Varied
No trip to Amsterdam is complete without a visit to the Van Gogh Museum. At least that’s the prevailing ethos of the global tourism/Instagram/industrial complex.
The Van Gogh Museum has taken some clever steps to keep tourist-induced chaos under control. The first one I noticed is that cameras are banned in the museum, so there aren’t queues of Japanese girls flashing peace signs in front of Sunflowers. However, outside the galleries, there are larger than life size, high quality reproductions of Van Gogh’s most famous works, specifically arranged so that people can use them as backdrops for their selfies.
The other clever idea is the use of audio tours. Visitors are strongly encouraged to use the audio tours, partly because it gives them some context for their experience, but mostly, I think, because it shepherds the herds in a controlled way. I saw crowds of people gathered around a fairly unremarkable painting, not because it was special, but because they’d been told to stop there by the audio tour. Meanwhile other works that were more famous were clear, because they weren’t part of the tour.
The audio tour also encourages people to move through the museum faster than they otherwise might, burning through hundreds of works in about an hour. And judging by what I saw, they spent most of their time standing in front of minor pictures, staring at their phones rather than the art, waiting for the cue to move on.
You know that a museum is a big deal when its auxiliary exhibitions are bigger than the “blockbuster” exhibitions at Australian galleries. The Van Gogh Museum was also showing a collection of David Hockney’s most recent works, which I liked a lot more than I thought I would, and a collection of Emile Pissaro’s etchings. Unsurprisingly, while the Van Gogh exhibition was heaving with tourists, the Hockney and Pissaro exhibitions were peaceful and quiet.
After lunch, we headed over to the Stedelijk Museum, an institution of more avante garde modern art. Maybe I’ve hit a wall with art, but it just seemed pretentious and boring. Having borne witness to amazing depictions of joy, suffering and reverence at the Hermitage and the Van Gogh Museum, I was now struck by dry, smug intellectualism – the fine art equivalent of virtue signaling. There was only one of them that raised enough interest to justify a renaming.
Your husband's work is what we call "outsider art." It could be by a mental patient, a hillbilly or a chimpanzee. Jessica Stockholder, 1998
The Van Gogh Museum has taken some clever steps to keep tourist-induced chaos under control. The first one I noticed is that cameras are banned in the museum, so there aren’t queues of Japanese girls flashing peace signs in front of Sunflowers. However, outside the galleries, there are larger than life size, high quality reproductions of Van Gogh’s most famous works, specifically arranged so that people can use them as backdrops for their selfies.
The other clever idea is the use of audio tours. Visitors are strongly encouraged to use the audio tours, partly because it gives them some context for their experience, but mostly, I think, because it shepherds the herds in a controlled way. I saw crowds of people gathered around a fairly unremarkable painting, not because it was special, but because they’d been told to stop there by the audio tour. Meanwhile other works that were more famous were clear, because they weren’t part of the tour.
The audio tour also encourages people to move through the museum faster than they otherwise might, burning through hundreds of works in about an hour. And judging by what I saw, they spent most of their time standing in front of minor pictures, staring at their phones rather than the art, waiting for the cue to move on.
You know that a museum is a big deal when its auxiliary exhibitions are bigger than the “blockbuster” exhibitions at Australian galleries. The Van Gogh Museum was also showing a collection of David Hockney’s most recent works, which I liked a lot more than I thought I would, and a collection of Emile Pissaro’s etchings. Unsurprisingly, while the Van Gogh exhibition was heaving with tourists, the Hockney and Pissaro exhibitions were peaceful and quiet.
After lunch, we headed over to the Stedelijk Museum, an institution of more avante garde modern art. Maybe I’ve hit a wall with art, but it just seemed pretentious and boring. Having borne witness to amazing depictions of joy, suffering and reverence at the Hermitage and the Van Gogh Museum, I was now struck by dry, smug intellectualism – the fine art equivalent of virtue signaling. There was only one of them that raised enough interest to justify a renaming.
Your husband's work is what we call "outsider art." It could be by a mental patient, a hillbilly or a chimpanzee. Jessica Stockholder, 1998
posted by Blandwagon at 10:25 PM
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