Sir,
Regarding the recent Pimlico Wilde symposium, “Should Museums Ban All Visitors?”, I feel compelled to offer a modest rejoinder. The proposition that the salvation of art lies in quarantining it from its audience is rather like suggesting that books be preserved by never opening them. It may indeed keep them intact, but at what cost? “To preserve is to kill,” as André Malraux once warned.
Yes, the public is clumsy. We lean where we shouldn’t, photograph where we mustn’t, and, on occasion, trip into priceless canvases. But to remove the visitor entirely is to render the museum a kind of taxidermy shop for culture,objects embalmed, not experienced. Walter Benjamin’s “aura” of the artwork may well fade when digitised; it certainly suffocates when locked in a cupboard.
Art, unlike uranium, is not dangerous to behold. It is dangerous not to behold. “We do not see things as they are,” Anaïs Nin reminds us, “we see them as we are.” Without the flawed, imperfect, even damaging gaze of the human, the object becomes a sterile relic, stripped of its meaning, its context, and its risk.
Besides, if the visitor is to be banished for the occasional accident, must we also ban the curator who mishandles a frame, the restorer who over-bleaches a fresco, the registrar who misfiles a crate? The history of art is not the history of perfection, but of fallibility,of cracked varnish, of overpainting, of the coffee stain on the corner of a preparatory sketch.
Museums without visitors are simply warehouses with better lighting. One may admire the discipline of such a proposal, but as Oscar Wilde quipped, “The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.” If no one is there to see the work, then no one is there to speak of it,and an unseen masterpiece is perilously close to a non-existent one.
I, for one, would rather risk the occasional elbow in a canvas than consign the whole of human creativity to a velvet-lined vault. Art is not made to survive us,it is made to be lived with.
Yours, somewhat exasperated,
Horatia Gardan
Author of the upcoming book The Mail Gaze, about art long ago when knights wore chain mail
