Miscellany, 3

Museums Old and New

For Judith Barnes

I feel ambivalent about museums. While they are invaluable repositories of the world’s cultural artifacts, there is something at once dutiful and false about them or about visiting them. Yet I keep going to museums whenever I travel; it must be that love-hate thing. Lately, in less than a month, I’ve been to the De Young and the Asian Art museums in San Francisco and the MOMA and the Brooklyn Museum in New York. Not bad for an ambivalent cove like me.

One thing that bothers me about museums is snobbishness—not the museums’, but mine. Too many people stroll in them and now that everybody holds a smartphone there is no preventing the masses from taking pictures. Life is no longer the present, but its rehashing on Facebook. About a decade ago I made an effort to enjoy the Louvre during a brief visit to Paris. It is impossible to look calmly at its most famous pieces. I knew the Mona Lisa was in the same room I was in, but I couldn’t see it because I lacked the X-ray vision necessary to traverse the wall of flesh admiring Leonardo’s little masterpiece. Why can’t people go see a movie or read a book instead, I asked myself. I suspect this attitude is wrong of me, that it is good that the masses flock to culture, and I should admit that I am not special and thus one more ingredient of “the masses” contributing with my bodily presence to the sad situation I decry. In my defense, however, I will say that I tend to drift towards the less iconic works and the calmer rooms.

Perhaps because secretly I hate museums (how come they can have a lovely painting by Qi Baishi, say, and I cannot?), I keep going to them. So in the following reflection I won’t be sure whether what I write is a product of reflection or of resentment.

In my early years museums used to be dusty, desolate, dim, decaying… They were the last resort on a rainy Sunday for the citizenry. The guards prowled about their territory hoping to be able to share their colorful knowledge of the collection with a friendly visitor, preferably one visiting from the country who wouldn’t mind the guard’s cheap wine breath. Those museums still exist, I think or hope, but they have been eclipsed by the modern megamuseum where the guards undergo drug testing before work and are as disciplined as their brethren standing in front of Buckingham palace. Yet the modern megamuseums show their jewels still bathed in a dim light. Not the dim light of yore, filtering through dirty windows and meant to save energy, but the light of the contemporary insurance industry that insists on keeping works from fading. Thank the gods for sculpture you can still see in broad daylight.

Once you get used to the subdued lighting—which also subdues you into respectful obedience—you amble around resignedly admiring the works and ruing you didn’t bring a flashlight. You also realize then that the pieces you are admiring (in my case often coveting) have been recontextualized. They are no longer in the spot they were destined to, but in a spot, the museum, where you consider them unilaterally. A medieval altarpiece, say, is to be seen in the same context as Monet’s water lilies or a Buddha head from Thailand. Everything has become a “museum piece” quite literally. That altarpiece no longer has a church around it, with the mumblings of prayers, the smoke of incense, the rites and beliefs to which it was made for. Now you look at the Christ on the cross as if it were a dancer sculpted by Degas. You have entered, you realize, the temple of the hushed religion of Art.

With more modern works this recontextualization becomes less egregious (since the pieces were done in the spirit of the new faith, Art), but it’s still there. A portrait by Franz Hals was meant to hang on a wall, but the wall is no longer one in a Dutch bourgeois home to be shown off by the owner. Of course the museum allows us to see those works even if we would never come near that bourgeois set. Had they remained in their original destinations we wouldn’t even know they existed. So, thank-you, museum. And the same goes for art that comes from places too far for an affordable visit, to say nothing of past periods. Think of a charming Persian miniature or an Assyrian frieze.

Things have improved. In recent times museums exhibit their works with contextualizing maps, charts, and explanations, particularly when a curator has assembled works on a theme from a number of lenders. In those special exhibitions I spend more time reading the explanations on walls than looking at the pieces exposed. Many friends I know would disagree with me and would rather not waste time with context and devote themselves exclusively to the adoration of the icons. But I appreciate context because I like to think of development, of transmission, of the changes Time imposes on all, both living beings and art objects. Still, I always find something missing in those explanations: the path of the piece to the museum or collector who owns it being foremost. A number of museums have been fed by big-time snatchers: Venetians pilfering Byzantine works, French grabbing Egyptian obelisks, Lord Elgin pilfering Parthenon marbles… The grandness of a museum is in direct relationship to the looting powers of an empire.

At a less grandiose scale, the rapacity may be subtler, but it is still there, and I would appreciate knowing something about it. It would be nice to know how a work came to be acquired and then owned, don’t you think? Museum labels rarely give us a hint, but I would appreciate knowing all the people who have at one time or other invested in a work of art. That oil portrait of a prominent socialite by Gainsborough or Sorolla, how did it come to slum down to the walls of a museum thousands of miles away? In oriental paper works you see a number of seals imprinted in the work by distinguished owners or admirers. The work’s history is added to its form as if the watercolor was alive, acquiring what might be maturity or simply wrinkles. Western mores reject this procedure and indeed there is no room left in paintings for such contributions.

The museums of my youth, redolent of mothballs and cheap burgundy and still existent in lonely provincial towns, are a dying breed and they too will evolve. The museums fifty years from now will also be different (if the barbarians have not set them afire). Those old museums were places of discovery; visiting them was like rummaging through an interesting attic. The new museums are places of education and didacticism. Needless to say I don’t know which model I prefer. I guess it depends on the price of admission—oops! I’m sorry, I meant suggested donation.