With My Own Eyes

On Museum-Going After a Global Pandemic

Still from Vertigo (1958).

Some years ago, I visited Munich’s Lenbachhaus, home to an incredible collection of Blaue Reiter paintings. A group of German teenagers continually interrupted my encounters with the Kandinskys and Franz Marcs as they sped through the galleries, taking cell phone pictures of each painting as if they were trying to catch ‘em all. They spent no more than ten seconds on each painting, with the majority of that time devoted to framing the picture on the cell phone screen. Presumably there on a school assignment, they spent almost no time on the act of looking itself.

This was only the most blatant atrophying of museum-going skills I’ve experienced as an adult. Anyone trying to truly experience Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers at London’s National Gallery, for instance, finds him or herself in what appears to be an ever-replenishing line of paparazzi trying to get it on camera. Similarly, the most famous paintings and sculptures at any large museum have become popular backgrounds and/or accessories for selfie-taking.

In all three cases, the German teens, London paparazzi and global selfie-takers only peripherally engaged in the activity museums were built to facilitate — the personal encounter between viewer and artwork. Instead, the building and its paintings became the background, sometimes literally, for another activity. In all three cases, the artwork in question was seen at a remove, through an iPhone screen.

This behavior makes me think of and quote the dying Darth Vader removing his helmet in Return of the Jedi: “just for once, let me look on you with my own eyes.”

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If the twentieth century was the age of mechanical reproduction, to quote the title of Walter Benjamin’s most famous essay, then the still young twenty-first is the age of downloading and streaming, which represents a further step away from the work of art as a single physical object.

Consider the history of the book. In the pre-modern world, a book was a singular, painstakingly hand-copied objet d’art; in the early modern and modern world, a book was a mechanically reproduced piece of mass media, a consumer product physically distributed around the globe; in our post-modern world it is often a downloadable digital file, a dematerialized piece of content divorced from any physical object. Similarly, our experience of music, movies, video games and other media has shifted from records, CDs and cartridges to digital files on our various electronic devices.

The pandemic and its lockdowns exacerbated this dematerialization. Before the pandemic, concerts, plays and film screenings — to say nothing of conferences and business meetings — were events that happened in a specific place at a specific time. During the pandemic they became, to a great extent, another kind of streaming media, often on-demand, divorced from time and place. Just as transport and refrigeration technologies have submerged local and seasonal cuisines with frozen ingredients shipped to our local supermarkets from around the world, on-demand media has cut old ties with time and place.

Of course, the digital revolution has some tremendous upsides. The budding film connoisseur, for instance, has streaming access to a quantity and variety of films from different countries and different time periods that makes even the best-stocked video store or university audiovisual library seem like a bucket of water compared to a deep lake. A streaming service like the Criterion Channel offers the equivalent of a world-class film festival several times over, every single month. “Lost” films have been rediscovered and restored using digital technology. Unlike film, digitized cinema cannot catch fire or chemically decay.

But there have been losses as well as gains, as the most cursory Google search of “screen addiction” or “attention spans” will tell you. And the art gallery provides an important counterbalance.

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A painting or sculpture offers a real aesthetic challenge in 2023 because of the extent to which digital media has become the cultural air we breathe. Once, as an art history undergraduate, I read a scholarly article whose author used the unlovely word “thingness” to describe an artwork’s presence as a three-dimensional physical object. Thingness has not become part of our normal vocabulary, but perhaps it — or a more elegant synonym — should, because an artwork, as a specific object in a specific place, takes on a new aesthetic power in an age of digital disembodiment.

If you want to see Matthias Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece, you must travel to Colmar, France. If you want to see the beauty of Canterbury Cathedral’s stained-glass windows, you must travel to Canterbury and on a sunny day, preferably after a service, as the organ voluntary booms through the massive space. (And best of all, if possible, on Easter morning.) If you want to truly experience the prehistoric Irish passage tomb known as Newgrange, you must win a lottery (over thousands of other entrants) to visit it on the dawn of the winter solstice, when the morning sun shines directly through the passage and illuminates the tomb chamber.

These objects or places make demands that digital media often does not. Unlike frictionless on-demand streaming, they wait for the would-be visitor to come to them.

The viewer has to meet the artwork where it is in a figurative sense as a well as a literal sense. The art critic Jerry Saltz, who in his own words “hated art as a kid,” had a life-changing experience as a ten year-old visiting the Art Institute of Chicago:

I walked around there, and at one point got stuck looking at two paintings. In one a guy was in a prison cell with people visiting him outside. In the next his head was on the ground, and his neck was spouting blood through the cell. I remember looking back and forth and it suddenly hit me that these two paintings were a narrative, they were telling a story. My mind was blown. I looked around and thought, Everything here is telling a story, everything here has a code, has a language—and I’m going to learn this whole language and I’m going to know the story.

This quote speaks to two equally important halves of the art experience: the engagement of the intellect, imagination and curiosity, and the direct sensory experience.

The museumgoer encountering an artwork cannot pause, rewind, mute, turn up the volume or fast forward; instead of being controlled, the object will continue speaking its silent language for century after century, regardless of the presence or absence of an audience. He or she cannot turn on subtitles; he or she must personally learn to decode that code, read that silent language, imaginatively travel across space or through time to its point of origin. He or she must fill in that blank.

But just as important is the immediate impact — “it suddenly hit me… my mind was blown.” Unlike a book or film or piece of music, which unfolds across time, a painting or sculpture is immediately present to the eye in its entirety. Experiencing it is not a line from beginning to end but a series of movements, up and down, side to side, detail to detail, detail to whole, painting to painting: an exercise for the observant eye.

By offering a more direct sensory experience than any other form of media, with the exception of instrumental music, the visual artwork provides an almost uniquely unmediated piece of the past.

For example, I cannot speak Italian and thus cannot read Dante’s Commedia in its original form. My experience of that incredible epic poem is second-hand, mediated by the translator and his or her interpretation. These translators can give me helpful and fascinating forewords, introductions and footnotes that explain some of Dante’s now-obscure references and situate his poem in the context of his world, but they cannot give me Dante’s own words.

When it comes to Dante’s contemporaries in the visual arts, however, the situation is quite different. I can visit an art gallery and see, with my own eyes, the exact image —its colors perhaps faded by the centuries — painted by Duccio or Giotto di Bondone. While these paintings do have decodable aspects, specifically Renaissance flower symbolism and traditional saints’ attributes, I don’t need them to experience and enjoy rich royal blues, glinting gold halos, rhyming diagonals, elegant lines delineating drapery. I have eyes and can use them. I can see just what Italians who died seven hundred years ago saw.

The irony, of course, is that those German teens on their museum photo safari — or the selfie-takers posing alongside a Monet or Manet — have the perfect antidote to their screen addiction right in front of them. What is a painting or sculpture but a skillful assemblage of matter presented for our contemplation, a collection of atoms and not of pixels, a physical argument for the beauty and significance of the physical world? It is a piece of sheet music for the eyes, an exercise in discovering or a distillation of the sights to be seen outside of the screen and outside of the museum.

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