Visiting an art gallery always goes the same way for me. I look at one artwork. I look at the next artwork. And then the next. What was the first one again? Was it of a farm? Who knows? I reach the inevitable conclusion: there are simply too many paintings. After about 15 minutes I’ve had enough and don’t want to look at any more art; by the time I reach the gift shop I have a powerful urge to lie face down on the floor and go to sleep.
To be clear: I like art. I grew up drawing and painting, did GCSE art and still paint now. But when I go to a gallery now, hoping that this time I’ll feel something, I’m dismayed by the sheer volume of what’s on offer. The National Gallery displays more than 2,400 artworks and the Louvre up to 4,500 paintings. The New York Met boasts tens of thousands of artworks, but I wouldn’t know. When I visited, the rooms were so monotonous and numerous that I got lost, couldn’t find my friends, asked a security guard for help, went up and down in a lift, sat on a bench and then left early. I do not recall a single piece of art. Seeing as the average viewing time is only 27 seconds, that means an hour’s trip exposes you to a whopping 133 paintings. No wonder I can only remember a handful I’ve seen over the years (and those ones are already famous).
The fact that there are too many paintings is not a problem that exists in a vacuum. It permeates into the entire sensory experience. I get lower back pain from standing and peering because, considering the amount we’re supposed to look at, there is a distinct absence of comfortable seating. Shuffling from one painting to the next, I take a series of bad photos that I won’t look at until I need to clear some iCloud storage. If I still have energy, I’ll try to make it more entertaining by pointing to an ugly person in a painting and telling my companion “that’s you”. And I know I’m not the only person to experience “museum fatigue” – academics have been studying it since at least the 1920s.
But ultimately not only is it the volume and repetition, it’s also the atmosphere that suggests we must pay close attention to each piece, under the pretence of being culturally enriched. So I wait, patiently, until an appropriate amount of time has passed and I can suggest we go to the pub. I watch others walk slowly, hands behind backs, sombre and pensive before these great works. Such an expectation automatically instils in me the 10-year-old’s instinct to run wild and smash something.
My current method to cope with the intolerable scale of art is to truncate the experience as quickly as possible, and
to complain vociferously to whoever I’m with. At least then I’m not the only one having a bad time. But if I did desire a better experience, and had the opportunity to curate my own National Gallery, what would be an appropriate amount of art to display? The fewer the better, for sure. I’d much prefer to go to a gallery to see one painting than thousands.
