Three Tips for Surviving the Art Museum
Have
you ever noticed that no one in an art museum ever seems to be having
fun? This is particularly true of the men. They always look like people
dragooned into attending the funeral of someone they didn't even like.
They stand there, glum and gloomy,
surrounded by Raphaels, Bronzinos and Goyas, staring morosely at the
carpet or up at the ceiling, trying to pay attention to the preening
weenie on the art phone. They can't wait for the tour guide to say that
it's time to get back on the bus.
Art phones have turned museum-going
into a dreary chore. It's like being back in high school, where you're
expected to memorize everything. Everyone is afraid that there's going
to be a test and they'll need to know that Pablo Picasso's father bore a
strong resemblance to Edgar Degas, that Nicolas Poussin despised
Caravaggio, that the third centurion to the left in the Rembrandt
crucifixion scene was a dead ringer for Ignaas van der Hoeven, a baker
who once stiffed the artist out of 50 guilder.
But who cares?
Museum-goers, I feel your pain. I have
seen you suffer in silence in the presence of paintings you loathe,
sculptures you deplore, tour guides you want to strangle. Yet
museum-goers can be emancipated from all this unpleasantness by
following three easy rules:
1. Refuse to rent the art phone or read any sort of manual.
You're not going to remember any of this stuff anyway. It doesn't
matter that Michelangelo got his nose broken by Torrigiano, or that Paul
Gauguin was a pig. Just look at the paintings and relax. Or go to the
restaurant and have a beer. But do not let the pontificating twit
yammering away on the art phone turn your museum visit into drudgery.
You don't need to know how a Lamborghini got built to enjoy the ride.
Why should a Leonardo be any different?
2. Never take a tour with a docent.
Docents are all blathering idiots who think they missed their calling
as stand-ups. They're the most excruciating human beings on the face of
the earth. They're living proof that people should not be allowed to
retire, because in retirement, the pathologically garrulous cease to be
merely annoying and become truly dangerous. If I had my druthers, NATO
would send in warplanes to take out every one of these knuckleheads.
3. Don't be afraid to laugh at the art.
And not just modern art. François Boucher's 3-year-old hunters and
sculptors and mathematicians (you can see them at New York's beloved
Frick Collection) are meant to be laughed at. Babies aren't supposed to
load muskets. Infants aren't supposed to devise complex mathematical
proofs. Boucher knew this. He knew that his work was over-the-top,
comical, just plain nuts.
But I visit the Boucher room at the
Frick every week and never see anyone laughing. That's because the
art-phone autocrats have brainwashed people into believing that art
museums are meant to be deadly serious. They are not. If an art museum
is clicking on all cylinders, you shouldn't be able to get out of there
without doubling over in laughter at least three times.
For additional chuckles in the wide
world of art, take a gander at J.M.W. Turner's amateurish drawings of
human figures (they look like stick men), Edward Burne-Jones's foppish
knights, Dante Gabriel Rossetti's waterlogged maidens and any painting
with a Sphinx, a Viking or Medusa in it. Late 19th-century French
painters like William-Adolphe Bouguereau were also very good at painting
daft shepherdesses and emaciated waifs, often fetching water or
rounding up wayward farm animals. You can't keep a straight face looking
at this stuff.
In other words: Don't worry; be happy.
If you can't laugh at Anthony van Dyck's boozed-up cavaliers, Thomas
Gainsborough's cadaverous, blue-faced debutantes or Damien Hirst's
13-foot shark in a few thousand gallons of formaldehyde, you're really
missing out on some great fun.
So my advice on your next trip to the
museum is to kick back, have a couple of stiff ones, lock the docent in
the broom closet and treat yourself to a few guffaws. Art is meant to
lift your spirits. Don't let the people who run museums ruin it.