The author of a recent article in The Guardian grumbled about how major exhibitions around the world are now so crowded that it is almost impossible to enjoy them. ‘Can you really appreciate art when you have to crane your neck, dodge elbows, and wait for selfie-takers to move on?’, she asked. Overcrowding is not, of course, a recent phenomenon, as the number of visitors to museums and galleries have grown steadily in the last few decades, but it seems to have become something of an issue. There is now so much demand for new cultural experiences that the likelihood of anyone actually having agreeable or lasting engagements with art, at least in popular exhibitions, is becoming increasingly remote. As in most areas of contemporary life, cultural activity is usually based on a need for entertainment, distraction, and - at best - well-meaning curiosity. While all of these desires can be catered for in crowded rooms, the experience of art is diminished.
During the many years I worked at a Dublin gallery there was always pressure to increase visitor numbers, and the main reason for this was this was the supposed necessity to justify the funding that came from the public purse. In my final years the pressure became insistent and relentless. I resisted it, but although this sometimes gave rise to accusations of élitism, I was always pleased when an exhibition was popular. On the other hand, it wasn’t a priority; I liked the fact that the gallery was normally a quiet place, withdrawn from the bustle of city life, somewhere where people could slow down, gather their thoughts, and let the art work on them. I remember once justifying this approach, when pressed to do so, by saying that there was a great deal of purpose and beauty in a small whitewashed Greek church that was lit by a handful of candles and which wasn’t listed in tourist guides, and that I wouldn’t at all mind if the gallery had something of the same evocative and luminous anonymity. Apparently my analogy was not convincing.
There are other, perhaps more compelling, reasons why quiet galleries are a good thing, and some of them are to be found in John Dewey’s classic Art as Experience, a book first published in 1934 but still of relevance. Dewey is especially insistent on the idea that art is a form of transfiguration, and that it is not inherent in objects or commodities. When art is dissociated from life, he writes, it loses its power and just becomes a thing. The aesthetic experience, he adds, should not be reduced to the level of pleasurable transience but should help to create order out of chaos in a world that is constantly threatened by disorder. Otherwise, that experience is simply confirmation of what you already know or anticipate, with occasional moments of surprise. To Dewey, engagement with art implies reflection and the overcoming of uncertainty, a process that involves the suspension of judgement, at least for a while, as well as the willingness to endure a degree of ambiguity. This is close, he says, to the state of mind that the poet John Keats called ‘negative capability’. There is often, Dewey remarks, an intimate connection between slowness and depth of response.
None of this is easy to achieve in a crowded gallery, and while it is certainly fair to argue that it is good and democratic to have more people enjoying cultural activities it is not unreasonable to counter with the suggestion that excessive popularity can destroy the very experience that people want to enjoy. Dewey proposed that the rise of capitalism removed art from life by making it a commodity of class, status and taste, but while there is probably a desire for upward social mobility in the growth in the number of visitors to major exhibitions, a more plausible cause to be found, as The Guardian article suggests, in the ubiquity of smartphones and in the dominance of social media, both of which encourage superficial notions of familiarity, novelty, and connectedness.
Not that long ago museums and galleries were for the most part muted places, even in capital cities, and popular exhibitions could be visited without too much discomfort. There was time to stand still and look, and this meant that moments of understanding and discovery were possible and often commonplace. I’m also sure that such experiences come to us through a form of grace, in the absence of wilfulness or desire. As Buddhism emphasizes, being is of more value than becoming. In J.D. Salinger’s masterly short story, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenter, the main character, when asked by his fiancée’s mother what he will do when he leaves the army, replies that he would like to be a dead cat. Mrs. Fedder, who is interested in psychoanalysis, concludes that Seymour Glass has psychological problems, missing the point that he was alluding to a Zen parable about a spiritual master who said that the most valuable thing in the world was a dead cat, precisely because no one could put a price on it.
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2019/dec/02/caught-in-the-crush-are-our-galleries-now-hopelessly-overcrowded/
https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/02/11/art-as-experience-john-dewey/
https://hyperallergic.com/67081/reconsidering-john-deweys-art-as-experience/