Nicholas
Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to
literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree
or disagree with him.
ECCENTRICITIES OF GREAT ART GALLERIES
I’ve recently returned from an extended
holiday in Europe, and I am once again pondering a cultural question that has
often puzzled me.
Why is it that some of the great art
galleries and museums are happy to allow tourists to take photographs, while
others totally forbid the practice?
Based on
experience of three trips to Europe in the last three years I draw up the
following scorecard. In Paris, the Louvre, the Orangerie, the Musee
d'Orsay and the Musee de Cluny are perfectly happy for snaps to be taken, although
they do warn against using flashes. The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and the
Scottish National Gallery, the Scottish Gallery of Modern Art and the Scottish
Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh are all similarly tolerant of photographs. But
Holyrood House and Edinburgh Castle are not. The London National Gallery and
the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam forbid photos. Meanwhile in Madrid, the Prado
forbids photography as does the Reina Sofia museum of modern art. But Madrid’s
third great gallery, the
Thyssen-Bornemisza collection, permits photographs. One hour’s train
journey from Madrid, the Escorial (palace and basilica) also forbids
photography, despite all the El Grecos and Velasquez’s on the walls.
Tally them up and you will see nine
of these establishments allow tourists to click away, while in seven, raising a
viewfinder to one’s eye will provoke stern glares from curators.
Why this discrepancy? Obviously
works of art in the Louvre and the Rijksmuseum are just as precious and
valuable as those in the Prado and the London National Gallery, so it's not a
matter of conserving the paintings.
Is it, my cynical heart thinks, a
matter of preserving the lucrative sale of postcards in the gallery shop? (And,
truth to tell, those professional postcards that reproduce artistic
masterpieces will usually present better images than most tourist cameras can
capture.)
Or could it be an aesthetic
preference? In this day and age, when most people use silent digital devices,
taking photographs does not produce the loud click of the old Kodak or Leica.
So crowds of tourists taking photographs will not produce an irritating racket.
But having people stopping and lining up sights will impede the progress of
crowds, and in many cases will cause other viewers to get irritated as the
photographers in front of them block their sight of a masterpiece by lingering
too long in front of it.
These are, of course, just idle
specualtions of mine.
I am still genuinely puzzled by the
lack of uniformity in this matter.
Personally, I like the freedom to
snap away at the Assyrian antiquities in the Louvre.
Or at the preserved and over-opulent
quarters in the Louvre that once housed Napoleon III and his empress Eugenie.
I like to stand beside Braque’s Pink Tablecloth in the
Thyssen-Bornemisza and be photographed admiring it.
As for those museums and galleries
that forbid photography, they provoke in me the bolshie habit of taking bootleg
photos anyway, when the curators aren’t looking.
How could I resist taking, in
Edinburgh Castle, a snap of the room in which Mary Queen of Scots reputedly gave
birth to James VI of Scotland (James I of England)?
I
refused to forego the opportunity of providing photographic proof of how
under-patronised, and therefore more delightful for us, were galleries in the
Prado in the off-season, which I now believe is always the best time to view
canonical art.
As
for the Reina Sofia, why should I deny my friends the pleasure of seeing that
the main aesthetic delight of conceptual art is the delight of enjoying the
space of an empty room?
I
have a very bossy friend who has rebuked me for this surreptitious habit, but I
think I will continue to indulge it until such time as somebody can explain to
me why the museums and galleries make such different rules.
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