one and a quarter seconds per -- museum marathons

Listening to a ‘great conversation’ on the public tv station between the urbane critic from the times and a newly-retired museum director renowned for spending copious amounts of someone else’s money acquiring trophy art for ever more prestigious institutions, a brilliant career. Some of the stuff they said I liked and any serious friend of Velasquez can’t be all bad, but museums like full parking lots and the bored attendance counters at the front desk and returns from the gift shop may not be the best judges of art for posterity.

The museum guy was lamenting the fact that the average museum goer’s average time in front of any particular work of art timed out at about one and a quarter seconds, really not enough time to comprehend what’s there. Well, there’s just an awful lot to see all accompanied by little tags of learned explanation, and it might be too much information for just one afternoon. The former director with his weeks, months, and years wandering the world’s major museums has had time to gaze at many illustrious works of art and so can speak with authority, but his day job is acquisition, funding, and revving up attendance.

Museums hoard all the great art available and ambitious directors take a chair in an ongoing game of monopoly -- rolling the dice, upping the ante, betting real money. They amass a big pile of really good art in big buildings on expensive real estate and they justify it all with projected attendance figures in great footstep-echoing halls. Their actual function is to serve as a reference library displaying what’s been achieved elsewhere, and raising the bar for the population in the surrounding vicinity, if the sports besotted six-packs would just show up. Well, with a bit of sympathy for the common man, everything all at once might not be the best way to experience art.

Paintings take time and physical effort to produce and they don’t give back much in one and quarter seconds. Try sitting on a park bench and see how long it takes to begin to hear the birds, to notice children playing, to consider the light and shadows under the trees. It doesn’t all enter consciousness right away. In fact, unless you’re distracted staring at your devise, there’s more to be aware of fifteen minutes in than when you first sit down. Paintings also require looking. Every feature was consciously put there to contribute to the final image, and new information, even a kind of unspoken understanding, will float to the surface if you can manage to look for more than a moment.

An easier approach than making the museum guards twitch while you sway on your feet trying to absorb some great work of art all at once, would be to buy something worthy and live with it day to day. Doesn’t have to be reproduced in books and worth millions. It just has to be the product of the commitment and practice it takes to become an artist, and engaging enough to you in the long term to spend money in the moment. Time at the museum might help you make such a choice. Instead of squinting for a second and a quarter at masterpiece after masterpiece pushed along by blockbuster crowds or simply hurrying to take in as much as possible in one afternoon, just live with four or five significant works of art, perhaps purchased over decades, for the rest of your life.