Gawking at the Museum

Have you been to the Museum of Modern Art lately? Yve-Alain Bois, esteemed art historian and professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ, has, and he thought it "was a kind of torture." I could not agree more. It has become so overrun with museum-goers — you would've thought the $20 cost of admission would've deterred a significant number of people — that you can't, as Bois points out, enjoy anything you're looking at. You've got to elbow you're way into a line of sight, and even then, chances are that a steady stream of people will parade between you and whatever painting is hanging on the wall. It's more like going to the zoo and fighting for a good spot at the monkey cage than anything else. And it's not just MoMA's problem. I've been to the gallery where the Mona Lisa hangs in the Louvre, but I couldn't really tell you what it looks like in person because the crowd is so densely packed, you don't have a fighting chance unless you're over six feet tall with 20/20 vision or scrappy enough to make your way to the front.

This is the Catch-22: As more people visit museums (a good thing, the democratization of art), the reason for going is totally compromised.

So what's the solution? Bois doesn't offer one. I don't have one either. There's got to be some cultural policy guru out there thinking of a direct, strategic approach to museum crowd control. But maybe something as simple as time could make the problem at least a little better:

I'm willing to bet that some number of the people flooding into museums are products of the overheated, much hyped art market (in its current state). People want to see what other people are spending so much money on. Remember the swarms that overwhelmed the Neue Galerie after Ronald Lauder reportedly dropped $135 million on the portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer?

When the bubble bursts and money and glamour associated with art dissipates, so will some of the gawkers.