OPINION
I wrote recently for Insight describing a visit to my home town and a pilgrimage to the glittering post-modern edifice that has replaced the old regional library I used to love. The first thing I noted was that this ultra-modern “multi-function learning space” had far fewer actual books than it used to. The second was that this place supposedly dedicated to the written word so assiduously grovelled at the feet of a culture that never even came close to developing written communication.
It was entirely appropriate, I concluded, to a modern culture which is fast forgetting how to even read.
But if libraries have been dumbed-down beyond belief, then museums are even worse.
As a boy, I used to love going to the Melbourne Museum: the massive dinosaur fossils, Tjebe the Egyptian mummy, Phar Lap in his glass case… But in 2000, the museum moved from its original, 150-year-old premises to yet another ultra-modern building. The first (and last) time I went, I was rather perplexed to find an entire wing dedicated to… Aboriginal baskets. Now, I’m sure such a thing is endlessly fascinating to chin-stroking anthropologists, but I know that 10-year-old me would’ve been bored stiff.
But, when modern museums try to appeal to the ‘yoof’, the results are even more dire.
About 20 years ago I made a visit to my favorite local museum […] the whole place had been gutted, infantilized, and ruined.
One of the main “exhibition” rooms had been denuded entirely of its previous contents and a series of large, brightly colored plastic slides, seesaws, and trampolines installed there instead, in order to widen the building’s audience by attracting more children inside, this being thought cheaper than replacing all the bricks with gingerbread.
Then there is the addled-brained idea that the best way to get gnat’s-brained Zoomers into a museum is to shanghai a witless ‘internet celebrity’ and have them say some incredibly vacuous nonsense.
The Louvre in Paris garnered much adulatory media attention for itself last month by allowing a 27-year-old online celebrity named Rayenne Guendil […], an art and history enthusiast, who creditably wishes to pass on his knowledge to other young persons in his age group. Unfortunately, the only real way he feels he can realistically do so is to dumb down outrageously, via the chosen method of inviting an ignorant young empty-head from the web world along with him to act as the eager Young Apprentice to his wise Old Master.
In his Louvre broadcast’s case, the costar chosen was Lena Mahfouf, aka Lena Situations, a 26-year-old French [“French” – LDB] YouTube, blogging, TikTok, and Instagram personality with several million followers, whose posts are generally about inane topics like fashion, beauty, holidays, hairdressing, and bling: Tell her a gallery contains a statue of Hermes, and she’ll probably expect to see a big bronze handbag.
Lena is more used to appearing on shows like the French version of RuPaul’s Drag Race (not as a contestant, Lena really is an actual physical woman) and would not usually be considered a qualified expert on art history, her chief criterion of appreciation of any given piece of human portraiture or statuary seemingly being whether or not she would like to have sex with its subject, like a real-life Pygmalion. “I would have walked straight past him. He’s not my type,” she said of the first exhibit her host Rayenne showed her, the ancient Hellenistic sculpture Borghese Gladiator, from 100 BC. Don’t let her see the Egon Schieles or Lucian Freuds, she’ll never look at another man naked ever again.
This online broadcast was considered a great success by those in charge of running the Louvre, with curator Philippe Maillet calling the show “a new way of talking about art.” Yes, a completely asinine one.
But “asinine” doesn’t even begin to describe Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum’s attempt to reach out to ‘the kids’ involved turning the immortal Vincent into a Pokemon.
How is it possible to claim Pokemon have anything to do with van Gogh? By lying.
According to [the exhibition] “There is a strong link between the inspiration behind Pokemon and the inspiration behind some of Vincent van Gogh’s most famous work.”
Which is absolute bollocks, of course. But absolute bollocks is the watchword of modern culture vultures.
Still, the exhibition was popular – but with whom? Adult actual art-lovers ended up staying away in droves because the hordes of Pokemon-hunting children made the whole place, according to one employee, “quite awful” and “just way too busy”. Worse, apparently, were the witless young adults who competed with the actual children for the collectible cards. Including paying up to $100,000 for scalped limited-edition van Gogh Pokemon cards. Possibly one from the box stolen by a gallery employee.
In other words, the art gallery was no longer an art gallery. It was a children’s playpen, crossed with a 50-percent-off closing-down sale in the Nintendo Megastore.
Which sums in a nutshell the fatuousness of the whole ‘modern’ approach to museums. After all, any idiot can waste their money on Pokemon cards at any toy store and children can find a free and rather exciting playground at their local McDonalds.
But where else can you take kids to see dinosaur skulls, extremely dead Egyptians, or bloodstained bayonets from WWI?
Takimag
Yes, well, they don’t do that kind of thing at museums any more. Because, ‘colonialism’, probably.