> Most people prefer paintings and sculptures to be in museums, and the notion that live performers of theater or opera could ever be "owned" is abhorrent.
People aren't talking about personally owning a Wagner opera or a painting in the Louvre.
People just want to be able to watch the movie or play the game that they already paid for, without being nickel-and-dimed or having ads shoved in your face.
So lets stop making museums buy overpriced art then.
So while it is nice for the public to be able to see a certain original, I can think of millions of better ways to spend that money and then just see a replica.
It's a form of visual entertainment no different from visiting the cinema or a theatre; of course one is to pay for it.
They make expenses housing these paintings just as a cinema does, and have the right to charge to recuperate this.
In fact, I see no reason why musea should even be allowed to be non-profit. — is a cinema ever non profit?
There seems to be a rather arbitrary mentality that some entertainment should be free, in particular whatever entertainment “the cultural establishment” has arbitrarily declared to be “intellectual”, often for no other reason than that it's old.
Wishing to see a famous painting with one's own eyes is no different from wanting to see a famous singer perform live. — a man should pay for it if he wish to do so.
I'm not sure why you're being downvoted. I first went to Paris in 2014, and I experienced the same thing. Throngs of people surrounding the Mona Lisa. I was with family that wasn't very receptive to the Louvre experience, so we pretty much "saw the Mona Lisa and got the f* out".
I'm heading back to Paris next month with just my wife, and I plan on spending at least 2 days in the Louvre. I wouldn't say that people ruin art, but what I saw with the Mona Lisa was not very positive.
I think there's value in it being a disappointing experience as a learning opportunity. Might encourage people to think about what makes something famous, what draws crowds, hype and substance, etc. And hopefully people spread out afterwards and see surrounding pieces (I liked the Charles Le Brun pieces that were, at some point, in a large gallery near the Mona Lisa crowds).
This could be a great thing for art in the long run. Contemporary Art museums like MOMA (mentioned in the video) have already been catering to these crowds, albeit unadmittedly. I would not be surprised if this observation planted the see for this idea. The result of art museums doing such has been an atrocity for serious art and art criticism, the latter of which has ceased to exist. Art has may other problems but acknowledging and putting a label on this phenomenon could force a light onto what these galleries and museums have become.
There is a lot to be said about seeing great art in a less crowded context. One of the best days of my life was when I went to Member Only Hours at MoMA, and I walked alone, in silence.
I live near the Met, and too many tour buses show up, discharge huge groups of people who hustle and shove from one famous piece to the other - ignoring the art that isn't in text books. It's not a checklist, it's a really incredible place. All people should be entitled to see "Self Portrait with Straw Hat" but man, maybe they should look at the pieces next to in, instead of running downstairs to check off the next box.
In my opinion, this will be a good thing - fundamentally, the land belongs to the people of the city of New York, and the free rent for that much acreage of Central Park on Fifth Avenue is an incalculable subsidy. It should at least _try_ to be more pleasant for the citizens of the city.
This is such a peculiar, and I have to say, snobby, criticism - especially towards the last part of the article.
The Gioconda is too famous and doesn't deserve the crowd it gets? Maybe. Sounds like a subjective judgement.
People are left disappointed? Maybe. But anyone who does a 10 second search for "is mona lisa worth seeing" should already be aware of that. If they still choose to do that, why should we stop them? (or force them into an overly commercialized pen that deprives a piece of art of its dignity)
By all means, the Louvre should optimize the queuing experience. But as the author admitted, the Louvre doens't have a space capacity issue. And in my books anything that gets more people into a museum of any sort is a good thing.
> This is peculiar because it treats security guards as humans and challenges unspoken hierarchy.
I still find it a bit condescending / annoying. I read things like "offering a particularly human-centered lens through which to consider the objects" as let the plebs have their night out once in a while. They'll still get "mentored" by curators apparently, so it's not like they're just using their understanding to pick, they'll probably get brainwashed a bit.
One interesting experiment would be to put a button / ticket scanner near each artwork and ask the visitors to vote on what they liked. Maybe give them a theme and ask them to pick 2-3 pieces of art that matched that theme and put an exhibition on at the end of a month or so with the most picked works.
Why wouldn't it be justified? They are inflicting costs on the museum and museum goers (monetary and in reducing the quality of the experience). "This is why we can't have nice things..."
They (and others) should be disincentivized from doing so.
This figure immediately reminded me of a very interesting EconTalk episode[0] on the management of art museums. The premises from the discussion (as I recall):
- Art museums have more than 10x the number of pieces in their archives as they do on display. Some of this art will never be seen by the pubic.
- When art galleries charge admission, patrons feel the need to "get their money's worth" so they rush to see as much of the exhibits as possible, without taking time to thoroughly enjoy anything.
- The purpose of art is to be enjoyed. The above two points make this goal much harder.
The conclusions:
- Museums should be free admission and funded by selling pieces from the archive (really interesting discussion on how this is taboo for curators)
The second-order effects:
- Patrons can sit and enjoy a very small section of the museum instead of rushing through, since they can simply come back for more later
- More people get to see fine art
- Second- and third-tier museums start to gain access to better art, since they can simply buy it instead of waiting for estate donations (which go to larger museums)
Although I don't like the tone of the article, it does have a point.
Whether or not most of the Louvre visitors are there only for Mona Lisa, most will want to at least see it, whereas the rest of the museum is diverse enough to never be too crowded.
Moving that painting elsewhere would probably make it an immensely better experience for visitors who aren't coming for it. The entrance queues would not be that long, and past these queues, as long as you avoid that room the museum is more than large enough not to be crowded.
So let those who want to see the painting see it, and let those who want to the see the rest of the museum see it. People can do both of course, but there's no need to ask people who just want to see Mona Lisa to navigate the museum.
At this point I don't understand why anybody would even bother trying to visit any of the popular spots.
For example we were in Madrid in 2019. The queue to the Prado was round the block. It was hundreds of metres long.
I don't care what's in the Prado, but it's not that good. The Mona Lisa can't be that good. The Sistine isn't that good.
Find another chapel. Find a smaller gallery. Find a lesser-known work. And actually enjoy it, rather than just seeing it so you can take your photo and tick the box.
It's impossible to observe, appreciate, study, or learn anything useful from the Mona Lisa when you're over 12 feet away in a sea of bodies. I thoroughly agree with this article, and I'd go even further. I've pretty much stopped going to popular museums because they are simply too crowded. I don't understand people who go to museums just to take a selfie in the same room as a famous artwork. If you really want to appreciate a work, you can learn far more about it on the Internet where you don't have to fight a sweaty crowd.
I'm with you 100%. Try visiting the Mona Lisa at the Louvre. The room is packed and everyone's taking selfies with the painting as a background. It's beyond ridiculous...
Without knowing what the physical space looks like I'd rather we just not arrange valuable artwork like sculptures where tourists can easily damage or even touch them. People are dumb, tourists are a even dumber subset of people, you're asking for it if you don't properly secure the artwork.
Throwing these people in prison won't make tourists smarter it'll just put them in prison at the public's expense.
And before someone comes back about how this devalues appreciation of art of whatever, I obviously mean secure the artwork to a reasonable degree. Especially in places known for MASSIVE crowds like the Vatican. God isn't exactly jumping out of his seat to protect them.
It is insane because this alienates the demographics that appreciate everything you are denouncing here: European history, art, culture, colonialism, civilizational accomplishment etc. Everything that created the very art housed withing the museums.
Even if one is not apart of this heritage, this should be respected as the foundation of the art itself.
I think I've seen the Mona Lisa... once? I go to the Louvre pretty often but that specific painting is far from the best thing it has to offer. If people really cared about it they'd just go see the one in Madrid [1], but for some reason people only ever want to see the Louvre one.
I get what I say makes me look like a hipster but it's really not what I mean, people should just take a hard look at touristy things and places and consider whether they're really worth the overcrowdedness, inflated prices, and banality of experience. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't. What does it really bring to you?
"completeists" -- This reminds me of Big Year [1], i.e. ridiculous.
I've been to a lot of the world's major museums, but I've never been to The Netherlands (or Russia). I really don't get the attraction of a "private viewing." As long as there aren't so many people that someone's always walking in front of me (like at the Uffizi), I'm fine with other tourists there. Once in a great while, someone will say something interesting about it.
This is an elitist attitude. "I don't think these people are appreciating art properly, therefore let's take it away from them."
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