Are museums getting uglier, or am I just turning into Mr Grumpy? Maybe both things are happening at the same time. I visited a great many art galleries and museums during the past summer and found myself increasingly irritated by the ubiquitous visual distractions from what I consider – eccentrically perhaps – to be the main attraction of such places, namely the art itself.
Barriers, barriers everywhere: not just placed between viewer and painting but sometimes enclosing entire sculptures, even such Minimalist works as the floor pieces of Carl Andre, which the artist explicitly intended his audience to walk on but which are now, at museums such as Tate Modern, routinely cordoned off. If it is not barriers getting in the way, it is wall texts, with their little morsels of sound-bite banality, usually printed on rectangles of jarringly white paper – no matter what the museum decor – and placed so close to the paintings to which they refer that they cannot be edited from the field of vision without standing so close to the work of art in question that the alarms go off (in itself fairly distracting).
Not so long ago wall labels were generally about the size of postcards, but I could swear they have got bigger, perhaps reflecting the increased status within most major museums of Educators and Curators, those responsible for – as the modern jargon would have it – the interface between gallery and gallery-going public. Interface? In your face, more like. On a recent visit to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam – a cavernous cube made mostly of air, with hardly any walls for hanging pictures in the first place – I found wall texts so enormous that they made the paintings seem entirely secondary, as if included merely...
