Barry's Blog

We rush headlong through life, and consequently, miss many things of importance.

In a recent article in The New York Times, "At the Louvre, Many Stop to Snap but Few Stay in Focus," writer Michael Kimmelman describes a recent idle morning he spent at the Louvre Museum in Paris, watching people looking at art. He poses the perennial question: What exactly are we looking for when we roam as tourists around museums? He recalls seeing two young women in flowered dresses meandering through the gallery, in the Pavillon des Sessions, taking time to pause and circle around several sculptures. They took their time, looking slowing at the objects. And he is amazed that they stopped to slowly take it in, since most visitors pass through the gallery oblivious.

Noticing that hardly any visitors paused before any object as long as a minute during his hour or two visit, Kimmelman makes the following observation:

"Visiting museums has always been about self-improvement. Partly we seem to go to them to find something we already recognize, something that gives us our bearings: think of the scrum of tourists invariably gathered around the Mona Lisa. At one time a highly educated Westerner read perhaps 100 books, all of them closely. Today we read hundreds of books, or maybe none, but rarely any with the same intensity. Travelers who took the Grand Tour across Europe during the 18th century spent months and years learning languages, meeting politicians, philosophers and artists and bore sketchbooks in which to draw and paint - to record their memories and help them see better."

Contrasting our own age with the earlier century, Kimmelman continues: "Cameras replaced sketching by the last century; convenience trumped engagement, the viewfinder afforded emotional distance and many people no longer felt the same urgency to look. It became possible to imagine that because a reproduction of an image was safely squirreled away in a camera or cell phone, or because it was eternally available on the Web, dawdling before an original was a waste of time, especially with so much ground to cover."

In a culture of convenience and immediacy, where millions of images and other forms of stimulation compete for our attention, Kimmelman appears to have put his finger on part of the root problem for the superficiality of our age. Almost apologetically, he admits:

"Recently, I bought a couple of sketchbooks to draw with my 10-year-old in St. Peter's and elsewhere around Rome, just for the fun of it, not because we're any good, but to help us look more slowly and carefully at what we found. Crowds occasionally gathered around us as if we were doing something totally strange and novel, as opposed to something normal, which sketching used to be. I almost hesitate to mention our sketching. It seems pretentious and old-fogeyish in a cultural moment when we can too easily feel uncomfortable and almost ashamed just to look hard."

On some levels, Kimmelman's article is reminiscent of T. S. Eliot's words from his "Choruses from 'The Rock'":

"The endless cycle of idea and action,
Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;
Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.
All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance,
All our ignorance brings us nearer to death,
But nearness to death no nearer to GOD.
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries
Bring us farther from GOD and nearer to the Dust."

The link to The New York Times article is:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/03/arts/design/03abroad.html?_r=1&em  

The hundreds of comments on Kimmelman's article on the NYTimes website are revealing, but then we probably don't have time to read them! -blm