The Great Museums in 20 Minutes!

WARNING: This post is riddled with exclamation points (!).My son Orion at the de Young Museum in San Francisco
Like a lot of artists, I have a love-hate relationship with museums.  I often think of museums as mausoleums: glorious, often ostentatious burial places for great ideas as well as radical and sometimes revolutionary expressions of human culture.  I also know that if you uh... dig a little bit deeper you will find living, breathing works of art under all that marble. 

That is why taking a friend or family member who is not an art enthusiast to a museum feels sadistic.  Instead of sharing your excitement you find that your loved ones have become nervous and agitated as if fulfilling a dire obligation. They know and you know that like honoring the dead their visit will be grim, tedious and way beyond their deeper understanding, but they go anyway in order to become a better person and make you happy.  I have friends who grew up in Manhattan who now hate museums because they were taken as  kids  by schools and parents and are bitter at having been forced to spend hours of their youth “appreciating” the old and long-dead masters.

So what to do?  Well, brace yourself, for as you have duly noted in the above title of this post, I will show you how to take on the great museums in less time that you spent making and gobbling down your breakfast this morning!  The Louvre in under an hour? No problem! The Metropolitan in a matter of minutes? You betcha! But before you think this is an insane run-through of many a hallowed halls à la Band of Outsiders, I will outline the process so that you too can live the life of Kultur like yours truly.

Still from Kentridge's film Tide Table
The key is to stop trying “to do” museums, and instead partake of the deliciousness of institutionalized art through slow-roasted visits.  First, start with the museums in and around where you live.  Get a membership at one or two, and instead of those marathon 4 hour stints every year (not including the visit to the gift shop), plan 7 visits at 1/2 hour to an hour each over the course of the year. That can add up to nearly 10 hours or more in one year! Also, don’t feel as if you have to see it all and more importantly, like everything you see.  Be aware of what you don’t like or or just don’t get and take those in the smallest doses.  With regular, intense exposure to the difficult, you will build that mental muscle for appreciating Color Field paintings in no time at all! When you drop by your friendly neighborhood art warehouse to say hello, save that special time for those friends you really want to see and don’t be ashamed to ignore the rest.  I am to this day held in disrepute by many whenever they recall my rude and abrupt intrusions to see William Kentridge’s Tide Table at SFMOMA in 2007, but I don’t care. I would go through the door, rush up to the 3rd floor, see it once or twice (it's about 7 minutes long) and then leave with nary a good-bye. It takes courage, but I promise that If you act quickly, you will find that skipping floors and shortcutting through random galleries will help you avoid the ever-dreaded museum fatigue, guaranteed.

To test my hypothesis, I allowed my son, ORION, TO BE THE SUBJECT OF A DANGEROUS YET FAR REACHING EXPERIMENT: can a museum be interesting and fun to the more or less uninterested? Well, let’s find out! Ready?  Here we go!

 (Please wait for the slide show to load)

Comments

[elliott]

it is kind of like Ikea, you need to know what you want before you go, and not get sucked into their maze. you will end up exhausted and broke, and take home lots of strange sounding items.

i like to watch the people watching the art. maybe i'll catch orion one day staring at a big wave.