Saturday we went down to Brooklyn. Kate cooked dinner, we discussed some final WDW issues, we lamented over having the internet (and losing “Put Down the Duckie”), etc. It was very enjoyable. Before arriving at Chez Scion, we went to the Brooklyn Museum. For some people, running into Jared there would have been the high point of the excursion. Now, I don’t want to diminish the value of running into Jared; I enjoy doing it, and he and I got to discuss how this was one of the few years in the last decade neither of us was at Harvard for Presidents’ weekend, and how nice it is running into people serendipitously. So that was nice. And I like the Brooklyn Museum, which has a few surprising holdings that remind you that Brooklyn would be one of the largest cities in the world if it wasn’t already a borough of one of the largest cities in the world, which renders its self-standing claim rather moot. But what was most interesting to me was the storeroom. The fifth floor of the museum is its American collection. All sorts of artifacts—paintings, sculptures, design objects—are taken from the museum’s holdings and displayed thematically. (I like this approach; one of my favorite examples of it is the Louvre, where most recently I went through their Egyptian material which is essentially two vast parallel exhibits, one thematic and the other chronological: doing one and then the other does a great job of opening your brain to exactly what is going on with this material.) At the Brooklyn you walk through each themed area to see visions of home life, or American landscape, or industry, or whatever. But toward the end of the exhibit is the storeroom. Behind these doors are all the pieces that didn’t make it into the exhibit. It is open to the public, and it is something of an art wonderland. Walls of unlabeled pieces, chairs and sculptures and clocks and tea sets and a bed in the shape of a piano and dozens and dozens of paintings on racks, most of which you can only imagine. As you look at these things, the question arises, what is this stuff, and why is it here and not on display? And then as you stare at a wall of marginally connected doodads from the 20s and 30s, you start to wonder, is this art nouveau or art deco, and where exactly is the separating line, if any? (Some academics claim that the two are opposites, while others claim that the one is the natural result of the other.) Is that a 50s modernistic clock, or a 60s modernistic clock? Until, of course, you get to the point of asking, Does it matter?
Art is a complicated thing once you start throwing museums at it. All the questions that we’ve been looking at off and on arise. What makes something worthy of being presented in an institution? Is this piece prettier than that piece? Or is this piece more important than that piece for some other reason? What is art, anyhow, when it’s not just a bunch of really pretty things because there may be no objective criteria for what makes something pretty?
I applaud museums that carefully label their material with lots of factual information. I like to know what it is I’m looking at, and why? Some things I can look at, like this
and have little need for someone to tell me that it is a beautiful piece of art. But it is nice to know its place in art history (way early, given its realism), and what it’s a painting of (the Annunciation, and the viewer is where the angel Gabriel would be, which explains the girl’s expression), and how the artist painted that hand (look it up for yourself). But in the end its not the painting’s history that haunts me, it’s its beauty. I can’t shake this painting from my mind. And I don’t want to.
If you take away all the labels, as the Brooklyn storeroom theoretically does (it is, in fact, simply a storeroom, after all), and behold the art with no qualification, no explanation, nothing but its presence, it is a different experience than seeing that same piece all presented and gussied up and carefully labeled and identified and placed in its moment in art history. Obviously the very existence of any of these pieces in a museum indicates their intrinsic value as artworks, but still, when you know nothing about them other than that they are artworks of some moment, you can only appreciate them on their ostensible aesthetic merits, or at most, whatever sense of aesthetics (and art history) that you bring to them yourself. In other words, you look at stuff, and you like it or you don’t like it simply because, well, you like it or you don’t like it. No one is telling you whether or not to like it. You just do, or don’t. As I say, this is not a perfect example of the purity of aesthetic appreciation, since we’re already in a museum venue, but it comes close, and I don’t know too many other ways of looking at art totally absent any art venue and the presuppositions inherent to that venue. That would be a painting in a vacuum, which you come upon not knowing anything about it at all, and can only look at it and like it or not like it on face.
The questions this vacuum-packed art raises are, of course, those of the nature of art itself. The nature of beauty. The nature of aesthetics. Those are the questions that we’re always niggling at, and never answering. Those are the best questions of all.
I do recommend that you go to a lot of museums and look at what they’ve got. There are all sorts of museums of all sizes and shapes all around us. When you first start doing this, you may find it a bit dull, and you may find that you don’t have much staying power and that after half an hour you’re running out the door screaming, but I promise you that over time you will enjoy it more and more, because no matter how much of a lout you are, you do have some part of you that appreciates art.
Whatever that is.
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