"Museums should help us to live better lives, but they are little more than dead libraries for the creations of the past"
His full chat can be found here
Essentially he thinks that since Museums and Galleries are being touted as the new churches, they should re arrange and label their collections so that visitors can understand the objects in a more spiritual way and take moral and psychological comfort from them. He argues that current arrangements by art school or chronology are uninspiring and not "responsive to the inner needs of museum goers". Suggestions for replacement captions include: "look at this image and remember to be patient" and "use this sculpture to meditate on what you too could do to bring about a fairer world".
 | |||
| The National Gallery - "little more than dead library for the creations of the past" |
Alain thinks that Museums should be emulating churches in offering moral guidance though their interpretation of art, so that:
"There would be galleries devoted to evoking the beauty of simplicity, the curative powers of nature, the dignity of the outsider or the comfort of maternal nurture. A walk through a museum would amount to a structured encounter with a few of the things which are easiest for us to forget and most essential and life-enhancing to remember."
 |
| Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari - in the business of "soul balancing" |
Now I haven't been in a church where the art is labelled beyond the title of the piece. Art galleries title their paintings too as do museums. Apparently the Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari in Venice does operate on this principle and is commited to "rebalancing the soul with a highly eclectic range of works, including a fresco by Veneziano, a statue of John the Baptist by Donatello, Bellini's Madonna and Child with Saints and a large altarpiece by Titian.". Alain I will take your word for it but it sounds like there might be a theme there and it's not paganism.
Last year the Tate ran a tube campaign encouraging visitors to make their own lists of paintings and art works for particular moods, which seems like a nice idea, but very much highlights the personal nature of choice. One man's calming introspective Francis Bacon is another man's nightmare on canvas.
To do what Mr Botton suggests would be to proscribe the visitor's emotional reaction to art. As my flatmate said on being given the potted version of this article "it's like writing "you will like this" on food labels". If anything people would be more likely to react against it and decide they feel the opposite way about a piece.
 |
| A dinosaur poo - subject for meditation on the inner workings of the soul? |
Alain belittles the slogan "Art for Art's sake" as meaningless and suggests institutions use art to make "us kinder and better, more thoughtful and more generous...". Which is all very nice but surely only we can do that for ourselves.
*fossilised turd
Perhaps Mr De Bottomfeeder would like to give up the title of Philosopher and instead teach primary school. Because at least that's a proper job.
ReplyDeleteI'm not putting down his central idea; I agree we could all do with some secular moral inspiration. But he seems to be advocating the 'dumbing-down' of museums in a way which would surely alienate their main demographic and cater only to other school parties.
Of course, in Alain's lesson-plan you'd probably just have to get rid of many exhibits. What does coprolite really have to give us in terms of inspiration? And the Mayans were clearly just a bad lot, concerned only with chocolate, perversion, ritual murder and sunbathing, WHICH IS A BAD THING. DO NOT TRY IT AT HOME CHILDREN.
Ethics and morality should be debated, not dictated. And museums should be (as they are) similar to libraries. (I'm not about to get started on his use of the phrase 'dead libraries' ... of course, nobody uses libraries these days and it's TOTALLY OK THAT THEY ARE LOSING FUNDING AND BEING CLOSED BECAUSE ONLY POOR PEOPLE, GRANNIES, KIDS AND STUDENTS USE THEM. *head explodes*
Consider if you go into a church and see a stained glass window with (say) St Katherine on her wheel, or a station of the cross with 'Then Jesus fell for the third time'. Atheist or not, assuming this is your culture, you'll have some sort of orientation on what it's all about - and be able to enjoy a nuanced feeling for the art, look for the Norman bits, see what survived the Reformation - and generally have a historical backbeat to draw from. There's also quite a good chance of cold, mustiness - lots of random odd stuff lying around like modern plastic toys for children, cheesy tracts - flowers, silence, emptiness, sunlight. All of these things jazz in a coherent tradition.
ReplyDeleteSuppose instead you're in the British Museum looking at this:
http://www.britishmuseum.org/explore/highlights/highlight_image.aspx?image=ps263281.jpg&retpage=19083
For a start it's a gorgeous bit of art. What the 25 words on the label will probably tell you is it's a royal lion hunt, Assyrian, from 645BC. If instead it said it was a Babylonian priestly sacrifice from 2000BC, it probably wouldn't make the slightest bit of difference to you - the culture, the atmosphere and the meaning of the object are completely divorced. And the object itself is placed in a completely aseptic situation, a couple of yards from an Egyptian thing and an Iranian thing. The lion's removed from everything that makes it visceral, and can only be experienced as a piece of art.
I think this is what Alain de Botton is getting at. I'm not sure that the answer is modern emotive labelling, but there is something lost from most objects the moment they enter a museum, and this needs attention.
Kate that's a fine point and one that Museums do try to address where possible - the Mexican Gallery in the BM was designed precisely to evoke atmosphere. How it succeeds or fails on this is a subjective matter. I personally didn't notice until it was pointed out to me.
ReplyDeleteHowever, I don't think that's at all what he's saying. His example of how it should be done is a huge (rich) church which does not look like there would be much lying around to create the kind of atmosphere you suggest apart from perhaps the odd Titian.
He is suggesting that someone decides what the Assyrian Lion says to the soul ("Look at this sculpture and consider lionhood and the dissipation of empire?") then group it with more items with similar messages to create a magical journey into the psyche.
As a temporary exhibition I would be all for this interesting interpretation, as the new direction of curatorship I am not convinced.
Erm, yes the Mexican Gallery is a bit gloomy, but it's fairly poor if that's the sum total of what curatorial wit can come up with. By contrast, I think that the Living and Dying Gallery is among the ones that work the best - which would tend to bear out de Botton's argument a bit. It's free enough that you can stare at Mr Easter Island and think of bird men, but there's also a wider point about who we all are, and how we do death - what we rely on when we face it. The Western pills down the middle are completely inspired.
ReplyDeleteIf the whole museum was done this way, I'd find it annoying. And it may also just be that this gallery abandons the museum's general obsession with Statues And Things Made Out Of Stone for more colourful stuff. But it still is that the stuff in this gallery is animated and has less of the very-removed-still-life that you get if stuck up among the Etruscan pots on the first floor (thought: I am unconvinced that anything's been altered in that gallery since 1950.)
I have a theory that the Living and Dying Gallery was a bit of a solution for the "cripes what do we do with the Museum of Mankind" problem. However that doesn't detract from it being fabulous.
ReplyDeleteI really don't think that's what he's getting at though and even if it is, as you say, it would become dull very quickly and would not aid the visitor in searches for specific areas of interest such as greek pots with pictures of boys on them etc.
I agree that locating pots with pictures of boys is paramount, and nothing else should stand in its way.
ReplyDeleteThe weasel writes:
ReplyDelete<>
Yes, yes I did: and I agree that hideous labelling that says 'Emote here" would be revolting - I have occasionally seen it tried, usually in smaller museums; all the people involved should be given MAs in golf studies and then fed to Assyrian lions.
I was taking his suggestions as a general way of shaking things up a bit rather than a unilateral proposal. Tate Modern's been doing the across space and time layouts for years of course, and it probably feeds my psyche less than almost any other impressive building in London.