Thoughts about the challenges and positive outcomes this lockdown can lead to.
Museum directors can finally feel safe from intruding, inappropriate and “touchy” visitors.
It is not funny.
Safe? Quite a paradox to use this word these days, nothing is safe: health, family, job, house. I wonder about museums. I don`t mean the staff that works in museums but the institution itself. When I think of a museum the first thing that comes to my mind is artworks, the second one is people. People give life to the artworks and vice versa, not literally obviously. But now this fantasy of a museum can`t be farther from reality: museums are closed or more than closed if that is even a thing. They are just like on a permanent “night mode”: they are locked up.
I happened to listen to a podcast about safety in museums at the time of Coronavirus and I find myself surprised by the comments of the speaker who claimed that museums have never been this safe! Museums meaning a collection of art works in this case because can you really call a museum as such without people being in it for longer than a few days? Take away the visitors, you take away the main risk of spoiling whatever object is preserved in the museum. What is left is “just” the remote possibility of a theft. Which I am not sure how remote it is since just lately a van Gogh has been stolen in the Netherlands precisely because of the Coronavirus lockdown. So maybe big museums are winning the statistics of spoiled art works per visitor but at what price! Artworks that become mere objects if no one looks at them, interacts with them. You say: there is no option. I agree, there is no option.
But I miss looking closely at paint, seeing the wrinkles on the canvas. I miss entering in a museum and feeling my heartbeat slowing down, taking off my jacket and getting ready to experience I do not yet know what.There is the digital. True, I wonder about its benefits and effects. When I wrote my thesis about the digital opportunities for museums I didn`t mean I wanted to experience them all at once. At least if this had happened last year I would have had more resources for my writing. Anyway, I am sure everyone agrees that the efforts of museums to dive into the digital format in such a short time are admirable. Then my doubts and questions arise. I wonder how long it will take for museums to forget about all these efforts after all of this is over, when the time to dedicate to social media will be better used. Never it was given so much attention to Instagram, Facebook, email lists and so on, and now I believe most of the “art people” on Instagram find way more direct stories and video by museums than ever before. Sure they do not risk that any dirty-handed child cuddles any artwork. Very safe. Nothing can be safer that visitors at kilometers away from a masterpiece, right?
The “very safe museums” scare me a little. When the interviewer on the podcast considered visitors as a risk for art I had a quick realization: of course I know that visitors are a potential risk as everything is in a museum - pipe leak, humidity, warned out ceilings and even breaths - but not in a way that I actually imagined eliminating visitors from the equation. But let`s contemplate for a second, maybe shorter because it hurts too much, that museum directors will realize that it actually isn`t that necessary to visit museums since everything is visible online. Then yes, online becomes a spell, a terrible nightmare of tiny pictures and captions and zoom of a detail and quick information. It is nice and informative to watch a video with the presentation of an exhibition, the curator that does his/her best to explain some parts of it, but still. We are still watching at a screen and we are still watching something that was never conceived to be seen in such a way. We do not only watch art with our eyes but with our entire bodies and for how extremely annoying it can be to have voices and people around, isn`t that still part of the experience? Well, I confess that I agree only partially with this last sentence of mine: I would be perfectly comfortable in front of my favourite painting alone and in silence. But not for every exhibition and forever: museums are a social space and they need to be filled up with people, clean or dirty-handed.
Everyone needs a chance to see, feel, think, be opinionated. Aren`t precisely those “touchy” people those that we want to appeal to through social media? Because I do not believe that museums use social media to only please the eager art professionals and art lovers. Social media are for the masses. So what if after Corona museums fill up with masses that have never been in museums and have gotten to know them online? I cherish the unsafety of this vision! That is the whole point of museums and social media related to museums. We will forget the direct story on Instagram by this or that museum in a couple of weeks, but at least they are reaching out through all the possible tools and shaking our sleepy quarantine minds.
As museums are pushing towards social communities they are knocking on everyone`s door to make art, thoughts and culture circulate in a swirl where everyone sees different things, feels different feelings and yet is united in the same spark of light in these dark times. After all, aren’t museums just like a big city square where everyone meets, talks, shares and feels the connection of being in the same place with a common purpose? I hope the pandemic will bring more chatty and touchy people into museums. That is the only way we keep museums alive and safe.
PS: the quality of the pictures is not great but I prefer sticking to memories than perfect pictures these days.