FINE ARTS SPECIAL
Victims of their own success
Martin Gayford finds museums and galleries besieged by milling crowds Y ou've got to be careful about wanting things, as is well known, because you're liable to get what you want. It's the same with predictions — the trouble is that they're inclined to come true. In these pages and elsewhere, for example, I've long been pointing out the growing popularity of contemporary art and prophesying sen- sational success for Tate Modern. Now it has arrived. Indeed, it's a truism, the stuff of a hundred columns, to point out how stark is the difference in fortune between TM and the slowly deflating Dome.
But now that the art boom is clearly and incontrovertibly with us, I'm not so sure that I'm glad it's happened. And I'm not the only one. Here and there in the gal- leries of the world, the question is being whispered: is art becoming too successful for its own good?
Last autumn I was on a press trip to Flo- rence, one of many such agreeable excur- sions that punctuate the life of the art critic. We had just heard from the mayor of Florence about his plans to create a new entrance at the Uffizi — something along the lines of the Louvre Pyramid — the more effectively to channel the tourist mil- lions into the place.
On the way to the next monument — or, as it may have been, meal — we had a dis- cussion in the minibus. A fellow critic tousled, avant-garde, anything but blimpish — piped up with a surprising view. 'But we don't want lots of people and screaming children in art galleries,' he complained. `We want them to be lovely and quiet and spiritual and reserved for people like us.' He was speaking ironically, of course, but he was also being serious, and in our hearts we all agreed.
David Sylvester, doyen of art critics in the English language, went on the record with similar views earlier this year in a long interview for the Guardian. The whole education argument is crap,' he opined. 'I hate museums cluttered up with children. I was turned on to art by simple black and white reproductions, and that was enough. I am all in favour of taking films and repro- ductions of art into schools and of decent television programmes. But one doesn't necessarily have to sit in front of master- pieces.' And, in Sylvester's view, what goes for groups of children in museums, also goes for adults in large numbers. 'These huge exhibitions, like the Monet in London and the Vermeer in The Hague, are so packed that there is no pleasure in going to them.'
The problem is simply stated. All manner
of factors are increasing interest in art, not only contemporary — though that is per- haps the outstanding growth stock — but all varieties. This is being encouraged by museums with their education depart- ments, directors of interpretation and press offices, and by the media, in part through the efforts of writers such as Sylvester, myself and my friend in the minibus. Even more important are underlying social fac- tors: the growth of leisure, of prosperity, of travel. All these lead more and more peo- ple to take an interest in art.
But visual art itself is, if not exactly a finite, certainly a limited good. The odd thing about it, or much of the best of it, is that you have to be in its physical presence in order to experience it to the full. Photo- graphic reproduction works relatively well only for photographic works, and those originally designed for multiple editions• You can get a pretty good impression of a Cartier-Bresson photograph from a book, and a rather less good one of a Darer woodcut. But all reproductions of paintings are travesties, and the same is even more the case with sculpture and three-dimen- sional art (although it is possible to love reproductions and, as Sylvester notes, to learn from them). Walter Benjamin, the literary critic and thinker, once wrote an essay, 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduc- tion', in which he argued that in the mod- ern age the aura of the original work would evaporate; the Mona Lisa actually painted by Leonardo would be essentially no differ- ent from a million prints. But whether or
not one accepts this argument, the appetite for unreproduced art, with or without its aura, has grown hugely since the days when art galleries were nice quiet places for an assignation or a tranquil rest.
Reproductions, among other factors, have bred an ever greater thirst to see the original. So that in front of the 'Mona Lisa' there is permanently stationed a small crowd, which in turn makes it impossible to see the thing itself properly. And the same applies to many other of the world's most celebrated sights. Because experiencing great art requires not just physical proximi- ty, but also silence, concentration, contem- plation.
The other day, having an hour or two to kill in Paris, I went to the Musee d'Orsay just as it opened. I stopped in front of Manet's 'Olympia', a painting I hadn't looked at for years. There was hardly any- body else there, and for about ten minutes, it seemed to me, I saw it and understood it in a way I never had before.
Then the first guided tour — it was Rus- sian — arrived, shortly followed by the sec- ond (French schoolchildren). So I left. Looking at 'Olympia' now required a con- stant effort to cut out the chatter of expla- nation. Of course, none of those people in the groups could look at it either because they were all listening to someone's lecture, which effectively distracts one from seeing for oneself (as does, I presume, listening to a taped guide).
But even if all the people had attempted to commune silently with 'Olympia', the sheer crush would have made it hard. The shouting guides and the flash of cameras do not help, but it is really just numbers that make certain masterpieces — the Sis- tine Chapel for one — almost impossible to see.
The huge, theatrical museums such as Tate Modern and the Guggenheim, Bilbao, are one response to the new, milling art crowds. They are big enough to take the numbers, and they tend to encourage big, theatrical works of art — the Louise Bour- geois towers at the new Tate, for example — big enough to speak to a throng of spec- tators (as do the Berninis in St Peter's). Conversely, this new breed of museums is hostile to small, intimate works of art, such as Cezanne landscapes and Vuillard interi- ors, which were made in any case to hang in drawing-rooms, not cathedrals of mass- market modernity. More symptoms of the art boom are the exhibition as media-packaged marketing event (Apocalypse), and the museum with ever-revolving displays, ever-fresh, ever- rebranded. Is there much that can be done to reverse these trends? Probably not. Except perhaps to cherish that endangered institution, the unpopular museum, where the education officer is yet to be appointed, the café has not been built, the shop has Only a few postcards, and it is possible to sit down and look at the works of art — and look, and look, and look.
Previous page
