What do we see?

My friend Lena is visiting a whole lot of art museums in Europe – she’s an artist and she takes it seriously – and she seems annoyed by the hordes of people who don’t appear to have a clue what they’re looking at.

You can’t blame her. I recall one night watching Hamlet at the RSC in Stratford and two whole rows of oriental tourists (Japanese, perhaps?) stood up in the middle of act five and went to get their bus. The actors managed to fill the stage time until they were all safely gone. Michael Pennington then resumed one of the most poignant speeches of the entire play and soon got us back in the flow. The speech? It was the famous “the readiness is all” meditation, so a little unintended irony seemed to be going on.

And yet — would I have been able to make much sense of a Japanese Noh drama if the positions had been reversed? Would I have known when to applaud at the end of a Javan gong concert? I doubt it.

I rest secure in only one thing; art – real art – has a way of moving some part of us, even if we have no idea what stands before us, and even if we’re half asleep. Art touches us before we know we’ve been touched.