On galleries

Cole: "The Arcadian or Pastoral State"

Recently, I went to the Milwaukee Art Museum to check out its (AMAZING!!) temporary exhibition "Nature and the American Vision." The collection focuses on the Hudson River School and features several early paintings of Niagara Falls, upstate New York, and - my favorite - Thomas Cole's 5-part series, The Course of an Empire. Highly recommended.

Anyways, since the museum's completed renovation this past November, I've acquired a much deeper appreciation for both gallery-visiting in general and the museum itself. On our breakneck joyride around Europe's greatest galleries, my friends and I often hurried from one famous painting/sculpture/building to another, in a frantic effort to see as many masterpieces as possible. Given the time restraints, I don't necessarily regret such a decision, yet I find myself wistfully remembering what it was like to stand in the presence of such workmanship. I wish I could have taken in more of each piece.

I returned to Milwaukee with a bit of a cynical attitude toward American art collections (and to be fair, it is hard to top the decadent concentration of art in places like the Vatican Museums or the Louvre); however, in the past several months, I've had the happy realization that this mindset wasn't fully justified, especially in Milwaukee. Weaving between the temporary exhibit and the permanent collection, I was struck by an awareness of the richness of every single piece. Of course, you have your mediocre ones, or those that fail to capture your interest; for every one of those, though, there is another that is quite good.

In the end, it actually began to be overwhelming. It made me realize that I have played the tourist even at my own, "home" art museum. Rushing from one painting to another, blazing through entire rooms in 3 minutes, I never stopped to cultivate a meaningful encounter with the pieces.

While I love the diverse gallery opportunities presented by large art museums, the sheer volume of art they offer can be dangerous. Living out one of the classic American stereotypes, we can easily fall into the trap of valuing quantity over quality. In focusing on the whole, we take each particular piece for granted.

The reality is that you could easily spend several hours - a whole visit - on just a room or two. It's an experiment I would like to try the next time I go. Instead of doing what I usually do - make value judgments based on my taste/mood, I want to pay closer attention to what the artist is telling me. To borrow a page from Shakespeare and his strategically-placed plays-within-plays, I'm learning that there needs to be a sense of humility, a willingness for art to change you. It isn't there just to look pretty (well, unless you're fond of Oscar Wilde & co. But I think I'd challenge even that).