This past summer, I travelled to London and Paris for the first time. As an art lover, I was positively thrilled to visit several of the cities’ impressive museums, which harbor some of the greatest works of art humanity has ever produced. So, in London, I excitedly planned to see the National Gallery (which I ended up visiting twice), viewing both the permanent collection and the Siena: The Rise of Painting exhibition, and in Paris, I purchased tickets for the MusĂ©e de l’Orangerie and MusĂ©e d’Orsay.
The museums themselves were utterly incredible; their architecture and extensive collections were breathtaking. Access to so many amazing pieces was a dream come true for me, as I have longed to see them for years. However, the experience of being in the museums was not so perfect. While I knew these famous museums would be crowded, especially during the summer, I was shocked at the throngs of people that visit only to snap pictures of the art, especially pieces that everyone has seen online or on merchandise (such as Van Gogh’s 1889 Self-Portrait and Monet’s 1899 The Water Lily Pond and Woman with a Parasol) without so much as looking at the paintings.
Let me make clear that I don’t mind if people take photos of some of their favorite paintings — I myself will take a few pictures if a piece particularly strikes me or if I want to tell others who enjoy art about it — but it saddens me to see people forgo taking even a single moment to actually look at the amazing painting right in front of them. I could not have attempted to count the amount of people, particularly in the MusĂ©e de l’Orangerie and the Impressionist sections of the National Gallery and MusĂ©e d’Orsay (Impressionist paintings always seem to attract the largest crowds, interestingly) who fought to obtain a photo of or with (my personal favorite pose was when people would pretend to look at a painting for a photo) well-known works only to immediately move on to the next one and repeat the same action.
Forget the fact that these crowds prevent people who are actually interested in the art for its cultural significance and technique from spending time with pieces (which can be particularly frustrating since seeing artworks in person allows one to stand close to a painting and note an artist’s use of color, light, perspective, brushstrokes, and layering, which you can’t do well from a photo), but it completely thwarts the goals many artistic movements strove to achieve. Take the crowd-drawing Impressionist works as an example: a cornerstone of Impressionism was capturing the fleeting moment, which involved a careful study of light, the employment of a variety of hues, and brushwork that oftentimes did not blend but made itself evident, which helped to produce the feeling that the artist was capturing a single moment of an everchanging and evermoving scene; while these works aimed to fully inhabit the moment, to exercise the ability to see and represent the bright, detailed world in front of them, and to remind the viewer of life’s brevity and the value of the moment, they now are the subject of a practice that accomplishes the precise opposite effect.
A specific example of this would be the treatment of Monet’s NymphĂ©as rooms at the MusĂ©e de l’Orangerie. Monet designed these rooms for meditation, but they are not often used for this meaningful effort today; most do not pause and reflect in these beautiful spaces as Monet desired, but instead busily capture photos, which leads not to enrichment and peace but forgetfulness and lack of attention. The rooms were so crowded that the museum attendant had to repeatedly shout over the loud chatter in the rooms for people to be quiet because these rooms were intended for calm introspection.
Art is intended to inspire feeling, create a connection, and spark debate and questions, and it is utterly heartbreaking to see so many treat breathtaking works with such apathy for their significance. Images have undoubtedly, and perhaps irrevocably, depreciated in worth; they have become common commodities that we swipe through on our phones within seconds, a medium with which we are inundated on a daily basis, leading many of us to treat art in the same manner, and worse, to lower it to the level of an unimportant snapshot on our phones or social media pages. As a society, we have largely lost the ability to look, to truly see what is in front of us, to admire the world in its great beauty and myriad of colors and details, to appreciate how precious each moment is, and to live in the world and in the moment instead of in the digital world, which has become increasingly consuming.
I did pass by several people who inspired hope within me during my museum visits, which was incredibly heartwarming, especially amidst the sea of people who were obsessed with capturing pictures. For instance, I saw a mother walking with her young daughter through the d’Orsay, teaching her how to really look at paintings and ask insightful questions, and I witnessed a docent giving a tour challenge his large group to not simply receive works as given, irreproachable, and unapproachable entities but instead to think about why artists created them, why they used particular techniques, and why they are considered “good.” I was overwhelmed with joy to see these people push others to exercise their ability to think, question, and see, and I want to exhort anyone reading this article to do the exact same and to promote this exercise so that more people re-learn how to truly see and appreciate art.