I went to the museum
Maybe it’s worth reconsidering what place art museums play in our modern world and our lives
As a self-proclaimed History Buff™, I’ve always thought of myself as an art museum person. The idea of strolling through the annals of time in a vibey atmosphere, surrounded by the past and communicating indirectly with people who lived thousands of years before you, all while seeing things that make you either suddenly extremely grateful for modern medicine or go “oh my gosh, they were so advanced” is, without a doubt, quite compelling. Museums are a wonderful way to broaden your perspective and get an idea of the world at large. This is no doubt a commendable and worthwhile effort, especially in an age of often vapid and insular internet islands. Not to mention it makes you sound so intellectual and sophisticated when you respond nonchalantly to the question of “What did you do this weekend?” with “I went to the museum.”
Unfortunately, however, no matter how worldly they might make me seem, August saw me swearing off art museums for a bit. Why? Going to museum after museum in a short span of time tired me out.
Between May 19 and July 27, this “museum enthusiast” went to at least five so-called “world class” museums: the British Museum in London, the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, and three on the Museuminsel in Berlin, along with many “smaller” museums (ah, the privilege!). After seeing what felt like a dynasty’s worth of Ancient Egyptian sarcophagi and about a million Madonna and Child paintings, I was tired. Turns out there’s a limit to how many mummies I can see before they all start looking the same, and honestly, I shouldn’t blame myself for that. Maybe it makes me naïve — or maybe it makes me human.
You see, I try not to have too many pretensions of intellectual sophistication these days. I go to an art museum with the blind hope that I will find something there that expands my narrow world, that maybe I’ll find a painting that truly moves me or see the product of some sort of technological advancement I didn’t know an ancient civilization had. I want to walk away from the museum with a sense of wonder, with the feeling that I’ve truly grown from the experience, seeing something I’ve never seen before. But by the end of my summer of museums, my only takeaways were a dazed expression and tired feet. I was getting to the point where I was just trying to get through it, and I masked that sad fact by taking those slow museum steps we all take when pretending to be mesmerized by something we’ve seen before.
Because, in a way, I had seen it before. Here’s the thing about “world-class” art museums: their collections are too big for their primary audience — ignorant harried tourists with impossible checklists. There’s too much to see and much of it we’ve already seen, either in this museum or in the last one. And if each of them is world class, they are all of a similar class with similar things. From the layperson’s perspective, their collections overlap, even if they each are high quality. Each museum has an enviable collection from Ancient Egypt, the classical worlds, the Renaissance. Each has somehow procured fifty Bronze Age pots. So if you showed me a Bronze Age pot from one of these museums and asked me where I’d seen it, I could give you many guesses. It might be an exquisite pot, but I’ve seen apparently “exquisite” Bronze Age pots in several different museums now; what can I say? At a certain point we stop growing — seeing one more isn’t teaching me anything I didn’t already know.
But that’s not all. Maybe it’s the oversaturation, but as I wandered through the Bronze Age section of the Bode Museum in Berlin, I started to wonder why all these pots were in the museum in the first place. They looked rather ordinary to me (gasp!). I can understand having one or two, so we realize our ancestors were pretty advanced back before the sea peoples of the Late Bronze age came and took them, [1] but forty in one room? Does no one else find that to be a little too much? And do they really deserve to be in this room, one story up from that exquisite bust of Nefertiti (which I now realize is somehow not overrated at all), simply because they survived three thousand years of human strife?
Perhaps this is the product of the content-saturated Internet Age life we live in, where our short attention spans need to constantly be enchanted by something new, and we can just close the tab and open a new one if we get bored. Maybe people a hundred years ago saw these pots and were rooted to the spot in awe of their endurance and that incredible scoring technique that somehow predicted the nuclear age, not to mention the fact that they were spun on a wheel (oh my!).
Maybe people didn’t feel this way about museums back in the day, probably because besides blurry images in hard-to-access books, the physical artifacts could only really be seen in museums. These items were exotic and were never seen before, instead of being just a Google search away. Museums brought the world to a person who couldn’t expect or afford to see much of it on their own or anywhere else.
I can imagine that, in a time not as content-saturated as ours, these collections opened up history and the world in a fascinating, in-your-face kind of way to people who might have never expected to leave their homeland. To someone who has never been outside their country (and most likely, a small radius from their home), seeing Ancient Egyptian sarcophagi or that Botticelli might have truly changed their world and brought them closer to the outside one. (Who knows, maybe our Victorian “ancestors” [2] were simply pretentious, or, in an age of stifling social norms, so bored that even these pots were a welcome distraction).
But either way, we’re in a different time now. Even an “average” person can expect to visit a couple of world-class museums in their lifetime; when it gets boring, they can also — for better or worse — simply scroll online. This reality is sad, but it’s true.
So I argue, maybe it’s worth reconsidering what place art museums play in our modern world and our lives.
Don’t get me wrong, I still love a good museum visit. I still feel like I reclaim some humanity and some connection with the world whenever I go to one. I do grow in some way every time — but only when I actively try and avoid the “gotta see ‘em all” mentality and instead make an effort to see something I want to see, to see something new. I’ve been lucky to see many amazing things in museums over the years, but that also means I don’t need to gawk at them again. If there’s something else in the next exhibit that could teach me something new, it would serve me better to go there.
So maybe in the future I’ll stay away from mindlessly wandering through the Ancient Egyptian or classical Greek sections (and certainly the Bronze Age!) if there are other things I’d rather see. (I’d highly recommend the Benin bronzes at the MFA, for example.) I certainly think I’ll only go to a museum when I really want to, and not, in the words of Mt. Everest mountaineer George Mallory, “because it’s there.”
Over the past couple months, I’ve realized that art museums are great in small, concentrated doses and at intervals — they’re not mountains to be climbed, or marathons to be run. They should be enjoyable. They should teach you something. Ideally, they should make you feel awe at people and what they’ve been able to achieve, and at your own smallness tucked within the human narrative.
There’s something incredible about a place that can simultaneously make you feel seen and invisible at the same time. I know that when I go to an art museum and see the right things, I feel proud to be a human, proud of the vastness and brilliance of what humans have done and are capable of doing. But I also feel incredibly humbled. I remember I’m just a small link in a long, long chain, and together, these things ground me and inspire me in a very powerful way. Isn’t it incredible that it’s possible to get such a thing just by going to an art museum?
Sure, those are lofty words, but here’s the thing: two months of Europe may have gotten me tired of museums, but two months at MIT made me run right back to the MFA. And I felt all those things there, I really did.
Maybe it’s because I didn’t go to the Ancient Egyptian section this time.
[1] Disclaimer: this hasn’t been proven.
[2] Culturally speaking, of course.