When you walk into an art museum, especially one as large
as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York,
there's a lot to process.
In fact, there are 2 million square feet to process
in their Fifth Avenue building alone,
not to mention the Met Cloisters or the Met Breuer.
After you clear security, navigate the crowd,
figure out the admission fee, grab a map,
and finally duck into a gallery, it's
likely that you will not be thinking
about the overall layout and organization of the museum.
More likely, your attention will be sucked in immediately
by a particular exhibition or an astounding object.
You dive into the world of the object
until you turn your attention to another amazing object and then
another in the next gallery, and you pick your way
from room to room around the world and through time.
And suddenly hours have passed, your blood sugar has plummeted,
and a kind guard tells you the museum is closing.
It's only later that you can zoom out and really
think about the building and these spaces
and what they're telling us about art history,
whether we're conscious of it or not.
The Met is what's called an encyclopedic art
museum whose goal is to represent
a broad spectrum of places and times and kinds of objects.
And there are more than 2 million objects
in the Met's collection, only a portion
of which is on view at any one time.
The objects are divided into 17 departments,
each overseen by people trained in that subject area who
work together to present and represent these objects in ways
designed to tell you something about how and why they were
made.
Together, it adds up to a more nuanced story
than if you were to see any one item alone.
And they change things around, rename departments,
and collaborate on temporary exhibitions that mix up
the collection in new ways.
This way makes a lot of sense.
You're able to take a relatively deep dive
into a geographic location or a time in history,
or focus on one amazing piece with the benefit of seeing
comparable or contemporaneous works around it.
Like it's helpful to see David's neoclassical masterpiece
"The Death of Socrates" in the context of other history
painting from 18th-century Europe
because it gives you a sense of what the people around him
were doing and how, during the Enlightenment,
artists were resurrecting stories
from the past to solidify and promote their own ideals.
And there's a comfort to being able to return to this place
again and again and know exactly, or at least
roughly, where to find that fetching
Ancient Egyptian couple that always makes you happy.
But there are some drawbacks to this approach.
Once a collection is formed and cataloged and settled
into its space, it becomes more difficult and costly
to move it, rearrange it, and reconsider it
in light of new approaches to presenting history.
Most art-history departments in university
organize themselves in similar ways
to museums, training the next generation
in such a way that mostly keeps to the same categories
and classifications.
But do we do the art and objects a favor
by grouping them by department and designing
highly particular spaces for them,
or are we locking them into a distinct narrative
that it becomes harder and harder to see past?
These divisions by category might
make it more challenging for us to see similarities
between cultures over time and also give the impression
that geographic borders between regions are firm and distinct,
the cultures within them contained and definable.
Many of the artists whose works hang in these spaces
were influenced by travel, by art and traditions
from around the world.
To return to "The Death of Socrates",
it could be interesting to see the painting next
to ancient Greek sculpture or in the context of other artworks
through time that address sacrificing
one's life for one's beliefs or in the context of art
from the Islamic world, which deeply informed Enlightenment
thinking.
Temporary exhibitions do highlight these relationships,
but usually the works too quickly
migrate back home to their safe space
in the permanent collection galleries.
OK, so suspend disbelief with me for a moment.
What if we emptied out the Met and started over from Scratch?
First, we'd obviously want to leave
it empty for a couple of months and let everybody come in
and see those 2 million square feet emptied
of all the art and plants.
We'd take out the plants too.
You'd be able to better grasp the architectural history
the museum has to tell, the collision
of classical and modern styles like
where the west facade of the original 1880 building
is visible through the framing of this 1975 courtyard designed
by Roche-Dinkeloo.
This is a museum of art, but it's also a museum of museums,
in a sense, stepping us through changing approaches
to how we display art and build and adapt structures
to house it.
After it's empty for a while, the galleries
could be reinstalled any number of ways.
Rather than geographic groupings,
the museum could be reorganized by alternating themes--
landscapes through time and space,
couples throughout history, eating and drinking,
the naked and the nude, revolution and war.
We could organize the collection from smallest to largest object
or put modern art in the Greek galleries and Greek art
in the modern galleries, or we could devise an algorithm that
randomly selects a group of artworks
from the collection that will fit into a given space.
It could be organized by material, chronologically
by the year it was added to the collection.
You get a glimpse of what this might
look like with the programming that's going on over at the Met
Breuer, the brutalist building that used to house the Whitney
Museum of Art and now hosts exhibitions
that draw from the Met's collection
of 20th- and 21st-century art.
Here they're taking a more global approach,
combining newer and older works in imaginative ways.
Their current show, Like Life, brings together
artworks from 1300 to the present
in which artists have tried to replicate the human body.
It's fresh, it's fascinating, and it's a reminder
that we humans have been preoccupied
with some of the same ideas for a very long time.
You can also simulate these kinds of alternative groupings
just by exploring the Met's collection online,
using their search filters to envision
all kinds of thematic shows and ways
to organize the museum because, barring extreme disaster,
the Met is never going to do this.
It would be absurdly expensive, recklessly
unsafe for a lot of the art, really impractical,
and most of the staff would probably quit.
It's easy for me to sit here from afar and list its flaws,
but it's still the Met, and it's full of astounding feats
of human creation that you're lucky to be able to see once
much less again and again.
It's true that the Met's structure, organization,
and complex of buildings are relics of the past.
That's part of its appeal.
And there are new models for museums cropping up
around the world casting off these categories
and actively working to bridge disciplines.
But the Met and other encyclopedic museums
still very much exist.
They're still charged with protecting these objects
and are entrusted to share this material
with us and with our great great great great great great
grandchildren.
And people are still visiting these museums.
Millions of us every year pick up a map
and choose our own adventure through these vast spaces.
Our role in this is key, primarily
in the way we choose to pay attention
while we're in a museum.
You can take a formal tour where the guide does
the jumping through time and space for you,
charting different journeys to focus on music,
fashion, sculpture, or any number of themes
that cross through departments and galleries.
There are also really awesome externally organized tours
like the completely unofficial and definitely unlicensed
Boy Wizard Tour of the Met.
The group Museum Hack leads that one,
and you can find them in other cities too.
Even without a docent or audio guide,
you can challenge yourself to find all the hands you can
and a set of galleries or feet or fruit or flowers.
You can search for weapons, adornment.
You can focus on display techniques, the barriers
and plinths and gritty floor tape
and signage all designed to protect you
from the art and the art from you.
You can look at the people around you,
observe how they look at the art, how long they
stay at each object, eavesdrop on their conversations.
You can spy on the guards, notice their patterns.
You can select a room and force yourself
to stay there for an hour.
Because even if the art stays in the same place, the way
you move through it can be different every time.
You can return to the Met weekly for the rest of your life
and never really know it, always finding surprises.
It's not a terrible metaphor, actually,
for how we navigate our real lives, how we sometimes
float along adhering to the structures
and systems around us, but also how
we work against those structures and systems,
figure out ways around them, and try to reform and refashion
them.
How would you remake the Met?
What kind of stories could it tell
that it's not already telling?
And more generally, how should we share the nuanced tale
of human creativity, and what kinds of structures
can help us do that?
Let's talk about it in the comments.
If you're interested in absorbing
a nuanced and global tale of human creativity
without even leaving your house, you
should check out "Civilizations",
the new series produced by PBS and the BBC that
tells the story of art from the dawn of human history
to the present day.
It's a rigorous and thoughtful and mind-expanding look
at how art and creativity helped forge our societies
and cultures.
Click the links in the description below
to find out more.
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