These are meant to be simple guidelines and basic approaches for getting the most out of a trip to one of the big art museums scattered through out the USA. These are to harmlessly encourage you on how to have a more engaging experience in the museum.
1. Do not come on an empty stomach.
I've noticed this problem over the years with friends or relatives or whoever. What happens is that after about an hour and half, people become distracted by their hunger. They didn't have breakfastor lunch and now while they're looking at a cubist fork by Picasso, all they can think about is twirling some pasta in some classic restaurant in Little Italy. Which isn't always necessarily a bad thing but if you're with your girlfriend and she hasn't eaten all day and after an hour or so you haven't even arrived at the contemporary art galleries yet, don't expect a long interesting and lively discussion on whether that penis is a pencil and what that does or does not reveal about gender identity in the 21st century.
2. Leave your cell phone in your coat! And check your coat when you come in!
That's right. The incessant picture taking on our phones of great paintings that goes on in this country has reached epidemic proportions. What is that picture going to do for you besides act as proof that, yes, you were in fact present in the art museum one fine day? Taking pictures is not a way of 'capturing' these paintings. You're not getting any of the magic or real energy and power of great paintings by reducing them to shrunk down digital images. Paintings are physical things made with human actions. They are not mere surface images. We would all do well to remember that.
3. Take your time in front of a single painting.
If you can spend 30 minutes at a time watching the Kardashians and an hour on the new hot Netflix show and all day long doodling at some game on your i-phone, then surely you can spend two to five MINUTES in front of a single painting. I realize that our generation and even the one before us is so accustomed to quick cut editing and constantly moving images that our brains are locked in a kinda perpetual flow of visual stimulus. It's ok. I understand. I don't blame you. (We also know technologically how the big internet giants are now programming our attention spans for us.)
But having an experience at the art museum should be much different than watching your favorite show even if it is one of the so-called 'smarter' shows on tv or browsing online aimlessly or playing games on our screens. If it is a portrait you land in front of, relax and dwell a bit on the face, the hands, the clothes, the colors and the color combinations. Maybe move closer. Are they wearing rings? If it is a portrait painted in the 15th Century, what might those rings tell us about the person?Maybe take a step back to get a better view of the whole. Maybe get close and see the thick brush strokes and feel the labor that went into the piece. Then go back and look at the face. What can a person's facial expression tell us about them? About human beings? How can pure color arrangements effect the way we feel? Must we always crave instant gratification? Or don't ask your self anything. Just look for awhile and see how it makes you feel. One power that paintings have is their sheer ability for the image never to change. We may change and our relationship to a particular painting may change but Van Gogh's 'Adeline Ravoux' will have always have those scrunched up eye-brows, that pulled back hair looking off to something beyond in an almost annoyed way. Her upper body will always radiate in part due to Van Gogh's use of color(the yellow and sea green in this painting seem electric) and it will stay like that forever.
4. Know that not everything we now see in the museum was ever intended to be seen as art in a museum.
Here I am referring to religious works that were for altarpieces and were strictly devotional objects or whole sections of the museum where old sculptures were meant to protect temples or villages from mysterious forces or neighboring tribes and now they are temperature regulated in a chilly, sterile room totally detached from their original purpose and place.
These were sacred objects and were understood by the entire community as such. So the next time you skip by a painting of the Madonna from the 1300's know that it was a central part of the life of every individual in the area and that as an icon was used to ward off evil of all kinds and used to be a protector. Before battles when people knew some measure of death was imminent they would invoke the icon. They believed these images reflected the actual presence of the Virgin and therefore worthy of veneration and hope. But the Museum has one floor of Madonna's and above it Warhol's many Marilyn Monroes as though they are all progeny of the same art universe--They aren't. (Though they are both protected by (once they are accepted in) the European Architecture Facade Institutional Wealthy Family and Inherent Hierarchies within Model that has been dominating since the 18th century.) Nevermind.
5. Just because you are inside an Art Museum doesn't mean you have to think everything you behold is valuable or interesting or worthy of the high praise heaped upon it by cloistered curators.
Use your own intuition and try to see more clearly the work's context and the overall context of the Museum space itself.
The great atrium space at the Cleveland Museum of Art is one of the great public spaces in the city of Cleveland but it should not go unnoticed or left unsaid that the Director's office and the Boardroom have glass windows that look down from high above onto the hoi polloi of Northeast Ohio wandering around in their allotted time, whose children are being warned by poorly paid, over zealous guards with sore feet, "Do not touch the art work, please."
