the pilgrimage is very old. In the time of Herodotus the caves on Crete associated with Zeus were at the very focus of tourist-pilgrim razzamatazz. Holy caves and oracular shrines drew people from near and far. And latterly, visiting a church, even a secularised one and a museum has something of spiritual hunger about it.
Yet even the Northern cities are not free from crowding. A few weeks ago, Wim Pijbes, the Director of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam responded to complaints about how crowded the museum was in a somewhat unimaginative and high-handed way by telling visitors to ‘buy a Rembrandt yourself.’ Now this is a cheeky-bugger sort of remark that I find a tad irritating. ‘tis true that there is nothing much to be done about the problem in an administrative way. Heaven forfend that we should have quota system. Imagine going to a museum and discovering that it filled up within the first five minutes and that you had to make an appointment for one hour in the afternoon of Tuesday week.
The only thing that I as an individual can do is not to go to the local museums in summer. By ‘local’ I mean the Rijksmuseum and the Vincent Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam. People come from all over the world to visit them and they really ought to have a fair chance to see the paintings. I can go in the winter to see the permanent exhibitions. Perhaps Romans, Florentines and Parisians have already made a similar decision. Leave the city to the visitors in Summer.
Yet, that decision isn’t foolproof. When I was in Rome on a chill February day a year or two back, the queues to the visit the Vatican museums were long and serpentine. So what is a proper solution to the problem of overcrowding? Anyone?
