I can’t remember the last time I enjoyed visiting a museum, but it probably was when I was young and pretentious. I thought if people heard I’d spent the weekend stalking moldy old antique stuff or modern art monstrosities I’d be considered a big intellectual.
The most boring building I’ve ever been inside is New York’s Museum of Modern Art. I’ve been there twice. You’d think I’d have learned.
This museum, that museum, any museum, every museum is mostly just old coins and broken jugs. Bowls made out of clay or mud or ceramic stuff, all very old and therefore, the theory goes, well worth looking at. Why?
Just because they’re old, and even older things haven’t yet been dug up, is not a persuasive reason to go look at them. Would you visit Greece to watch an elderly tree? How about the oldest metal bench on the Pacific Coast?
Or travel to the Senate Building in Washington to stare at Bernie Sanders?
And maybe that’s the answer: If you build a museum, people will come. It can be filled with anything (Jackson Pollack proves it, as does Andy Warhol, Judy Chicago and the artist who recently used duct tape to attach a banana to a gallery wall, and sold it for $165,000).
Do you still want to go to a museum?
I’m not even clear on a museum’s purpose. They seem to mostly serve as employment rest areas for curators and docents, which must be nice. Not having to work outdoors in the rain or have people complain about your job performance would be a real plus.
And museums provide archaeologists with storage space to put the things they dig up. If not in a museum where would we put all the rusty little nails and bits of broken crockery?
But beyond hiring people to watch over dusty remnants produced by semi-civilized ancients is mostly beyond my imagination. Jasper Johns and Mondrian are completely beyond my comprehension, interest or patience. And these are the cats, plus hundreds more also in on the joke, whose works cover the walls of every modern art gallery or museum in the world.
By contrast, any “Still Life with Fruit,” and there must be thousands of them, is worth staring at for at least a few seconds, especially if the alternative is a framed canvas filled with random paint streaks and paint globs, hand prints and footprints.
And from there it’s a tossup if the other choice is pottery shards or photos of pictures of drawings of stick figures on cave walls. Or Egyptian hieroglyphics. Or Greek urns.
Or ceramics by Judy Chicago.
But let us distinguish some museums from other museums. Best of the questionable bunch are those with cool stuff like a guy in a suit of armor over in the corner, great statues by talented sculptors from way back when, and paintings of beauty and inspiration. That’s a museum worth going to.
At the bottom are museums featuring modern art. I’ve been to galleries where there isn’t a single violated canvas I would allow in my home. We are puzzled, all of us except college professors and gallery owners selling jokes by Jackson Pollack and Jasper Johns at the sheer audacity of the entire swindle.
If Grace Hudson herself ever produced something as hideous as Andy Warhol’s dismal batch of silkscreens (Marilyn, Elvis) her family would have assumed she’d come down with dementia and packed her off to the State Hospital in Talmage.
I’d happily pay a hundred dollars not to have to spend a meaningful two hours inside any modern art gallery.
Protecting The Children
We’ve all been to parks in different cities and states, and a standard, though not universal, sign appears in many of those parks:
“Children Must Be Accompanied By An Adult”
The wife, the dog and the me were in San Francisco last weekend, and looking for some green space to run the pooch and enjoy the sunshine, we visited Duboce Park. It’s a nice big swath of green interspersed with sets of swings, slides, a merry-go-round and enough grass for a lot of dogs.
Entering the park, a large metal sign:
“All Adults Must Be Accompanied By A Child”
In San Francisco.
(Did I already mention that?)
Bob Dylan used to do a song that had the lines “I don’t like San Francisco / I went to a party there once.” Tom Hine and TWK hope dear old Bobby is feeling well and enjoying life
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