Before today, I didn't know there was something called the Bentvueghels, or Otto Marseus van Schrieck, or the Dutch Golden Age -- and then I read a big plaque on the wall next to his painting at the New Orleans Museum of Art. I barely knew anything about Dutch and Flemish art before today, but now here it is midnight and I am one of the world's foremost experts. That's what museums can do!
It was great -- this dank, sinister, inexplicable little non-ecosystem of snakes and insects and fungi carefully arranged for your viewing consideration. It's a pitch dark canvas studded with corpse-white moths being devoured by reptiles slithering around jagged toadstools and the don't-give-a-fuck frog below. I'm sure it's teeming with all kinds of symbolism I don't know about, but I do know that it's got all the claustrophobic darkness and uncanny foreboding of a Ridley Scott movie. Judging from my post-museum research (two minutes Google image search, three minutes Wikipedia -- the magic ratio) it seems like paintings of this kind were basically his thing.
NOMA has free admission every Wednesday, but this is the first time I've gone in the two years I've lived here. I don't think I've ever been to a big art museum by myself before. It was at least one and a half times more enjoyable than going with another person. I guess it's a product of our dumb times and my own smallness of consciousness, but as much as I honestly enjoy looking at paintings I can never fully get past the pretension problem when I'm with someone else at a museum, even if it's someone with whom I feel totally at ease. We're always reduced to mumbling vague earnest things to each other and getting semi-embarrassed about the whole cartoonish spectacle of being one of the People at the Museum: folding those arms, LOOKIN' AT THOSE PAINTINGS, critiquing the form or whatever, making little grunts of approval or squints of disapproval, imagining that people think you're bored even if you're not bored and anyway are you sure you're not bored? Have you actually just duped yourself into thinking you're not bored? You're at a museum, which popular culture universally pans as a boring and pretentious experience for boring and pretentious people, so you've gotta be pretentious and bored. Come ON buddy real talk here.
But today, I spent the whole time by myself in maybe three rooms and took my sweet time and didn't feel pretentious at all because I was answerable to no one but myself, which means the spectacle loosed its hold upon me for a little while. I think I'll go back next Wednesday and keep looking around the museum very slowly. Maybe museum visits should usually be private, personal things. Anyone else had this experience? If not, you should test it out and see. Also, just so we clear, I think that going to the grocery store and doing laundry should always be a social activities performed with lots of friends.
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ReplyDeleteObviously it's not an art museum, but I went to the Field Museum last year by myself and loved it. As you say, I was able to explore the museum at my own pace, which I think was key. Usually when I'm at a museum with someone else I find myself either rushed or lingering in an area that I'm ready to leave. As a result I usually leave unsatisfied.
ReplyDeleteOne exception is the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe. The museum is loaded with so much fascinating and in many cases very intricate art, that I think it helps to have someone with you to point out things that you might otherwise miss.
I think you might be onto something. I mean people are naturally drawn to different types of art, because people are, well, different. I wonder if people usually view art in groups because of our call-and-response learning model; because it seems to me, in groups, we tend to learn for the purpose of informing others, but what you're describing is more hands-on. It seems like a person who takes a class on how to build a computer versus a person who just dives in and figures it out on his own. The latter is more difficult, but also more rewarding.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure if that last comment made sense. Did it? Also, have you visited Crystal Bridges (the art museum that Alice Walton funded) in Benton ville?
ReplyDeleteThe dutch are hands down the best, the old masters. Not that I know much about it, 'cause I don't, but they paint some crazy and awesome shit.
ReplyDeleteBut you already know that.
They're better than the Russians in painting (though not in novels?) because they are generally more self-aware that they are painting crazy shit in a crazy way. The dutch are down with psychosis. No point in denying it, they figure. If you're nuts, better to level with yourself. Russians are only interested in being right. The dutch are interested in keeping it real.
But that's just my professional opinion.
Arlo, exactly. Being able to look at exactly what I wanted to look at was really liberating. Maybe this is also a matter of our tastes changing as we get older? I don't crave social experiences as continuously as I used to, and I feel more comfortable being alone in public for long stretches.
ReplyDeleteAnd I've never been to the Museum of Folk Art, or Santa Fe period, but I'm sure it does depend on the museum itself. I also think that if I were genuinely well-informed about a subject, it would probably be fun to go to a museum (on that subject) with another person who was similarly well-informed because then we'd have a lot to talk about independently of "oh, this one is nice".
Xacstra, I thought of you immediately when I saw this painting, and I made the post largely because I think you should check out his stuff. And no, I haven't been to Crystal Bridges, but I hope to go this summer!
ReplyDeleteA trademarked Katherine black-and-white off the cuff declarative statement. I love them.
ReplyDeleteI don't think I know anything about Russian painting. Was Kandinsky Russian? Or was he Polish? Who's a Russian painter? Maybe it's too cold and their linseed oil freezes up. But you're right about the Dutch old masters...there's something insane and riveting in those paintings that's nowhere else. They're un-selfconsciously dark and scary, and in a way that's just totally not a part of our contemporary world. It's like this window back into a pre-Enlightenment universe filled with constant threats and plagues and demons, but in sophisticated, high-def resolution. I don't know. Whatever it is, they've got it going on.
Man, wish you were already over this way. I am, at this moment, locked in my 7×5 guest bathroom with 3 cats and will be here for the next 3 hours for part of the repairs. Wish I were at a museum right now.
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