Photo: GV
Each Wednesday, thoughts on art and science….
We in art museums spend a lot of time researching and writing labels, but sometimes I wonder what value they add to the museum experience – which, for me, is an aesthetic experience first and a learning experience second.
Artists, after all, whether their works are in the caves at Lascaux or the galleries of the Walters, are no more “teachers” than their viewers are “students” or their setting a “classroom.”
Anish Kapoor’s gigantic stainless steel elliptical sculpture “Cloud Gate” in Millennium Park in Chicago hardly needs a label. You simply experience it!
In his book Inner Vision: An Exploration of Art and the Brain, neuroscientist Semir Zeki invokes Cezanne’s dismissive dictum that “all talk about art is almost useless,” and observes that language was a relatively late arrival in our evolutionary history.
Four years ago Walters curator Eik Kahng did an innovative (and controversial) exhibition without labels called Courbet and the Modern Landscape. The art experience was instead accompanied by contemporary music composed in response to the works, and by subtle fluctuations in the light levels in the galleries, to evoke the passing of clouds in the paintings.
We discovered through research that our visitors not only said that they had a more immersing art experience than usual, but also that they spent significantly more time with each work of art than is typical for museum goers.
Is there a disconnect between those mental processes that are called upon to create a verbally discursive art historical experience of a work of art - e.g., learning to put a “new” Courbet landscape into an art-historical sequence - and those that are useful in maximizing an immersing aesthetic experience of that same work?
I think Cezanne would have said so.
Filed in: Aesthetics, Art, Museums, Neuroscience, The Walters, Uncategorized.
Gary Vikan, director of the Walters Art Museum since 1994, has been with the Baltimore institution for more than 20 years. A native of Minnesota, Gary received his B.A. from Carleton College in 1967 and his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1976 before working as Senior Associate for Byzantine Art Studies at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C.