BY DR BINDU DESAI
About a month ago I went to several museums and monuments
(M&Ms) in Paris: the Rodin, the Picasso, the Louvre, the Musée d'Orsay,
the Musée du Moyen Age, the Invalides, the Palace at Versailles, Monet's
house in Giverny, the Sainte Chapelle, the Pompidou, Notre Dame, the Notre
Dame at Chartres and others. After a few days of obediently lining up for
the several queues now needed to see these sites, first the security
checks, which have only two very long slow lines for bags, persons
and then the ticket line, I began to feel very annoyed at the whole set-up
and felt like never entering a museum or monument ever again! I
also felt a deeper resentment at the way I was willy-nilly being made to
view the world. For instance, it began to dawn on me that a big art museum
conveyed much more than the art inside. The art is always housed in a
palatial building with impressive gardens and uniformed men all around.
There are now more armed guards who seem to get more officious with each
passing year. We wait like witless school children except that we merely
fidget and not chew the ends of our handkerchiefs as we might when
younger.
Waiting makes us more compliant with the regimen of the
M&Ms and our feelings approach near reverence at having cleared the
"security check" (a true art form of our times!) and then, hey presto,
actually entering the portals of the great temple itself. Whatever
ache crept up one's legs is gone now, we forget the many minutes spent
shifting our weight from leg to leg, trying to calm the many sore spots
that seem to all throb at once. We are ready to devour the masterpieces at
once so familiar and so rare from our readings, TV shows, magazine
pictures, etc. Wow, you say to yourself, you are about to see the Mona
Lisa or the Burgers of Calais or whatever. It makes me almost fond of the
bizarreness of abstract/modern art, a museum of which I went to in Venice
(a former home of Peggy Guggenheim), for I feel I can detest it openly.
Not so Monet/Rodin/Picasso/da Vinci: how could I possibly summon up the
courage to detest these? You ignoramus, you imbecile, these are wondrous
works of human creativity, such a pity you can't appreciate them, your
parents wasted their money on educating an idiot. No matter, I do love
some of each of these artists but why are they worth so much? Who decided
that? Of course, the wealthy, who now seem to extend their malevolent
reaches into every aspect of my life, especially the solace of a
comfortable retirement! Man, a thought says, if you had the good luck to
have a Picasso give you his sketches when he was poor and unknown you
would have it made now! Why should such a thought occur? I have worked
some 36 years since I graduated from medical college and am quite
privileged but then I may live so much longer and will I be okay, what
with the daily gyrations of the world stock markets. Why do the
wealthy buy paintings and art objects? So their assets don't depreciate
you fool, I say to myself. Hmm, then there is a lot more on display in
these museums than art; I decide to delve into the history of museums.
The word "museum", from Latin, is derived from the Greek
mouseion or temple dedicated to the Muses (patron divinities for
art in Greek mythology). The first collection of art was in Ur where
buildings stored venerated objects and were preserved for the "marvel of
beholders", these words being noted on a clay object with Sumerian writing
on it (made around 2500 BC) by a curator in 450 BC. The Greeks had several
collections: Aristotle with his Natural History collection, the
Pinokethekai on the Acropolis where displays of "Old Masters" (what of the
women???) were preserved in special frames and later the renowned
Libraries at Alexandria in which Ptolemy Sotor created a museum. So
museums began as a blend of individual curiosity and awe as well as a
collective desire to preserve and display for generations yet unborn. They
seem to represent the flaunting of conquests and the abiding love and deep
delight for beauty and exquisiteness.
In our times the Ashmolean at Oxford is the first museum
for public display opening in 1683. The 18th century saw a flurry of
museum openings, the British in 1759, the Hermitage in 1764 and the Louvre
in 1793.
They were sites for "educating the masses in taste and
refinement", this they are, but like formal education they perform a more
enduring function: today they sanctify private property like
nothing else. They make the present structure of society, with grand
buildings for the few, armed guards to intimidate us, which we wrongly
draw comfort from as protecting us, appear as a natural and inevitable
event. After all, if the rich did not allow their paintings, sculptures,
jewellery to be displayed publicly we would never get to see it and enjoy
it. So what if they get tax credits for their kind deeds? Many of you who
read this will say: Bindu has gone into overdrive, how else would we
preserve these wondrous creations for future generations? Think about it
yourself. Can we not preserve the rare, the wondrous, the bewitchingly
beautiful, except in the way we do?
Yes, the original of Mona Lisa had a beauty none of the
photographs or films had captured. I feel the same about the Taj Mahal, no
photograph does it justice. I still remember when I first cast my eye on
it from the outer gates, I was entranced and captivated, it looked so
light I felt I could pick the whole structure up with one hand and take it
for all those I loved to see and delight in it. Today the Taj too is well
guarded.
In Houston there was an art museum open to everyone with
no guards at all and space on each wall for participants to draw and leave
their own reaction to the painting on display. This was a deliberate act
on part of the museum owners, they wanted to make art open to all, to
desanctify it, to reclaim it as belonging to us all. The museum was housed
in a modest building and had no admission charge. It felt so different to
visit this museum, what a refreshing contrast to the thick-walled wide-corridored
high-ceilinged endless galleries with their closed-circuit video cameras
and supercilious bureaucracy.
The modern museum allows no critique of the existing
order, rather it encourages submission. I would no more subscribe to it
than I would to the inherited powers of a priesthood and am as resistant
to it as I have been to the religious orthodoxy I was born in.
That orthodoxy could not contain me and I left it years
ago, so also I must shun the orthodoxy of the bourgeois with their god of
Private Property, their priesthood of con men and advertisers, their
majestic edifices subsidised by taxpayers everywhere, their idea of art
and beauty, they who do so much to promote ugliness, yes they must be
rejected and fought against just as the earlier reformers fought the
stranglehold of the priesthoods of various religions.
Our idea of beauty must come from within us, guidance we
need, no doubt, to refine our tastes and to deepen our appreciation. But
the market must absolutely not be our guiding light, nor pomposity
nor imperial architecture. Someone pointed out to me just how artistic was
the arrangement of brass and copper utensils in average Maharashtrian and
Gujarati kitchens, now alas giving way to plastic and aluminium. Yes, I
recalled, they were arranged delightfully, for in my mind's eye I could
see them neat, balanced, shining with the promise of the delicious food
they could hold. And the women who arranged them so carefully, surely they
were not unaware of the aesthetic dimension of this daily chore.
There is much to delight in today, the economy and simple
elegance of the wooden buildings of our wadis now replaced by
horrid concrete, the arrangement of various icons in every Indian taxi or
bus, the vivid colours of our sarees, the appetising way our thalis are
arrayed…
And so friends, enjoy Monet, Picasso, Rodin and all others
because you want to and not because the scallywags who are looting this
planet and destroying our future say so. Scream in their faces, I care not
for your most sacred deity, money, nor are you an arbiter of my
tastes and likes, I hope fervently your stranglehold on society is broken,
that art museums become open places, free of tickets and of guards and
that the value in art be our pleasure in it and not its monetary value.
(Dr Bindu Desai is a practising neurologist based in
Augusta, Maine, USA.)