... behavior of museum visitors has changed. Today many aren’t there just to gaze; they’ve come for selfies.
The museum experience is shifting in our digital age, and it’s hard to say who is leading the vanguard: the visitors wanting something more than a stuffy salon, or the curators nervously anticipating public fancies. Anyway, the upshot is construction. Since 2007, museums have committed $8.9 billion to expansion, more than half of that in the United States, according to a survey by The Art Newspaper. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art alone, which reopens Saturday with almost three times its previous gallery space, raised three hundred and five million dollars for its growth. (Naturally, it’s promising a new smartphone app for visitors.) Among the other august establishments in various stages of redux are the Museum of Modern Art, in New York; the Royal Academy, in London; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and the most popular modern-art museum in the world, Tate Modern, in London.
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The critic Hal Foster, the author of “The Art-Architecture Complex,” among other works, has raised concerns about the ongoing museum boom. For one, all this giddiness about stylish new buildings can overshadow the art inside. “The logic seems to be to build a container and then leave it to artists to deal with it, but the result on the art side is likely to be a default form of installation work,” he writes, in a piece published last year in the London Review of Books. Foster also cites a tendency to patronize audiences. “Another reason for this embrace of performance events is that they are thought to activate the viewer, who is thereby assumed, wrongly, to be passive to begin with,” he writes. “Museums today can’t seem to leave us alone; they prompt and prod us as many of us do our children.”
In the academic paper that researched museum viewing times, the scholars Lisa F. Smith, Jeffrey K. Smith, and Pablo P. L. Tinio cite an analogy: viewing art as eating food. Some people “sample” (just a glance at the artwork); others “consume” (that twenty-eight second eyeful); a few “savor” (perusing for a minute or more). A selfie allows visitors to “consume” without troubling to engage, they observe. Yet the rewards of art derive from engagement, attention, effort. When museum directors speak of “interactivity” and “participatory spaces” and “the site-specific app,” it must sound hip in the boardroom. It can also sound like pandering: that art should be easier, more laid-back, more like online entertainment.
One justification is the democratization of culture, a buzzy concept born of the online revolution and reinforced by page clicks, attendance figures, and other data analytics. Who can dispute democracy, with its admirable pledge of equality and merit? But the metaphor of democracy is false regarding culture. This isn’t the citizenry selecting a leader to govern for a set term; it’s wherever crowds happen to converge, often prodded into position by a marketing team. Consider the movies gaining the most votes of late. Their elected representatives would include an awful lot of superheroes with abs of steel. Were those the best pictures?
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