Louvre

I can't let this article go without writing something about it. Everything about it makes me furious: the smug tone, the picture of tourists that we're supposed to judge, etc. Michael Kimmelman is one cultured mo-fo, and far be it from me to begrudge him that. Having degrees from both Yale and Harvard, including a PhD in art history, it is not surprising that he knows his art. He does not use this to question the position of art in society today: it functions as—in addition to opera—the most thoroughly classist medium I can think of. It's actually better than opera because if you are very rich you can buy some for yourself. Instead, he criticizes the rest of us for not being like him. I only spend so much time on this because his attitude is pretty typical among academics.

So to research this article MK went to the Louvre one day and he did not like what he saw. There were many people there who were less cultured than himself, and who perhaps had not even been to Ivy League schools. Instead of dawdling in front of pictures and admiring them for hours, as art historians do and as apparently was done in the 18th century, these barbarians walked through the museum quickly and even took pictures!

He begins by praising two women who happened to be browsing in this one particular room, before chastising those who either read the labels or breezed through the room without stopping. This could be read as evidence that they were on their way somewhere else, as the Louvre is very huge, and to spend the two hours per room that our sage recommends would take weeks. Instead, he reads it as evidence of our cultural crisis: after the collapse of our artistic canon, we no longer have any markers of value and just wander aimlessly (as though the persistence of the Louvre and the "scrum" around the Mona Lisa were not evidence that academic trends in art history have had precisely zero impact on the average tourist).

This is bad because, you see, in the 18th century, Europeans who went on the grand tour would study very hard, and learn French, and speak with philosophers when they arrived. So why, today, doesn't every tourist learn French and then book some meetings with a handful of French philosophers?

Kimmelman's answer: We live in a decadent society.

The real answer: The "grand tour" was taken by invariably high class people, who were freed from the need to labor so they could study French and art history all day to bolster their cultural capital. Even then they hardly took it seriously: read, for instance, "Portrait of a Lady." We now live in a different world: one in which you can't simply book an audience with a philosopher because you are high class. Instead, we live in a world where people have more disposable income than before and want to boost their cultural capital with a trip to the Louvre. These people work for a living, and have not been schooled by private tutors. Instead, they have gone to shitty public schools that do not offer art history, as mine did not. HOWEVER, because of people like Michael Kimmelmann, they believe that true culture requires a viewing of major art works. So they go and they aren't sure what to do when they are there, because it requires a lifetime of training to consume art the way MK wants us to, and so they go on tours or go right to the big stuff that MK-style experts have recommended they see.

Also: the very existence of museum culture is evidence of this mass-ification of aesthetic experience that Kimmelman turns his nose at. The great age of the museum is the 19th century, and the Louvre as we know it is a product of the French Revolution. The fabled Grand Tourists of the 18th century were not waiting in line at Met (opened 1872) or the National Gallery (1824): these institutions were provided in order to expose artworks to a broader audience who would not have had access before. They remain, however, frozen out culturally by articles like this even if their feet are allowed on the hallowed marble.

Finally, the sketching:

"Recently, I bought a couple of sketchbooks to draw with my 10-year-old in St. Peter’s and elsewhere around Rome, just for the fun of it, not because we’re any good, but to help us look more slowly and carefully at what we found. Crowds [unwashed Goths!] occasionally gathered around us as if we were doing something totally strange and novel, as opposed to something normal, which sketching used to be."

First off, it seems to me pretty unlikely that sketching used to be normal. He provides no evidence, and it definitely is not obvious. It may have been normal for people like MK. But he completely ignores the fact that it is now NOT normal. It used to be normal to do all sorts of things: murder Catholics, take ten wives, wear a top hat, whatever. Just because something was normal once does not mean that it is normal and unremarkable forever. But let's grant that it was normal, at least for people like MK with the money and inclination to take ten-year old's to St. Peter's. This is not evidence of particular virtu, but rather of a very particular conjunction of economic and cultural capital that has had its heyday and the existence of which MK is perpetuating.