I love museums, but they’re not flossing
The art and museum community is all in a flutter this morning over a rant penned by James Durston, a CNN Travel Editor. You can read the entire piece here, but I’ll sum it up by saying Durston starts out inflammatory and then raises some good points.
The headline is enough to raise blood pressures of curators: “Why I Hate Museums.”
Durston describes slogging through dull gallery after dull gallery:
Graveyards for stuff. Tombs for inanimate things.
Their cavernous rooms and deep corridors reverberate with the soft, dead sounds of tourists shuffling and employees yawning.
They’re like libraries, without the party atmosphere.
Oof. Durston slams museums for being boring, unengaging, dull:
After the 200th glass case containing an old bowl — or was it a plate, or perhaps it was some more cutlery, who knows, who cares — I decided the photo opportunity across the sea was the best thing about the place.
I’ve been to a sex museum in Amsterdam and never felt less titillated.
I’ve been to a beer museum in Prague and never felt less intoxicated.
Where’s the “muse” in all these museums? Where’s the theater?
Many points in the essay can be contested, and have been in the comments. He criticizes placing cultural artifacts behind glass. Well, while it’s true that one could better appreciate a Stradivarius by holding it, even the best-intentioned patrons can wreak millions of dollars of damage in a millisecond. Museums are dedicated to preserving their collections as well as displaying them, and that means putting them behind glass.
He bemoans the lack of information on museum placards. This is a hotly contested issue (really!), and inevitably, the amount of detail one patron wants is going to annoy another. Museums are trying to address this with better audio guides and, my personal favorite, by handing out iPads with interactive material that you can delve into while studying the art.
His most heartfelt and, I think, valid criticism is that museums aren’t engaging enough. Kids museums have done a great job in recent years in creating interactive exhibits, but museums for adults have failed to create a powerful interactive experience, instead sticking to a dry, academic formula. In fact, museums are wrestling with this very challenge, and some creative and innovative programs have attempted to change the model, or at least provide an alternative. The problem is that you can’t satisfy everyone. For every person who wants a stimulating environment, there’s, well, me, who would prefer the museum to be a quiet, blank canvas that allows the exhibits to speak for themselves. There’s also the fact that interactive exhibits cost a fortune that cash-strapped museums struggle to find.
But what really struck me in the article was this:
I’ve always hated museums.
Yet twice or three times a year, I somehow find myself within one, shuffling from glass case to glass case, reading the little inscriptions, peering closely at the details, doing what any “good traveler” does.
It’s that “good traveler” bit. Later he describes museum trips as a way to “amass phantom university credits.”
God, I hate that attitude.
I run into it all the time. When I’m at a party and I tell people what I do, inevitably someone will confess to me, in the same tones they would use to disclose an embarrassing drinking incident in their college years, that they don’t like museums. Or they can’t stand modern art. Or they’ve never seen the point in visiting Gothic cathedrals.
Clearly they feel they’ve failed a sort of cultural test and are revealing themselves as less than worthy. It’s the same attitude that is driving Durston to trudge through exhibits he clearly finds tedious.
Look, you’re not required to like art. You’re not under any obligation to go to museums. You don’t get points for being a “good tourist” and no ghostly registrar is tracking your phantom credits.
If you don’t like, say, modern art, fine. You don’t like it.
Now, I would certainly encourage you, if you’ve got the time and energy, to figure out exactly what you’re not liking and why. Maybe you could read about the origins and aims of modernism (perhaps in a book such as, cough, mine), and with that background you might decide there’s more going on than you realized, that “modern art” is a huge category that embraces numerous styles and movements, and conclude that you really appreciate Cubism, even if you don’t want it hanging over your mantel. Or you might not. You’ll have an informed opinion, and that’s always intellectually satisfying.
But if you truly can’t stand modern art, then for pity’s sake don’t pay good money on a modern art exhibit just because you think you should.
Shoulds shouldn’t be attached to art. There are a lot of things you should be doing. You really should floss daily. I don’t, and probably you don’t either, and that’s between you and your dental hygienist. But you should go to museums? Who on earth cares?
Personally, I can’t stand Rococo art. If a big exhibit with a title like “The Age of Fragonard” showed up in town, I’d probably go because this is my job, but otherwise? Bleh. Does nothing for me. I frankly despise Gauguin. I usually meander right past his art so I can spend more time staring at the Cezannes. That doesn’t mean I don’t appeciate Gauguin. I get why he matters in the history of art. If I’m writing something about his eras, I’m going to give him all the credit he deserves. But on my own time I wouldn’t bother.
It reminds me of a great Onion headline from several years ago, “Area Man Really Wants to Like The Marx Brothers.”
Despite repeated attempts to gain an appreciation of the legendary comedy team, area graphic designer Craig Logan confessed Monday that he still can’t get into the Marx Brothers.
“I realize they’re extremely important, and I very much want to enjoy them,” Logan, 29, said. “But I just don’t find them funny at all.”
It’s a great article because this guy is spending enormous time and effort to make himself like something that he really just doesn’t think is funny. And it doesn’t matter.
Society tells us we should like any number of things. Mozart. Breaking Bad. Fine wine. Monet. Dostoevsky. The Simpsons. Elvis Costello.
But when it comes down to it, there’s only so much time. And I don’t think it makes me (or you, or anyone) a philistine if I want to spend a Thursday evening sprawled on the sofa eating pizza and watching Criminal Minds reruns. If you want to turn your life into a nonstop pursuit of cultural achievement, knock yourself out. But know that you’re not getting extra credit from the universe.
So my advice to Mr. Durston? If you hate museums so much, don’t go.
