What are we looking for?
More than 200 Times readers have responded to the question the chief art critic Michael Kimmelman poses in his latest Abroad column:Julie Bloom in the NYT discusses the comments and their meaning. The comments have a few good points (lack of benches, etc.) but most are full of high handed snobbery and sadness. Read it here.What exactly are we looking for when we roam around museums?On a recent visit to the Louvre, Mr. Kimmelman observed that “almost nobody, over the course of that hour or two, paused before any object for as long as a full minute.” His conclusion: “Tourists now wander through museums, seeking to fulfill their lifetime’s art history requirement in a day, wondering whether it may now be the quantity of material they pass by rather than the quality of concentration they bring to what few things they choose to focus upon that determines whether they have ‘done’ the Louvre. It’s self-improvement on the fly.”
1 comment:
I dare say the average hillbilly American-in-Paris tourist that Kimmelman has painted with his blame-the-camera-first-for-causing-attention-deficit-disorder brush has spent more time looking at a single work of art in the Louvre than the average Senator or Representative back home in the good old U.S. of A has spent reading any of the proposed healthcare bills and amendments. How much time does a person really have to spend viewing a work of art in a world where the 2009 Stimulas Package (a monster piece of legislation) can be passed in the middle of the night with no one in the nation having being given enough time to read it, let alone comprehend it?
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