Stuff and Nonsense
Sometimes art's just not
enough. There's a new fashion in museum exhibitions: Accessorize. We're seeing
fewer shows like the Cezanne retrospective at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which
merely assemble great pictures, unembellished by catchy themes, related
objects, documentary materials, or voluminous explanatory texts. Today's
curators increasingly feel the itch to interpret, not only with words but with
objects and illustrations that "explain" the art and give it "context."
A few recent examples:
The Metropolitan Museum of
Art's "Rembrandt/Not Rembrandt," displaying drawing materials and printmaking
tools of the type used by Rembrandt, as well as photos and bios of Rembrandt
scholars and radiographs showing the underpainting in real Rembrandts and
Rembrandt wannabes.
The Met's and Boston Museum
of Fine Arts' "John Singleton Copley in America" (at the Milwaukee Art Museum
through Aug. 25) intersperses the art with colonial furniture, silver
(including a Paul Revere teapot similar to the one in Copley's famous
portrait), and costumed mannequins "suggesting the coherence of Copley's work
in the cultural environment of pre-Revolutionary Boston and New York."
The Florida International
Museum's "Splendors of Ancient Egypt" (through July 7), recreating a
pharaoh's burial chamber and providing "a taste of the actual Karnak
experience--using mirrors and two dozen massive columns to completely surround
the visitor with the magnificence of the temple." To add an authentic desert
touch, real sand was dumped on the floor along one wall.
People used to visit art
museums to look at art. Great paintings on the walls, superb sculptures on
their pedestals--what more could you ask? The thirst for detailed information
on the art's significance or the artist's life and times was best slaked before
or after. Outside intervention just interfered with the intimate communication
between artwork and art lover.
Not any
more. From the Metropolitan Museum of Art to the Mississippi Arts Pavilion,
there's a growing sense that art can't communicate on its own. A new
buzzword--"interpretive design"--means that art exhibitions must be laden with
text and context. Curators divert us from art with an array of related
artifacts or documents from the period, as if too much aesthetic concentration
might tax our attention span. The creative process itself is demystified
through displays of artists' working tools and illustrations of artistic
technique, as in the National Gallery of Art's Winslow Homer
show. (The show has traveled to the Met, where it will stay until Sept. 22,
without these supplementary materials.)
Is there a problem here? Not if you think an art museum
should be like a history museum, treating art as a cultural artifact that
illustrates the story of a particular person, period, and place. But for those
of us who cherish art for art's sake, gussying it up with photos, paint
samples, and teapots merely trivializes and distracts.
The trend
toward interpretive installation, aimed at broadening art's appeal by expanding
public understanding, paralleled the transformation of museum-going from
serious cultural pursuit to highbrow entertainment. Efforts to make information
about art (as well as art itself) more accessible were strongly encouraged by
funding policies of the National Endowment for the Humanities. NEH-supported
exhibitions were distinguished by their elaborate wall panels--educational
maps, photomurals, stenciled treatises--which competed with the objects
themselves for space and attention. One early critic of this trend, Sherman
Lee, then director of the Cleveland Museum of Art, complained 20 years ago that
NEH "tends to lose sight of the fundamental purpose of an art exhibition, which
is not to illustrate history but to allow an art work to be understood and
enjoyed as a work of art."
Next came the burble of taped audio guides,
filling our heads with instructions on what to see and think, while inhibiting
personal response. This also suppressed civilized conversation with our
companions, who were similarly encased in electronic earmuffs. The latest audio
guides have gone Hollywood and digital: "Art authorities" electronically beamed
up by recent museum-goers include Leonard Nimoy, Steve Martin, Charlton Heston,
and Morgan Freeman. The newest curators-in-your-pocket are lightweight CD-ROM
based systems on which visitors can punch in the numbers on wall labels,
accessing commentary on whatever interests them.
People enjoy these
cybertoys: Some exhibitions where visitors tote around the latest electronic
gadgetry are beginning to resemble cellular-phone-users' conventions. People
also enjoy shows that make them feel they are not just gazing at the products
of a distant culture but, for a brief time, are actually a part of that milieu,
roaming about an Egyptian pyramid, a Chinese tomb, or a Russian palace. Such
cultural tourism has become the specialty of a new breed of insta-museum, built
solely to imbue foreign masterpieces with glitz and mystique. In addition to
the Florida International Museum, other such blockbuster mills include the
Wonders exhibition series in Memphis and the Mississippi Arts Pavilion in
Jackson. Before the opening of the "Palaces of St. Petersburg" exhibition
(through Aug. 31), Russian and American artisans painstakingly transformed the
Mississippi Arts Pavilion into lavishly appointed rooms adapted from the homes
of the czars, fitted out with authentic paintings and furnishings.
Virtual-reality exhibitions
go one step further: They attempt to create the you-are-there sensation without
the objects. The Getty Conservation Institute in California recently sponsored
a virtual-reality recreation of Queen Nefertari's tomb in Egypt, which purports
to let cyberexplorers "look at the 3200-year-old wall paintings ... without
fear of damaging the fragile artwork." This cartoonish cultural video game can
now be navigated at the Guggenheim Museum SoHo, and, perhaps more fittingly, at
Epcot Center in Disney World. "Virtual Pompeii" recently had a glitch-ridden
run at the M.H. de Young Museum, San Francisco; and a new company, Atlantic
Networks, plans to work with major museums to produce a "Great Civilizations"
series, which will display "the finest archaeological works of art, together
with reconstructions and virtual reality visits to ancient sites."
All of this surely will draw
the curious hoards, a benefit that few museums can ignore given the
unreliability of outside funding sources. Museums must rely increasingly on
self-generated income--the kind that comes from admissions, memberships,
restaurants, and shops. But as the seductive trappings gain prominence,
something else is obscured. It's the art.
