With galleries reporting record visitor figures, our appetite for art has never been greater. And yet there is a crisis in the way we look at it. An impatient glance is no substitute for the searching gaze
On a recent visit to Madrid, I realised how unbearable the crisis in looking has become. It was an off-season, midweek morning in winter, but the Prado was overflowing with a cosmopolitan assortment of visitors. They all seemed eager to pay the entry fee and subject themselves to the incessant ordeal of negotiating their way through an interior calculated, above all, to bewilder and weary even the most dedicated devotee of art. The rooms lead off daunting vistas of long, corridor-like spaces. They direct us, eventually, to the most prized of all Spanish paintings: Velaz-quez's Las Meninas, an affectionate yet haunting and profoundly sacramental exploration of the artist's relationship with the royal family and its servants. Yet this immense canvas, where extremes of luminosity and darkness are deployed to meditate on new life and the inevitable approach of death, is impossible to see.
From the moment I entered the room where Las Meninas presides, my attention was monopolised by the painting as completely as it had been on my last visit, 20 years earlier. But my gaze was interrupted by wave upon wave of viewers, all competing with each other for at least a glimpse of the celebrated image. I am tall, and so was fortunate enough to be capable of looking over most of the heads massed in front of me. And nobody could stop me darting forward to scrutinise Velazquez's brush marks, which seem to have been breathed on to the surface of the image with deceptively effortless economy, close up. Yet whenever I stood back for an exploration of Las Meninas in its entirety, the painting almost disappeared. The press of bodies blocked my vision, as if bent on obliterating the canvas altogether.
After a while, I decided that the Prado had been turned into a battlefield. Ideally, it should be possible to sit down and study Las Meninas at length, undistracted by the need to peer, dodge and strain in order to see even a fragment of the picture's surface. The whole notion of lingering before a masterpiece is, however, implicitly discouraged. Apart from two attendants' chairs, there are no seats in the large room where the painting is displayed. The only figure permitted to relax here is the bronze sculpture reclining in the centre of the space: a shamelessly languorous nude called Hermafrodite, modelled with titillating skill in 1652 by the little-known Matteo Bonarelli de Lucca. The rest of us are obliged to remain standing, buffeted time and again as successive groups of tourists are led towards the painting by bored, assertive guides. The guides shout rather than talk, and are clearly impatient to carry out their repetitive duties as fast as possible. The noise level is often unendurable. It is more akin to a military parade ground than a museum, and this relentless commotion poisons all hope of giving art the undiluted concentration it deserves.
Nor is the crisis confined to Madrid. As the new century grows older, people in ever-growing numbers across the world are discovering art. Museums and galleries proudly report spectacular attendance figures, not only at exhibitions of revered masters but for provocative new work by contemporary practitioners. The appetite for art of every kind is burgeoning all the time, and crowds often converge on spectacular installations with the fervour of pilgrims at great religious festivals.
It may seem nonsensical to view this prodigious surge of enthusiasm with alarm. As a critic who has spent so much of his career encouraging readers to experience art for themselves, I would far rather feel gratified by the great fascination it now attracts. Yet the more I watch viewers thronging to sample the latest blockbuster shows, or the permanent collections at the Prado, the Louvre and the National Gallery, the less convinced I am that they are giving art any sustained attention. Most visitors move through exhibitions and museums with disconcerting speed. Pausing now and again in front of particular images before resuming the onward march, they do not seem prepared to scrutinise anything for a substantial length of time.
On one level, their unwillingness to linger is all too understandable. Most art - unlike film, music, drama and literature - gives us the illusion that it can be taken in at a glance. We do not, apparently, need to spend the hours required to read a book, sit in a theatre, stare at a cinema screen or listen in a concert hall. Our eyes simply focus on the work displayed before us, and we take only a short while to decide whether it merits our interest. So this brevity seems entirely sensible. Nothing can be more irksome than realising, after we have spent an inordinate amount of time watching an epic play, that it is irredeemably dull. Better by far, surely, to appraise art on the run and never risk wasting our energies on something meretricious.
If we adopt such a policy in galleries, however, the exhibits will never have a chance of engaging us fully. An impatient glance is no substitute for the searching gaze. How can we hope to engage with the full subtlety of outstanding art if we are not prepared to stop, concentrate wholly on the work before us and, by degrees, enter into its imaginative world? Steady, discriminative looking is the only way to deepen our understanding of how artists illuminate human existence. But it is by no means easy to engage on a profound level with the images they have produced. Our culture thrives on quick-fire visual stimuli. We are invaded at every turn by the rapid, restless rhythms of images assailing our attention. Wherever city dwellers look - in the streets, on the Tube, through shop windows - advertising presses its urgent imperatives upon us. It batters our eyes, insisting on the most rapid response. Even if we manage to turn away from this colossal bombardment, our ever more sophisticated mobile phones will undoubtedly ring, presenting us with a far smaller, yet no less intense, melee of sounds, words and (increasingly) images that demand an instant reaction.
However much of an adrenalin rush this relentless pressure may provide, it does nothing to prepare us for the challenge involved in the prolonged act of looking. The pure visual charge of art is often immediate, and can arrest our eyes at once. After this initial seduction has taken place, though, we need to ensure that alternatives do not distract and wrench us away - but it is very hard to achieve this.
It is tempting to conclude, once we have given the image a preliminary examination, that nothing more will be found there. We begin to feel restless and want to move on. Yet it is worth fighting the urge to leave. If we stay, and allow the work to seep into our consciousness, a revelatory communion between art and onlooker may well prove possible.
I have no desire to make light of the difficulties involved. There are no formulae available, no sure-fire ways of arriving at the requisite sense of alert, probing observation. Those who argue that audio guides are the answer, providing instant commentaries on a select number of exhibits, should think again. How can you formulate an authentic response of your own when a voice, lodged intimately in the ear, is telling you precisely what to think? Such devices are bound to encourage chronic passivity in the viewer.
Reading about art, in books, magazines and newspapers, can stimulate our response to the image, but such texts should be absorbed only before or after encountering the exhibit. Nothing should ever be allowed to interfere with our first-hand experience of the original work.
That is why I feel uneasy about the growth of detailed explanatory captions, displayed with increasing frequency beside art in public galleries. All too often, visitors spend most of their time reading the text rather than scrutinising the image itself. The words in the caption play a dominant role, and end up as yet another distraction. The truth is that they can never be regarded as a substitute for the act of looking on your own, with the wholehearted passion and attentiveness that great artists repay many times over. This, ultimately, is the key.
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