What is a museum
Because the authorities get prickly over context, let us begin this simple reflection with some theoretical musings. We all know what museums were (1.a. Hist. The university building erected at Alexandria by Ptolemy Soter. b. gen. A building or apartment dedicated to the pursuit of learning or the arts; a ‘home of the Muses’; a scholar’s ‘study’. OED). But what are they now, exactly? Official repositories of culture (whatever that means)? Brazen loot hoards? Re-education camps? Reach-me-down prestige dispensaries? Surely we can agree that what they are not, is egalitarian. Like symphony orchestras, the premier institutions thrive, while the small and regional ones face a dwindling audience and are beset by financial difficulty (Anyone care to donate $100k to endow a viola chair? How about $5 million for a new HVAC system at the local Art Institute?). If anything, museums are buildings full of material that people with non-zero levels of superciliousness think is worth a view. We rely on their expertise to teach us which objects carry abiding value, and they have us over a barrel because there’s way too much to look at, much less to display. Limitation is freedom, as any monk would say, yet museums register their dissent in spectacular annexes and galactic storage facilities. The internet tells me that roughly five percent of museum collections are on display at any time, the rest is in storage. And in the context of a ubiquitous internet even the plebs grow incredulous—anyone can eat from the tree of knowledge and become like gods, online. This access renders the cloaked authoritative posture of the curator suspicious to contemporary sensibility, which could be summarized as idle-omni-epi-expert. Nouveau riche foxes hate old money hedgehogs.
Museums are buildings full of stuff—to really partake of a museum one must be physically present outside the amnion of self and looking at things. This is hyssop to the bottomless pap of the screen. Many (most?) can’t tolerate withdrawal from their own navel, so even when I hate museums (see below) I like their utility. They highlight a primal need to escape self-obsession and gain resonance with what surrounds us—not just a generic “here and now,” but a durable bond with people and things throughout history. C.S. Lewis famously defined friendship as companions standing shoulder to shoulder in joint admiration of an object; a healthy mutual channeling of mimetic desire outward and upward, which seems like a step in the right direction.
And yet it’s hard sometimes not to feel put upon. Does this reflect a creeping sense of parochialism and sensory overload? Or do we suffer a more fundamental disorientation? Any collection, while perhaps curated with imperious competence, is decontextualized by default. (See: “Elgin Marbles.” Walker Percy described the curator’s effect on objects as “self-liquidating.” I understand his impulse, but it seems a bit hyperbolic now in light of the smartphone. The object ex situ still bears far more authenticity than any image of it, even if the very act of display erases cohesion.) Maybe this is why some stuff can become weirdly sinister in a museum; viz., stuff that is normally animate in some sense. Certain of these artifacts trigger the same hopelessness I might suffer if a third-degree relative afflicted me with, say, a tranche of recent Carnival cruise pics. Here’s a brief catalog of some such objects, in order of increasing despair: spacecraft (technically interesting, but sad in a way), aircraft (same, but a bit more melancholy), cars, farm/industrial equipment, scientific instruments, vintage medical grotesques (gross), nonfunctional musical instruments (pretty depressing, actually), taxidermized fauna (yes, I know the caged bird sings, but not when its thorax is packed with cotton). For some reason, real dinosaur fossils are exempt—they’re just plain cool under any circumstances.
Does anyone still enjoy an unsullied sense of delight even while looking at brilliant objects? For many of us, museum-going is besmirched by simple inattention and a sense of moral duty, like attending a middle school production of Godspell Jr.; and the seething masses tend to irritate most public experiences (with a conditional exception for the Palio di Siena, or really anything Italian). Perversely, many museums now encourage the very handheld devices that sabotage contemplation. I assume the directors intend to provide convenience and engaging didactic content, but personal tech in a museum creates a nullifying filter effect, like trying to listen to Beethoven opus 132 with a play-by-play man in your ear. (NB: I cannot categorically reject the smartphone with a straight face. I use mine a lot and concede that it offers good applications along with bad. Consider that not all books are created equal; one can choose between Persuasion and propaganda. The point is, it’s too easy to forget to set aside the looking glass and simply look.)
The world can grow no perfect garden, nor offer a comprehensively enlightening exhibit. We make do and glean what we can in our own capacity. Which brings me to the cosmological law of Museum Enjoyment Time (MET). MET falls into a bimodal distribution, based on the presence (METK) or absence (METKo) of one’s kids. METK peaks at around one hour, regardless of venue (with one notable exception: like the space-time continuum in a black hole, the law of MET breaks down completely in children’s museums. Parents are on their own to calculate the jump to lightspeed and escape. Many will resort to the smartphone for assistance, which is, of course, futile.) METKo occupies a much wider range, anywhere from two up to around eight hours and correlates strongly with baseline sphincter tone. At local interest museums (e.g. the SPAM® Museum, Austin, MN), an individual’s METKo is inversely proportional to the likelihood of getting second dates.
Like everything we think we can peg down, museums tend to be placed into categories. There are Big Art Museums (BAMs—we’re gonna blow your mind!), Historical Artifact Museums (HAMs—look at everything we stole…just kidding!), Science and Industry Museums (SIMs—we’ll make it seem like you’re sciency and smart!), and Small Academic Museums (SAMs—don’t you worry, Mr. Frodo, you and the kids will make it all the way through by elevenses!). With so much to explore, where does one begin?
If anything screams culture, it’s France. If anything screams France, it’s the Louvre. Except during latter-day Covidtide, when we all still wore masks. Having walked into the wind from across Pont Neuf to get there, my nose ran pretty much constantly under my mask, so I rolled up a kleenex and inserted an end into each nostril like a fat weedless joint doubled back on itself to form a sort of gauzy bull ring. The apparatus stopped the nose goo but transformed me into a mouth breather—an inauspicious start to our tour of the world’s premier cultural institution. Looking at pictures requires a calm intimacy which was impossible there; my snotty mouth breathing, the imposing size of the facility, and the volcanic crowd noise precluded any sense of human connection to the objects. It seemed more like a nightmare carnival—ten thousand smartphones deployed to achieve the social media-equivalent of maximum ram-you-damn-you conspicuousness, the crowd buzzing, hovering, shifting to the next entertainment like county fair Mountain Dew people proudly lugging around those big cheap stuffed animal prizes destined to be unmentionably soiled, discarded, and forgotten within a week. It’s almost enough to make one pro-aristocracy, provided one gets to be an aristocrat.
The Mona Lisa™ chamber feels like a cross between an Egyptian temple interior and a big corporate bank lobby, and it primarily houses an airport customs-style stanchion labyrinth through which hundreds of people shuffle cheek-to-jowl for a twenty-second ogle through her thick plexiglass holding tank. The procedure and display are very reminiscent of the reptile house at a zoo, minus the eye-watering tang of vaporized lizard urea. At this point we were third and long late in the fourth quarter, and so we opted for a quick end-around play, viewing her from about twenty feet and at a forty-five-degree angle. The parallax on the left-hand side rendered her smile somewhat malevolent. Joke’s on you, she seemed to say.
My mind wandered. The Louvre, like our national parks, is both a miracle and paradox of democracy, a trove fully accessible to, and rendered practically inaccessible by, the hoi polloi (n. Greek, tr: you and me). I started theorizing about how to optimize the Louvre “experience.” I concluded that the first step would be renting it out—the entire museum—for a week. Here’s how I’d do it. First, I’d call my sister (who is employed at a major art museum) and ask her to dig deep into her “rolodex” and connect me with a guy named Guy Philippe Henri Lannes de Montebello (who is a French Count, and whom she met and was snubbed by once at a cocktail party, and who likely has an actual physical rolodex), who could then maybe “dash off” a few text messages or “place” a few telephone calls and arrange it all. I figure the financing is the lesser obstacle in this scenario, and the money will take care of itself, to coin a phrase. Then at the appointed week, I’d pitch a pup tent behind the Pei Pyramid, and from base camp take quiet day hikes up and down the corridors at leisure. That’s the way to see the Louvre.
Musée d’Orsay, early April. The walk from our hotel was wet and cold. My teenage daughter set her jaw and leaned into it with the grim look of an infantry grunt about to assault an enemy pillbox. But I quite fancy this one. The reader will recall that the building is the former Gare d’Orsay, and therefore built on the scale of non-aristocratic humans. It’s walkable with kids. It’s precise. We enjoyed the bulk of the collection within two hours, but the way we saw it makes the difference. I loved looking at The Floor Scrapers off to the side, almost tucked in a corner. Unobtrusive and uncrowded, but stubbornly there scraping, scraping the veneer off high culture since 1875. One can stumble into a side room and “discover” Monet’s Women in the Garden without too much competition from the tall loud group, or unkindness, of Dutch high school kids brusquely infiltrating the corridors. At this point we’d had our impressionism fix, and we tried to exeunt, but the unkindness of Dutch had its own plans and bulldozed its way to the exit doors. I began to think that the best museum experiences must happen outside major cities.
Where to next… Eastward to Colmar, to the Unterlinden Museum and the Isenheim Altarpiece. Not just the transfixing crucifixion scene. We strolled around to the back, to the story of the Rich Man and Lazarus, to sit and silently ponder a while on the nature of privilege and responsibility. It seemed that the room, a 13th-century Dominican chapel, quieted us and plunged the younger children into moral philosophy—Dad, are we generous enough? Touché. Those are the honest imaginings nurtured by a great work in situ. For some reason I wished we could time-travel to the year 1902 and listen to Hilaire Belloc explain the pictures to us, notwithstanding his teutonophobia and unbending ambition to get to Rome.
Italy is not a boot, but rather a stiletto-heeled leg of museum en masse, replete with the World’s Best Food Court. This knowledge alone ought to render unmarketable the pornographic offerings of any social media company. Entire cities are museums. Case in point: Venice is now a fully-ticketed venue. I suppose it makes sense, but how far behind are Florence and Siena? Ah, Florence. Florence of the long-suffering polyglot tour guides. (I desperately wanted to document puffy sweating tourists entrained in kindergarten-style neon rope tethers and declare total victory, but I guess handheld adult tricycle flags suffice for grownup Americans.) College art majors swarm Florence like flies on dropped burger meat, and for good reason: Michelangelo’s magnificent David, the unsurpassable ideal of delicious manliness, housed in the Accademia Gallery. (Query: Anyone else wonder what Michelangelo imagined Goliath looked like? I mean, look at David’s expression with that in mind…update: professorial sources tell me that “Goliath” looked like Independent Florence’s enemies in Rome.) He is absolutely worth seeing in person, but like the Mona Lisa, his popularity has turned the encounter into a sitcom. The boys and I tried on “the pose” while my wife and daughter disavowed us. I do believe I bear a certain resemblance to David, excepting the disproportionately short arms and a slight atrophy in the buttock area—mine, not his.
The Uffizi? We skipped it. Too much. But it is a pretty tight ship, by all accounts. It is managed by a German, according to one garrulous young Florentine waiter who went on to inform us—without a hint of irony—that “we Italians don’t know how to be organized so we need Germans to run things.” It wasn’t really the time or place to offer any historical counterfactuals to his happy thought, and so I held my tongue… Galileo Museum? A bit lame-o, unless you care to see his actual desiccated middle finger flipping you and the whole city of Florence off. We took the hint and moved on to Siena (gorgeous), Verona (Shakespeareanly fair), Padua (Scrovegni Chapel—intimate, heartrending), Milan (Duomo—beautiful; fascist buildings and history—avoidable). As I say, to a Piet Mondrian canvas landscape-dwelling Midwesterner, the whole of Italy—terrain, architecture, populace—is easy on the eyes.
The premier stateside concern is the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, aka the “Met”). Compared to the Louvre, the Met seems small and provincial. [Hang on. Quick text to the editor…need to fix it so that Guy Philippe Henri Lannes de Montebello (the French Count who was also the longtime director of the Met) will never see this piece and read that comment, which he might take exception to. I’m still counting on him to help out with that Louvre camping trip gambit…update: the editor assures me that there’s nothing to worry about, as far as Montebello ever seeing this is concerned.] And yet the Met’s MET equals the Louvre’s MET. Thus, the Met’s smallish size (relative to the Louvre) arithmetically confers a counter-intuitive higher yield, visit-wise.
Smug with this advantage, we looked at the great pictures: Washington Crossing The Delaware, The Gulf Stream, etc. Then I split off the main party to hunt down the Dutch painters and El Greco. I approached a gentle cobwebbed Upper West Side-accented docent who must have been there since the Carter Administration. He winced in his fragility, shifted his stance and then, one presumes from hard-won experience, used all four fingers to direct me duahn the huoalway, second rayght, ehn then ehmmeejetly you’ll feynt a staihway, go duahn the staihs. I wanted to ask clarifying questions just to get the accent again. Instead I went and confided in El Greco’s pictures for a while. Eventually we regrouped and looked at the depressing unusable musical instruments, located conveniently to fulfill the boys’ ongoing metallic request—
Arms and armor. European armor. Italian, German, French, Spanish armor. Japanese wicker armor (how effective was it, really?). Persian pointy-helmeted circular-shielded armor. Henry VIII’s armor. Big guy, Henry. My mind wandered. I thought of a History Channel documentary about his daily (apparently vomitorium-inspired) meals, consisting of: fishes, fowls, beef tallow tarts, saddles of venison, loins of beeves, <vomiting>, cakes, fruit piles, gallons of wine... I imagined some of our more dismal frantic weeknight suppers, sandwiched within the gluelike wonderbread of contemporary American extracurricular activity. Morally-Assuring Sustainably-Harvested Costco Breaded Fish. The kids whipsaw between complaint and uproarious laughter. I look wistfully at the leftovers on my plate. I ask my wife, “Care to eat the rest of my cod piece?” She rolls her eyes.
Speaking of heavy metal, there’s a lot of it in the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, in the form of a genuine WWII German U-Boat. The thing is massive, and yet it was (almost unbelievably) undertheseaworthy. Definitely worth a visit. That said, I’ve grown less enthralled with the museum over time. I salute and pity those who would, on their day off, voluntarily enter a steel cage and descend into a pitch dark coal mine with an unkindness of schoolkids. Other industrial metal-based museums of note are the Henry Ford Museum (Dearborn, MI), Gilmore Car Museum (Portage, MI), Smithsonian Air and Space Museum (Washington, DC—the Udvar-Hazy annex near Dulles is worthwhile if you have a six-hour layover, or if you’re indeed vacationing in Dulles), Cité de l’Automobile (Mulhouse, France). Planes, trains, and automobiles. Yawn. I suspect science and industry museums lose their luster because by and large their artifacts were generated by pragmatical committees, rather than created by (please bear with me) an inspired individual. This distinction seems to be lost on kids, particularly school-age boys, who tend to love these places. Come to think of it, an inspired individual could create a Venn diagram capturing the psychosocial intersection of: schoolboys, hobbyists who refer to their model locomotives as “she,” men who aspire to corvette ownership, and the set of insufferables who actually enjoy committee meetings.
But who am I to judge? I do like to nerd out at the odd Historical Artifact Museum (HAM). Some of these HAMs are somewhat gross in scale, like the British Museum (BM). We’ve “done” the BM on two separate occasions, each lasting less than two hours. I should back up. The BM is very difficult, if not impossible to squeeze into a stressful travel schedule. You need to give it plenty of time to sink in—I’d say it would be a much easier flowing experience if you called London home. As naive tourists, we made the mistake of scheduling both our BM times just before train departures, and thus didn’t have ample flexibility to let it happen more organically. I did like the unrepatriated Greek marble work, though, and we were able to check off the Rosetta Stone™, and Augustus’s head was pretty striking and big, and the Lewis chessmen inspired me to partially learn enough to be defeated by my twelve-year-old a lot, but whatever. Bottom line: the aroma of family bonding renders the BM more palatable.
The British Library Reading Room is a sort of non-museum museum, blessedly unpeopled, nice and compact with uterine light levels, displaying text after text of signal importance over which you and your companions can reflect in near-repose: Codex Sinaiticus (oldest complete Bible—in fact, the oldest extant book from antiquity, when people used to read books out loud, or at all); Beowulf; Magna Carta. And here the kids experienced a material connection with a few of the greats: handwritten Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Debussy, et al.; handwritten Jane Austen (neat); handwritten Lewis Carroll (weirdly neat); the very dying hand of Scott of the Antarctic, scribbling weakly into his journal—it seems a pity, but I do not think I can write more…
I bet I can, though. Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford: aggressively Victorian name, aggressively Victorian layout, aggressively Victorian collection, all daintily greeting you—Glad you could come, old boy! I say, mind your step, now there’s a good fellow. Guilt has led the museum to pursue a program of recompense, aggressively representing and repenting of colonial sins. It’s all very interesting, a sort of meta-museum exercise connecting modern sensibility to indigenous experience with a Victorian triumphalist aesthetic through a survey of that most universal human trait: sheer gobsmacking violence. I found the faded cardstock-labeled 100,000-year-old hand axes, less-ancient stone spears, more familiar metal swords, wicked-looking skull hammers, and icky torture hooks and flensing tools all fundamentally more honest than any of the firearms. The kids were enthralled by the whistle-arrows, and we could only imagine the terror they once evoked in the naked depths of the jungle.
One of my all-time favorites is the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures Museum, Chicago, which until recently was named the (I beg your pardon) Oriental Institute Museum. It’s a bit smaller than the Unterlinden, but they seem equivalent in the human dimension. Twenty years after our visit, I can still conjure the bas-relief lions of Nebuchadnezzar’s palace and the huge dead-eyed lamassu Daniel himself might have stood in the shadow of. Weights, measures, cuneiform contracts from Ur, so ancient and yet so recognizably human—Abraham’s dad might have used them; he was pretty well-to-do, if memory serves. At the risk of cliché, one really can commune with others across the ages there. Transporting without oppressing.
Phew. Time for a break. No, we didn’t get to the Ashmolean while we were in Oxford. (I did look at the brochure to see what was on: Jeff Koons and his balloons. Yawn. I guess somebody had to do it, as John Ashbery said of Robert Lax’s crazy minimalism.) Nor did we get to the Vatican Museums. Even casual skimmers will note gaping holes in this survey, like Natural History museums. (For the record, Sue the T-Rex’s jawline isn’t exactly Hollywood-grade symmetrical; maybe because her teeth range from two to a fearsome three-and-a-half Galileo’s middle fingers in length.) The fact is, I’m now fully conscious that I have limited energy, or “bandwidth,” in this life. Sometime between age thirty-five and forty the weariness slowly takes hold, coinciding with the growing realization that raking leaves might actually risk back rupture. Yes…bandwidth… Despite diligent if sub-heroic physical activity, a stubborn band, or “tire,” of surplus adipose tissue develops around the midsection. The tire—as though our bodies are programmed to auto-generate the perfect metonym of middle age.
It’s simultaneously embarrassing and necessary for every generation to restate the obvious. We can only do so much with the mental and physical resources we inherit and build upon, and certain experiences must be left behind. Some institutions buckle us under the sheer weight of moral focus, like an entire inverted pyramid pressing onto the conscience. I’ve never visited the Holocaust museum. Have I avoided it to protect the innocence of my young children, or because of my own cowardice? And what (if any) significance obtains from my recoiling from the Creation Museum (Petersburg, KY) but not the Museum of the Bible (Washington, DC)?
So we prioritize—a completely fraught task, even after we’ve narrowed it down to the facility level and are drowning in a collection. Drowning? That’s what we do online, except the panic is anesthetized by a pixelated lightscape mainlining into our midbrains. The physical world provides no euphoric cover, and so a teeming museum lobby unleashes the full psychological effect we ought to experience from the internet. The agora is more honest than screenland, as it turns out. I can now just make out a sort of twisted slant-rhyme to it all—the bigger and more popular the institution, the more adversarial the relationship grows between patron and exhibit, just as social media transmogrifies travel into a monstrous status-seeking revenge-performance. Why should museums habituate to the iPhony way we live? What if they made it their mission to lift us from the toilet bowl of “content upload” describing the contemporary media-distraction vortex? What if they discourage or even somehow prohibit smartphone use among the exhibits? An ideal begins to take shape—limited body count through the turnstile (or no turnstile!), a refreshing absence of media and tech industry techniques—and like a mental archaeologist one uncovers the whole heuristic principle of the thing: genuine admiration, reflection, and connection flow from an unencumbered interplay between maker, curator, and patron. A thoughtful act of co-discovery rather than consumption.
Well that sounds a tad presumptuous on a second read, and it might have whipped up a minor froth of hostility from our erstwhile friendly neighborhood museum directors (pax tecum, Monsieur de Montebello). No doubt those who contend with real financial pressure quickly tire of the deflating babble of a situational Luddite. I only seek an accessible place which can better us—to make us less distracted and more available to that which fully illuminates. And in that light I should probably try to land this wobbly plane with a long-overdue thesis statement: a good museum is a pre-eucharistic space, allowing a quiet reconciliation among bent and harried people in a broken and complex world. More of that, please.
