June 2006 
Year 12    No.116

Readers Forum


Of museums and monuments

Let the value in art be our pleasure in it and not its monetary value

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.)


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