Certainly one of my favourite Onion headlines reads: “Struggling Museum Now Permitting Patrons to Contact Work.” The article’s featured picture depicts individuals in a gallery doing simply that. A person within the background seems to be taking a portray off the wall, whereas a girl within the foreground rubs her face in opposition to one other piece. A superfluous museum guard stands by merely watching. The caption explains, “Met officers really feel that just a few smudged or punctured O’Keefe’s are a small value to pay for renewed curiosity within the arts.” The entire triumvirate — headline, picture, caption — creates the right satirical pitch, eliciting rapid laughter. We all know that is mistaken, however why? Has the artwork world gone mad? Maybe the absurd situation provokes us to marvel: Why can’t we contact the artwork in museums?
I’ve labored as a guard at a number of completely different artwork museums since 2001, and I can’t assist however discover an uptick in guests touching the paintings. It’s normally nothing malicious. Anybody can momentarily neglect the common but unstated guidelines of museum etiquette and attain out to really feel the floor of one thing. I get it. That’s the facility of artwork. Like a magic trick, it conjures up investigation: How’d they do this? Is that actual? What’s this fabricated from? Certainly, the urge to make use of a number of senses when experiencing artwork is completely pure and fairly widespread. Movie and theater mix components of sight and sound to make us really feel as if we have been a part of the story. The culinary arts stimulate our senses of style and odor. Music, too, is extra than simply an aural expertise. Rap and rock performances typically embody dance, lasers, lights, pyrotechnics, smoke machines, and clothes fashions to attract the attention and the ear. The varied supplies and textures of visible artwork nearly beg to be touched. If seeing is believing, then touching is confirming.
Sadly, we can not mix the senses when participating with visible artwork. We could look, however by no means contact. That’s as a result of the form of work you discover in an artwork museum is one in every of a form. That’s, visible artwork shouldn’t be reproducible. (Whereas there could be a number of prints or images in a sequence, they’re normally restricted editions.) Not like related establishments like libraries, artwork museums maintain distinctive artworks, which can’t be taken out on mortgage. Books, motion pictures, and music are mass-produced and reproducible. And as recipes are to delicacies, sheet music can resurrect a music to be perennially consumed by the listener. Not so with the visible or plastic arts. As soon as a piece of visible artwork is broken or destroyed, that’s it — it has been decreased or misplaced perpetually. Museum conservators can clear, repair, and restore artwork objects inside motive however there may be solely a lot they’ll do. Guards symbolize the primary line of protection in opposition to the unintentional or intentional damaging of artwork and are, as such, an extension of a museum’s conservation workforce. The job will be pretty gradual more often than not as most guests maintain their distance from the artwork. However there are various situations when guards are completely obligatory.
A recipe for sure disasters provides booze to the equation. Artwork museums are likely to lease out their services for personal occasions. On the face of it, this makes good sense as museums provide the best setting for anniversaries, galas, reunions, and weddings. The neoclassical or austere modernist structure of their inside and exterior areas lends the right backdrop to photographically doc these particular events. And, after all, there’s the artwork! The areas the place individuals are allowed to eat and drink — atriums, halls, and courtyards — are normally far eliminated or cordoned off from the galleries that maintain oil work on canvas and different extra delicate paintings. Nonetheless, there are sometimes historic artifacts like mosaics, statues, and vases which are tucked in and across the extra communal areas of an artwork museum the place consuming and consuming are allowed. Whereas this can be very troublesome to get wine stains out of canvas, it’s not as straightforward as you may suppose to take away them from ceramics, marble, or tile. Admittedly, there’s a twist of irony right here in that lots of the historic artifacts guards are paid to guard depict scenes of drunken revelry throughout their surfaces: Nymphs and satyrs guzzle down wine with Dionysian ecstasy within the photographs that seem on the very work we ask visitors to step away from.
For essentially the most half, after-hours renters are as effectively behaved as daytime guests. Now and again although, there will likely be a really rowdy group who’ve clearly not been inside a museum in fairly a while (if ever) and indiscriminately contact every thing. Dangerous issues normally go down at such occasions: One thing breaks, there’s a fistfight, or the DJ goes over the permitted decibel degree inflicting a portion of the inside structure to crack. I’ve seen the entire above at completely different locations. Throughout an occasion earlier this 12 months, I witnessed a drag queen twerk on a World Struggle II-era bronze of a mom and youngster trying up into the sky in anguish, arms outstretched. The dancer was nice. I simply wished they hadn’t leaned in opposition to such a poignant murals whereas strutting their stuff.
After we learn the outlandish headline I discussed in the beginning of this piece, we chuckle. We chuckle whereas subconsciously understanding the crucial to guard and protect nice artworks. We chuckle as a result of it’s so absurd to suppose that artwork museums would ever permit their patrons to manhandle the artwork. We chuckle whereas lamenting: Is nothing sacred?
