The art crowd

Don't worry, I haven't disappeared under a great big stack of books in the British Library. (Do you remember that story in the NYT several years ago about the man who had so many books in his apartment that when a few stacks fell over, he couldn't leave the place? Well, it's nothing like that here.) Tom and I have just returned from a few days in Paris: it was Tom's reading week, which meant that he didn't have to teach, and I was happy to take a few days away from work, so we hopped on the train and headed for the land of stinky cheese. It was a great visit: we went to this spice shop where there was a "bar du sniffing" -- a place where you could smell all these different kinds of spices -- and to more bakeries than I'd care to admit. As I have probably said to many of you, if I had to be a type of food, I'd definitely choose to be a carbohydrate. And if I could have a pain au chocolat for breakfast and lunch most days, I would. Then I'd start to look like the ladies in the Reubens room in the Louvre...

Speaking of the Louvre, I have to say that visiting that museum is completely exhausting. You feel a bit like all the masterpieces are just dominating each other and dominating you. The way they're arranged, in these colossal long halls, sometimes hung one above the other, makes it impossible to focus on one. Instead, the composite effect is like seeing all of these postcards of masterpieces pasted up on the wall. The thing is, though, they aren't postcards; they're the real thing, but you're so overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of them that it's hard to believe that each and every painting is the real deal, an original. You see a whole run of David and the first two or three take your breath away, but pretty soon nothing seems impressive because everything is. Paul Valery has this little essay on museums, which I read at Tom's urging -- and though in general I'm staunchly pro-museum, in this case I think Valery's exactly right. Here he is, from "The Problem of Museums" (1923):

"Only a civilization neither voluptuous nor rational could have constructed this house of incoherence. I don't know what to make of the insane result of this neighborhood of dead visions. They are jealous of, and argue over, the attention which gives them their existence. They call from all sides for my undivided attention. They throw into panic the living force which carries with it all the machinery of the body towards that which entices it.

"The ear won't support hearing ten orchestras at once. The spirit could never follow, never drive several distinct operations, and there aren't any simultaneous reasonings. But the eye, in the opening of its mobile angle and in the instant of its perception finds itself obliged to admit a portrait and a seascape, a kitchen and a 'triumph,' of people in the most varied states and dimensions; and, much more, it must greet with the same look harmonies and modes of painting incomparable with each other.

"Just as the sense of vision finds itself violated by this abuse of space which constitutes a collection, so the intelligence is no less offended by a close reunion of important works. The more beautiful they are, the more they are exceptional results of human ambition, the more they need to be distinct. They are rare objects, and their creators would certainly have wanted them to remain unique. This tableau, one sometimes says, kills all the others around it."

After three or four hours in the Louvre, you can get to thinking that all the masterpieces jostling for your attention do fail to be unique: they fail because they do not monopolize your attention, do not take your eyes away from all the other pieces. Ultimately it's hard to know what the effect of so much luxury is, whether you might as well stop looking around after you've seen three or four paintings, because you do stop seeing them. At first I found it frustrating that there were crowds of visitors photographing the works rather than looking at them, but then I got to thinking that perhaps that was a better strategy than trying to take them in all at once. The Louvre is like a gigantic catalogue of famous works, and producing your own index of photographs is one way to put all the works on even footing.


But I also understood why Thomas Struth took those pictures of visitors looking at paintings in the Louvre (the image immediately above is by Struth). It's a place where you can't help but find yourself amidst big crowds, and the experience is about seeing the art from within a crowd and seeing the art as itself a crowd. Even though the eye first wants to edit all the viewers from Struth's images, to see a Louvre empty of people, he's right to insist that there's no getting away from the crowd. The paintings themselves are a bustling, jostling crowd, each clamoring for your attention.