To be clear: art museums are not places tasked primarily to educate but to
hold public display of select masterpieces. Education should happen before and
after one goes to visit a museum. Nobody is listening to a symphony while
someone is "explaining" or even eating with running commentary. Do
one or the other, not both at the same time. Looking at paintings requires
immersion in the same kind of silence and concentrated attentiveness in which
language of painting is silently eloquent. Too much is made of the
'"explanations" of artworks and not enough emphasis put on
contemplation. My contemporaries not only see on the screen the action but they
want to be told that "Tyrone passed the ball to Leroy". Then they
have to be told what the Prez in his speech actually said and what they see
while staring distractedly at art.
I guess that most people are devout democrats at heart that rejoice seeing
all-inclusiveness in every public activity.To my eye it seems particularly
"american" to see that degree of inclusiveness. It is as if some
mythic Mother held on her public lap everybody and their children,even toddlers
and demented nonagenarians,spastic wheel-chair riders and uncontrollable
pranksters,overly energetic four-years- olds running and hooting along the
loggias of the museums.Nobody and never should feel the stinging bite of
exclusion.Come all! Come and bring along not only children but your beloved pets
to be posed for some selfies with art in the background as a campy joke.
.Anything but increasing chances at concentration and silence.
What a total misunderstanding of the purpose of the museum. It is not a
„fun place”, not a romper room or hall of distorting mirrors. Bringing
smart-phones to take yet more
snap-shots of your marvelous Self is almost as disqualifying as blindness[or more-because willful donkification is worse]
Malignant notion that it is good to bring in more and more wrong people
is going to turn them into high culture lovers is not supported by any facts.
It is the “midnight-basketball for ghetto thugs” way of thinking. Leave
smart-phone crowd alone: they are evolving in a different direction and
Occidental Heritage of Culture has only one use, they found: funny background .
At a nearby library most seats
in the Reading Room are taken but the occupants are taking extended naps, use
restroom to body-wash, have speedy sex and over time I have never noticed that
they started perusing the aisles for reading material.The painters exhibiting
their masterpieces at the National Gallery have not addressed their works to those
selfie-ninnies.The curators,the management furnished them with wrong audience , hostile to Culture. What a dismaying betrayal.
