What’s the Point of Going to Art Museums?

All photos taken by author.

There’s that ready quip that if it’s in the museum, it’s culturally dead. Pinned to a wall, its relevance scarcely explained on a little note card, and its place in cultural life safely in a mausoleum of meaning.

There’s a nice of the moment-ness to the idea, brightly dismissive with a twinkle of knowing just before the qualifiers, the explainers; it’s a tired little rhetorical what have you, seeping from the novelty of a paragraph to the ubiquity of pages before landing in the structure of one’s thoughts.

And it’s very easy to feel that way, walking around, just having a view of the pictures as hordes of generically touristic people trudge and trundle about the galleries on some distinction of looking for something or finishing the self-guided tour with a solid time; one can almost feel it, an odd sort of active, full-bodied viewing punctuated by teenage laughter or a loud comment about what the place was like when they visited on a High School field trip and an inevitable digression about a classmate or some FB reconnect.

It’s the easy shallow appraisal, the palace of high culture overrun. A solid play of form and some fun with the color but ultimately fleeting. Kind of like Fauvism:

Like an art class where the professor hands out office highlighters and demands a masterpiece.

And yet wandering the halls and galleries surrounded by the work of centuries, it’s more than a pleasing stroll; the playful jump from aesthetic to history, hopping continents and philosophies with beauty or even just a striking image, a journey of so many realms twisted and bound together with but an imagination and a dollop of life.

Or is it not even about seeing but poorly photographing the one everyone must?

Art as event?

Sometimes it feels as if the act of a museum is just that, some archaic ritual remade, making an event out of what occupies that great slide of image in our phones; something still alive in that game of imprint but virtual and outsourced and forever seeking more.

Haven’t read him since High School. Haha

Perhaps that’s the allure of those quiet spare galleries with the intimidating abstraction, the roving bands quickly scuttling through their boredom and never confronting that massive canvas, the one that with mere presence defies what a screen or even the chirpiest catchiest videos only strive toward, power and true resonance, it’s enormousness more fitting a door than depiction:

Appreciating AbEx feels like that stage of adulthood when Exile on Main Street suddenly becomes your favorite Rolling Stones album.

Or does one cheekily quote Tom Stoppard:

Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.

There’s a facile proof in the next gallery, seemingly; though it’s one of their lesser works, well short of their usual effect.

Love this artist, not this painting.

It’s pretty boring, yes. But that’s why one should just steal the idea and take one of your own:

Hoping they could approve.

Feel the movement, capture the movement, and put it up on the profile. The textures and planes and that amusing puzzle, that bright game of shape and space. The one that periodically lands on the phone, the composition, the capture of something that never earns out the likes one feels, suddenly dragged back and several floors later confronted with that awful feeling.

Actually went to a Saturday Night Smoker once.

Because maybe it is that much of a spectacle? Struck with the glancing recollection that most things in contemporary America are viewed through the boundless metaphorizing of combat; a reassuring jab that so little has changed from this century-old Ash Can School painting. A ray of light on the bloodied and battered as the grotesque, ghoulish faces in the crowd delight in the dim savagery.

Thinking of some refuge and yet alone and cut off but still in the light.

So much smaller than I though it would be.

And stumbling onto it.

Kind of cliched and yet.

Delightedly, obviously so. A picture one might always revisit and yet know as so many others immortalized in a place outside one’s spirit, a delightful well of meaning where the mind might journey on some fantastic blend of physical and sublime, to leave with a determination to find it in the world, in the real;

Of course.

and at once think of those jarring exciting jumps and forever wonder of the exercise, not entirely convinced but reluctantly, cheekily so; as if explaining to a cultural muse how truly one does feel those plays of form in nearly everything and leaves inspired.

She doesn’t believe me but she doesn’t have to.