DR MAY-9

Word Count: 598
Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level: 16.
Difficult Word Glossary: Provided at the end

Nevertheless, I am drawn to Magherini’s diagnosis. I confess, however, that the parts of my brain seemingly impervious to this purportedly transformative power—not solely of Renaissance art but of nearly all art preserved within the solemn interiors of museums—appear to resist its allure. When I step into these hallowed institutions, it is largely from a sense of obligation. This, I tell myself, is how I reaffirm my credentials as a man of culture. More often, however, it is a performative gesture, undertaken in the role of a guide. I have, over the years, escorted students through the Louvre and the Pompidou in Paris, family and acquaintances through the Menil Collection and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, and, in New York, my children to the Metropolitan and the Museum of Modern Art. Upon entering, I assume the ritual pose: hands clasped behind my back, scanning the walls with what I imagine is scholarly detachment. Yet invariably, when I pause before a canvas, I turn first not to the painting itself but to the plaque affixed beside it, absorbing the description with more focus than I afford the artwork. My impulse is not so much to absorb the painting as to contextualize it, to inscribe it within the grand narrative of history rather than allow it to speak through the immediacy of visual experience. I observe others—tourists armed with ear buds or clutching guidebooks, documenting the moment with their phones, often inserting themselves into the frame. I wonder: are they more earnest in their engagement than I?

Perhaps they are, insofar as seriousness is currently defined. Studies indicate that the average museumgoer lingers before a painting for no more than 15 to 30 seconds. Museums have transformed into gauntlets of cultural consumption, where visitors race through with an eye toward reaching the gift shop, now the ceremonial terminus of this solemn marathon of high-minded obligation.

And herein lies the paradox: our mode of museum visitation today feels at once entirely conventional and deeply anomalous. The accelerated thinness of modern life—shaped by Facebook, iPhones, and ceaseless multitasking—renders museums intimidating in their density and scale. One can readily imagine the future arrival of airport-style moving walkways within galleries, hastening our traversal of these slow, silent spaces. Meanwhile, the stated reason for our visit—to experience joy or enlightenment from great art—feels increasingly anachronistic. Scholars trace this frenetic superficiality to the dynamics of contemporary tourism: we ‘do’ landmarks not to truly encounter them but to be seen encountering them, amassing cultural capital rather than fostering personal growth. Hence the ubiquity of selfies before masterpieces. While I eschew selfies, I do send postcards, though I must concede this gesture bears the same subtext: I was there. The reverse side of the card features not insight but inventory—Picasso, Pissarro, Van Gogh, Vermeer—checked off like conquests.

None of this would have startled Stendhal. In his Histoire de la peinture en Italie (1817), he observed that by the time Louvre visitors reached the terminus of its 1,500-foot Grand Gallery—lined with works by Flemish, Dutch, French, and Italian masters and interspersed with monumental sculpture—they were physically and psychically depleted: red-eyed, slack-lipped, and yawning. The human sensorium is simply not designed for such relentless aesthetic bombardment. Amid the shuffling crowds and pressured itineraries, one is swept along, denied the agency to truly engage. Stendhal himself advocated redistributing the Louvre’s holdings across smaller institutions to foster deeper, more intimate encounters with art. His friend, Prosper Mérimée, capitalized on the booming market for guidebooks, and Stendhal followed suit with his Mémoires d’un touriste (1838), wherein he championed spontaneity over convention. Declaring that his use of “I” was not vanity but expediency, he wrote not for the masses but for the “happy few”—those liberated from calculation and open to subjective delight.

Glossary of Difficult Words:

  • Impervious: not affected or influenced by something

  • Hallowed: regarded as holy or sacred

  • Affixed: attached

  • Contextualize: to place in a context for understanding

  • Anomalous: deviating from what is standard or expected

  • Anachronistic: belonging to a different time period

  • Cultural capital: non-financial social assets that promote social mobility

  • Sensorium: the sensory apparatus or faculties considered as a whole

  • Itinerary: a planned route or journey

  • Expediency: being convenient and practical despite possibly being improper

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