Listening to the pictures: Sound in museums

Picture: Wikipedia

This picture has haunted me since I first saw it some years ago in Utrecht's Catherijneconvent. It's a tiny painting that hung in a darkened cloister, a sublime masterpiece that jumped out from the other fine medieval pictures in that lovely little museum. I'd known it from illustrations, but it hadn't prepared me for the really emotional experience of seeing the original. I went back recently specifically to see this one picture, after seeing the Wtewael show nearby. It was one of the most awful experiences I've ever had at a museum. The picture is now in the middle of a brightly lit gallery, with a loud musical soundtrack booming out from a speaker above it. Music from different periods plays on a short loop. It simply ruins the experience, and makes it impossible to appreciate the picture. Even with fingers in ears, the music is unavoidable. This deeply emotional and profoundly sorrowful picture is wrecked and trivialised when booming mood music is imposed on it. The subtlety of Geergen's vision is overwritten by the curators' crass muzak selection.

Music creates a particular mood. Advertisers and marketers deliberately use music to establish brand image and persuade you to spend money. It's their prerogative to impose a uniform experience on consumers. But pictures are naturally more open-ended. My experience of the Man of Sorrows is likely to be different from yours. But the imposition of a specific soundtrack closes down those experiences, enforcing uniformity. It's utterly inimical to the way I want to see art. Yet museums are introducing sound and video more and more into the staid galleries of old masters. The Met has an especially ridiculous audio visual display around the great Adam sculpture that they smashed a few years ago. It was apparently championed by their director, scholar-turned-impresario Thomas Campbell, and curator Luke Syson, notorious for his role on the committee overseeing the disastrous restoration of Leonardo's Virgin and Child with St Anne.

Now the National Gallery has an entire exhibition of 'sound art', in which 'sound artists' are invited to respond to pictures in the collection. It is feeble, as astute critics have recognised. The display of Antonello's St Jerome also includes a model of his study with a hilly landscape, which looks a lot like a craft project I did at school when I was six or seven years old. The musical choices are painfully obvious, and this ticketed exhibition deprives visitors of great pictures like Holbein's Ambassadors. 

The defensive publicity material tells us that the National Gallery is meant to be an inspiration to all kinds of artists, not just visual. Indeed. But that doesn't mean that the NG is obliged to show the fruits of that inspiration, no matter how badly they've withered. Nature, too, is an inspiration to poets and artists. But we can appreciate the lake district without have romantic poetry broadcast from the hilltops. And in the case of the NG's exhibition, it's more William McGonagall than William Wordsworth.

So why the desire to include sound in museums? The most hilarious comment I've seen is from Sandra Beate Reimann, who curated a sound show at the Tinguely Museum: "Our culture, since Plato, has focused on the primacy of the eye as a means of understanding the world. In the past year we've seen a trend to go wider and bring in other senses." Wow. Just wow. It tells us so much about the self-regard of contemporary art, and its utter lack of historic sense that anyone could try to divide the history of human culture into 'all history from Plato to 2014' and '2014 to 2015'. Of course anyone with an iota of historical awareness knows there's a rich history of exploring the world through different senses, and of reflecting critically upon it. We might reasonably wonder what Reimann can add to our culture given her profound ignorance of its history.

The curators at the Met and the National Gallery aren't ignorant of history. They are learned scholars expert in art history and skilled in sharing their knowledge with a lay public. Yet they seem defensive about their own expertise. Rather than tell us about great works of art, they defer to idiot popularisers who claim implausibly to have special insight into modern audiences and modern art (you know, the great advances of the past 365 days that Reimann enthuses over). The curators' knowledge is for nothing if they can't tell these people to shove off. These intrusive and stupid musical shows are not only without merit, they rob us of the chance to enjoy our own experience of truly great art.

The logic of our age

The entire Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York was closed yesterday, so that rich people could have a party. In the UK museums were traditionally reticent about renting themselves out for private functions, but some now market themselves aggressively. It starts with out-of-hours rental, but once the principle is established and the tills start ringing the plutocrats encroach on normal opening times. It's like the old joke where a man asks a woman if she'd sleep with him for a million pounds. On careful reflection the impecunious lady agrees. "Would you sleep with me for five pounds?" he then asks. "What kind of woman do you think I am?" she replies angrily. "We've already established that; we're just haggling over the price". It might be more expensive to hire an entire museum during opening hours, excluding the public, but it's just a matter of haggling. 

The Victoria and Albert Museum is already notorious for its vicarious closing hours so they can set up for parties. A number of other museums often have random room closures for private events. I've also heard anecdotal reports of damage to art during a wedding piss-up at the Wallace Collection. Weddings are appropriately a time for drunken revelry. Museums are not an appropriate place.

It saddens me that people can travel from all over the world to see the Met, but then be denied access because only the super-rich can go today. It would be bad enough if the Met were making a difficult compromise to raise needed funds. But they actually seem proud of themselves. Its Twitter feed is stuffed with pictures of celebrities, as if the museum's purpose is to provide a backdrop for celebrity photos, 'drooling over wealthy people' as Tyler Green put it on Twitter.

This is the apotheosis of the modern museum. The real experience is reserved for the wealthy. But the rest of us can look admiringly at how cool museums are, because celebrities hang out there. Maybe drooling over celebrity photos on the Met's Twitter feed is the museum experience today.

Bernini: Sculpting in Clay

C.D. Dickerson et al Bernini: Sculpting in Clay Yale University Press 2012

This is  a superb scholarly study with excellent illustrations and fascinating technical details of Bernini's surviving clay studies. It's one of the best art history books I've read recently, but shame on all involved for publishing it half-finished.

Bernini is the giant of Baroque art, a talented draughtsman and painter, but a genius sculptor and architect. His greatest sculptures are grand dramatic marbles like the great Ecstasy of St Theresa, but he also produced small-scale clay models for many of his commissions, like three dimensional sketches. Bernini ran a busy studio and his assistants learned his techniques. Given the sketchy nature of the clay models, they present particular problems of attribution that are addressed in this book.

Like many of the best art books today this book was written to accompany an exhibition, which was organised by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and traveled to the Kimbell in Fort Worth. The show intended to bring together almost all of Bernini's surviving clay sculptures, but many are in the Hermitage and unfortunately were prevented from travelling because of the current Russian prohibition on loans to the US. These sculptures are particularly fragile, but I'm convinced that there was sufficient scholarly justification for mounting this exhibition to allow comparison of the work as a whole, supported by this serious scholarly catalogue. But there's no justification for showing it at more than one venue, and no justification for going ahead with half an exhibition. A more responsible museum would have postponed the exhibition until the sculptures could all be brought together, but the commercial juggernaut that is the modern museum over-rode scholarly and ethical considerations. 

The book remains an impressive achievement, with solid introductory chapters setting out the background and explaining connoisseurial challenges, and catalogue entries justifying individual attributions. The problem is that this is an exhibition catalogue and not a proper catalogue raisonne, because it fails to discuss rejected attributions. A catalogue that fails to consider marginal cases and explain why they are not autograph is only half a catalogue, and the harm done by this omission rises in proportion to the greatness of the book as a whole. It's hard to imagine that a publisher will commission another study of Bernini's bozzetti for a generation, which means that we must accept the diktat of the authorial team about the inauthenticity of the sculptures they don't deign to discuss.

This is an awkward half-way between an exhibition catalogue and a catalogue raisonne. These days the best exhibition catalogues are superb, but the rise of exhibition catalogue publishing seems to be squeezing traditional monographs. In this case it's detrimental to scholarship - I wonder the extent to which exhibition budgets and deadlines militated against proper consideration of rejected attributions. The book is a tremendous achievement and I commend it to you. I just wish they'd finished it properly.

Great wall text

Picture: Metropolitan Museum of Art

The latest Tate Britain show is dispensing with long labels so that we can find our own meaning, reports AHN.  Phooey, I say.  We can dispense with art history entirely if it's just about finding our own meaning.  The point of wall text is to help us to look out rather than in, to expand our understanding rather than narrow our vision to our internal thoughts.  One museum that does it really well is the Met.  It's quirky, variable and often brilliant.  Here's the text for the picture above:

De Witte's earliest architectural views, like this one, borrow compositional ideas from his fellow Delft artist Gerard Houckgeest (ca. 1600–1661) but treat the Gothic church interior less in terms of solid forms than of space, light, and mood. In stressing these intangible qualities De Witte suggests a spiritual environment and also anticipates the optical approach of Johannes Vermeer.

This breaks a lot of rules.  That first sentence is long and complicated.  It's heavy with art history - how many casual visitors will even have heard of Houckgeest?  But it's packed with useful, interesting information that helps us understand the painting as an aesthetic object and place it in an art historical context.  It resists the temptation to describe the painting.  The most obvious thing to do would be to draw attention to the urinating dog, and talk about the activities taking place in the church.  But anyone can see that; it's not necessary to state the obvious in wall text.  I can imagine one of the trendier British museums writing something like this:

This church is painted white inside because the Dutch protestants have painted over religious images.  The artist, Emanuel De Witte, specialised in painting churches.  These paintings were bought by the middle classes to hang in their houses.  Churches were social places in the 1700s - we can see lots of people hanging out.  Can you see what the dog is doing?

I'm caricaturing a bit, but you can recognise the simplistic anecdotal style.  Of course this has its place, and one of the nice things about the Met is that it seems capable of speaking to different audiences.  They run great docent tours and the wall text speaks with different voices.  It's a refreshing change from the uniform infantilism in some British galleries. 

 

The text for the Bronzino Drawings exhibition a few years ago was especially memorable; I noted down some of the text:

This study is among a group of drawings dating about 1545-60 that may be attributed with some confidence to Bronzino but are particularly reminiscent of Pontormo's mature figural style at the time he was working on the frescoes (now destroyed) in San Lornezo, Florence; Bronzino, who assisted Pontormo on the project, completed it upon the master's death in 1557.  Unique to Bronzino are the soft yet palpably defined sculptural quality [...], evident in the rubbed, relieflike interior modeling; polished degree of finish; nervous fineness of outline; stylized roundedness of individual muscles; and greater overall naturalism of anatomical structure and detail.  The technique of regular parallel hatching, not usual for Pontromo, was used throughout. [Agnolo Bronzino Standing Male Nude in Three-Quarter-Length Seen from the Rear c. 1545-60, Uffizi 6589F]

The anatomical modeling recalls that of cat. no. 47 [above], but the rendering is more diffused and impressionistic, with the strokes of the chalk more smoothly rubbed in while the contours are not as hard and fine. Bronzino's tendency was to contain forms within marked outlines and to define sculptural forms while rubbing the chalk strokes of the interior modeling into soft, nearly sfumato effects [...] [Agnolo Bronzino Standing Male Nude in Three-Quarter-Length Seen from the Rear c. 1550-60, Uffizi 6606F]

I think this is just brilliant.   It's well-written, and it flatters the viewer by explaining what is at issue in attributing these drawings.  This kind of text isn't a barrier to looking, it encourages us to look more closely and more carefully.  I can't imagine any major British museum daring to write wall text like that. 

Michelangelo Attribution at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Photo: Telegraph

Great post by CultureGrrl on a daft attribution of a sculpture to Michelangelo.  It raises questions about curatorial responsibility.  Everyone is free to assert an attribution, but when a museum label claims a work for a certain artist it lends institutional authority to the claim.  It's misleading to the public when a work is so contested, and it's especially problematic with loaned works that may subsequently be sold.  Explaining the debate is the safer course, and it is more respectful of the visiting public to engage us in the discussion rather than hiding the dispute.