The Problem With Museum Tourism
As many of you know, I really like art and museums and going to museums to look at art. Especially Renaissance art. And I was in Italy just last week, and while I was in my beloved Florence I visited the Galleria degli Uffizi, which gives me both great joy and anger at the same time. I feel compelled to explain because tumblr, of all the social media websites that I use, will most likely understand the most.
I live in New York, and I regularly go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Unlike in Europe, American art museums are not tourist attractions, but somehow European ones are. In New York, tourists do indeed come to museums - but these tourists genuinely care about what it is they’re seeing.
In Europe, especially in Italy (and, I’ve heard, in France - I didn’t notice this at the Prado in Spain), tourists include artworks on their lists of things they must see, and so book their tickets and rush in and rush out just to check off that they saw Botticelli or the David or the Mona Lisa or whatever. But these works are not treated as artworks!! These people don’t know what the hell it is they’re looking at!! (I mean, sure, Michelangelo is impressive in his works but the David is not much more art historically important than any other David made by any other Renaissance artist, like Donatello, and nobody goes to the Bargello to see that!) And to prove that they were there and they saw the art, they have to take a picture.
Okay. I understand taking pictures of sculptures. For one, I often can’t find good photos of the sculptures at the angles that I want to see them. But with a painting, there are many problems. There’s always a glare; you can never frame it correctly; you will never get it the right way. Just go downstairs and buy a fucking postcard if you want the photo so bad!!!! And since everyone wants a photo, if you try and go up to look at the actual painting from less than a few feet away, not only do you look a little insane, but also people start yelling at you to get out of their photo! You cannot see the brush strokes in a photo. Let me get close up to my favorite painting and go buy a postcard if you want the photo so bad.
It just really annoys me. I don’t think that art should be a tourist attraction. The people who come to museums to take photos to prove they were there are not the ones who should be going to the museums. In the Prado, photos aren’t allowed, and I didn’t notice this phenomenon at all - should we ban photos in museums? Would that change it? I don’t know. But I just wanted to put this out there (sorry it’s so angry) so perhaps the word will spread and less people will do this.
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