Museum 2.0: The Greatest Show on Earth

Vincent van Rijn,
raising an eyebrow
 at his visitors.

As is commonly known and latterly agreed upon, the causes of human overpopulation – the population overshoot - (if indeed such a thing there is), are to be looked for ‘at home’, and not in developing countries, as the West has done for decades.

Last weekend I believe I have succeeded in localizing a main hotbed of the phenomenon. It is Amsterdam. More specifically, the Rijksmuseum and the Van Gogh Museum. 

The Van Gogh Museum was built to the size of a large international airport. Having survived the scuffles at the entrance, one can enter on condition of having bought a ticket online. A seemingly endless escalator transports the visitors downward, and straight into the first of four Van Gogh Hypermarkets (there is also a Van Gogh Boutique, for the less discerning affluent), selling more stuff than Amazon, and all more or less Van Gogh-themed: from Van Gogh Monopoly (the board game), over ‘Tears of Vincent’ Perfume, potato-shaped Van Gogh wristwatches, to exclusive Van Gogh leather wallets (190 EUR). From there to the cloakroom - somewhere to dump your "I Love Amsterdam"-woolly cap. I would strongly recommend booking an early slot, as the 26 queues directed toward the coat-check are each about 200 m long.

Another word of advice: try not to follow the crowd – it will suck you in like a sneaker wave, rhythmically rising and dumping you somewhere in the vicinity of an exhibit – i.e. the one which the audio guides have dictated the crowds to move toward - rising and dumping, and rising and dumping - and you will be totally unable to escape it until the very exit. If you are very lucky, between your very self and the paintings there will be only seven or eight rows of visitors, each one of them listening intently until the voice in their audio guides orders them on, and some of them shooting an occasional glance at the thingy on the wall – until the wave moves on again. Every now and then, across the throngs of the huddled masses, your eyes will meet an old familiar face, in a flash – the face of a beloved painting. Feel free to wave.

Visitors to both Van Gogh and the Rijksmuseum do not only rely on audio guides, they own smartphones with multiple camera lenses, and they show it. I reckon every painting is being photographed about 16 times per second – and this, despite the 11 billion catalogues (roughly) being sold every four hours in the museum hypermarket. A very heart-warming, democratic practice, rendering the act of looking at the painting quite superfluous. The impossibility of enjoying art, not only for the few, but for all and sundry.
Also, many enjoy the pleasure of taking selfies, while posing in front of a Vermeer, a Velasquez, or a Ruysdael. Whole families, at times.

The lighting: as is their wont, the curators in their wisdom have chosen for artificial ambiant lighting, very much toned down. In the Van Gogh Museum, every pane of glass is blacked out with acres of black gauze. It is, as a matter of fact, just as dark and dusky as a 19th century bourgeois salon - quite in keeping with the (post-)impressionist Zeitgeist and esthetics. The paintings themselves, on the contrary, are cunningly lit up by means of batteries of floodlights. A happy example of this is the famous Neighbourhood Watch, bij Vincent van Rijn, in the Rijksmuseum. van Rijn, not having fully mastered the art of chiaroscuro, is taught a valuable lesson by the curator (scenographer? see infra), who has decided to aim an armful of floodlights at the critical (lighted) areas of the Watch, thereby making it into a true Masterpiece.
Generally speaking the spotlights cast informative shadows of the upper part of the picture frame onto the paintings, or reflect in the lower profile of the frame. This, in order to direct the viewer's attention to the often sumptuous frames.

During a short coffee break at Le Tambourin (eh oui!), my partner and I were startled by a strange noise. "What's that," I enquired, "...the gnashing of teeth?" - "No, that's the sound of a dead horse being flogged," said she.

A new development in museal and exhibitory science is the introduction, in the very museum halls, of high tech for the technical analysis of paintings. Microscopy, chemical analysis, x-rays, carbon dating, you name it – it is there, interactive and digitized. It provides a safe interface that contributes generously to the efforts of making the act of esthetic contemplation quite obsolete.

Luckily, the quality of the educational texts is maintained. In a room dedicated to Rembrandt van Goghs letter-writing, I read the following: “Letters used to be written on sheets of paper, in ink, with a pen - by hand. You would have to buy ink in a bottle. Often, a blotting paper was provided with the bottle of ink. Nifty, as this would prevent ink blotches when folding the letter.”

A modest proposal for the curators (or the scenographers, should the former have been replaced by the latter, as is common practice in Belgium): since 9.999 out of every 10.000 visitors are perfectly happy to spend their time listening to audio guides while taking snapshots, why not organize the museum 2.0 accordingly? Empty the museum halls, and furnish them with a few 100.000 chairs and tables, each provided with an audio guide, a camera stand and a catalogue on a chain. Thus, the one visitor out of every 10.000 could actually see the paintings – one-to-one – at some secret location, and enjoy the silent song of painting.