My wife and I spent two weeks this summer on a tour
of Spanish museums, wherein an insightful art professor led twenty-six retired, worldly, under- employed people to places of their dreams. I could write about
the art in the cities we visited- Madrid, Toledo, Cordoba, Seville, Granada,
Valencia and Barcelona- or the hotels or the heat (we arrived during a historic
August heat wave), but those things are well covered elsewhere. What I
want to write about is the photo-aggression committed by tourists, both
American and otherwise.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m not self-righteous about
it. I took my Droid, with its swift camera, and shot one or two photos
per museum. So I know the feeling people who love travel have, that they want to share something of what they’ve seen, to bring a bit of
it back, to "own" it (and of course the more crass feeling of, “Look, this is where
I went and you didn't”). Such feelings used to be expressed in
journals and letters, but now, as the spoken word is increasingly demoted to
short text expressions- these even freed from the syntax of sentences (Las
Meninas, OMG!)- the photographic image is the way we enhance our memories.
Fine, but how interesting can your memories be to
others if they include every painting and sculpture you
see? That’s right, everything. The goal of our group (who
were otherwise congenial and intelligent- I hope they’ll forgive me for this little critique!) and of groups all around us from many countries, appeared
to be to photograph each and every piece of art, along with its descriptive
plaque. As soon as we exited the bus, an advance squad, mostly men, would fan
out to snap the exterior of the museum, catching every column, angle and
perspective, fighting for space with young couples holding out sticks like
fishing poles with narcissism as bait. Some of the men, as they rushed
the museum gates, appeared to have worked as soccer refs, coming to sudden
halts before their targets, devices held out front, ready to inform the eye and make
the call, knees slightly bent for speed in moving to the next target.
Indeed, the invasion of the image-snatchers broke
free of museum walls. Any element of the environment with potential to be
interesting, which was pretty much everything, was subject to photography:
lampposts, signs in windows, graffiti, bad reproductions of Vermeer in
restaurants, manhole covers, and, of course, each other.
How do tourists represent their
countries when they commit photo-aggression? I learned, from the
beautiful paintings of Joaquin Sorolla, who is making a well-deserved comeback, of the arresting custom at Spanish beaches of permitting young boys to swim
nude (if you've never heard of Sorolla it's because he was nearly snuffed out by Picasso's gang). At a beach on the way
to Salvador Dali’s house in Port Lligat, I beheld a real-life Sorrola at a small cove dotted with families. As I took off my shoes
to wander over the stones into the gently lapping
Mediterranean, a nude boy of about four walked past with his
mother. The serene Sorolla moment was destroyed when several Americans from a nearby
group spotted a Kodak moment and whipped out their devices, no permission to
photograph having been requested or received. I wondered what the reaction
would be on one of L.A.’s beaches if a group of tourists, cameras
upraised, approached family groups to photograph the children.
Maybe the Inuit were right that having your picture taken steals your
soul.
I'm sure my fellow tourists are not trying to steal souls, but if it's not to steal souls, what’s
it for, this compulsive creation of images? If you were the first person
on Mars, you would certainly want to record everything you saw. Here on
earth, however, everything is amply recorded. I found no work of art
too obscure or counter-culture that I could not find its reproduction on my
cell phone, for free. Archeologist of the future will love our age, which
they might call, “The Age of Record Keeping.”
Maybe there’s some psychological need at
work. Marshall McLuhan posited in the 60's that “the medium is the
message,” meaning that the medium impacts the message and modifies it.
Perhaps we feel that works of art need to be processed through a
mechanical medium, like a camera, in addition to the medium of our minds, in order to be
modern, or post-modern, or something. If that’s what people think,
they’re wrong.
"But," you might counter, "What’s so bad
about taking pictures of great art in a museum setting if that’s what
people want to do?"
For starters, museum photo-aggression eliminates, for everyone in the space, the contemplative and peaceful state of mind required to appreciate art. How peaceful can you be when you have to be two feet from a painting before you can see it because, from further away, your view is obstructed by multiple hands raised high, positioning devices as if at a Stones reunion. When at last you're close enough to see the painting, it doesn’t help that, while you’re finally viewing, say, Bosch’s “Garden of Earthly Delights,” which you waited your whole life to see, a chorus of whir whir, click clicks attends you, along with multiple red dots that move across the surface of the painting like targeting lights from
snipers trying to kill art itself.
I saw the same behavior last summer on
another museum tour of the Netherlands, Belgium and London (the only relief I
found, in London, was in the Tate Gallery’s almost empty William Blake room,
where I learned that no one cares about Blake anymore). It’s a puzzle to
me why so many great European art museums tolerate unbridled photography,
particularly in Spain, where museum staff are as alert to transgression as the TSA. That
alertness to respect for the art of their country, though it can be off-putting
at first, is ultimately beneficial to the viewer. In the Prado in Madrid,
for instance, museum staff constantly monitor noise levels, emitting a harsh
“Shh!” when decibels exceed a certain point- often a welcome service. Yet
the only museum I visited that forbade photography was the Picasso in
Barcelona. Why do most museums permit unrestricted camera use,
which causes at least as much distraction as noise?
I implore museums to ban the use of
cameras. People would be able to look at art again, and sales of postcards and prints would dramatically increase at the
gift shop!
