A Letter From The Louvre: The Art Makes Up For A Lot

It was the Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset who in 1930 described in calm, lapidary prose the sheer press of modern life: “Towns are full of people, houses full of tenants, hotels full of guests, trains full of travelers, cafes full of customers, (…) theaters full of spectators, and beaches full of bathers. What previously was, in general, no problem, now becomes an everyday one: Namely, to find room.”Those words came to mind shortly after leaving the Louvre on a rainy, humid day in Paris. I was in a bad mood because of the crowds, the hordes of school children who when they weren’t draping their limbs all over the floor, ran around aiming cell phone cameras at each other, their high-pitched voices transforming entire sections of the world’s most famous museum into an aviary of screeching birds. They might as well have let people blow on vuvuzelas.The art, when you found a gallery quiet enough to enjoy it in, made up for a lot. A series of paintings of animals by Théodore Géricault – to take an example at random — were particularly affecting. A dead cat, laid out stiffly on a board; a horse’s head; a close-up of a lion’s profile, gold against the murk of a primeval night…. They were magnificent, and just a fraction of what was on offer. One did, finally, feel rewarded.Even the descriptive placards beneath the paintings, composed in the best lyrical-scholarly French manner (American ones can be deadly dull in comparison) were a blast. They were intelligent, poetic, and at times witty. There was nothing institutional about them. Each seemed to have been written not for a group, but for an individual – you, if you happened to be the person standing in front of it.But soon you were back in the throng, suffering from the doubly irritating sensation of knowing you were in someone’s way while someone else was always in yours. They wanted you gone and you felt the same way about them. (From art-lover to museum-murderer seemed but a short and easily taken step….) Almost everyone came equipped with digital cameras and made prolific use of them, myself included. Since one was allowed to take pictures of the paintings, that’s exactly what one did. After all, everyone else was doing it, and a kind of greed, a sensation of quasi-pornographic ownership and avarice took over one’s being as one clicked away, image after image to be downloaded into the laptop and locked inside. Happy sorts simply took vacation snaps, smiling couples posing in front of paintings as if they were bobbing up and down on Venetian gondolas….A series of questions kept nagging at me. If the Louvre was so central to France’s often grandiose self-image, not to mention being Paris’s crown jewel, then why, of all places, was it so chaotic? Why were visitors permitted to be so… loud? Why did the guards seem so indifferent? Why didn’t the teachers try to keep their pupils under control? (Were they at the Louvre to enlighten the children or to ruin the experience for the grown-ups?)But the guards and teachers were merely symptoms of a larger problem. Who were the higher-ups, the museum directors and the like, those who could exert authority but mysteriously preferred not to? In the name of “democratization” and cash they did everything possible to attract people to the museum (and to others like it), and then left them to their own devices, as if the difference between going to the Louvre and attending a comics book convention was too infinitessimal to measure.In a gallery devoted to the paintings of the Italian Renaissance, I watched a museum guard seated in a corner. He was holding his head in his hands, perhaps in despair. He was not an old man. On the contrary, he was quite a young man. But he was also a useless man, one who was supposed to have power but who had no power, and therefore no pride, no interest, no stake in the outcome of the institution of which he was a part.Other guards, rather than watching you, seemed to hope you wouldn’t look at them, like painfully self-conscious social outcasts. A handful reminded me of the tramps in Philip Larkin’s poem, “Toads Revisited.” Only instead of being forced to spend their days in a park, “turning over their failures / By some bed of lobelias,” they got to wear a suit and sit on a chair in the cultural headquarters of the Western World.It was hard to know how to react. That the Louvre was going to be crowded was a given; that it was going to be an auditory nightmare was not. So you had to come to terms with the fact that you were deeply irritated while surrounded by the paintings of Botticelli, or that you were thrilled and irritated at the same time. The cognitive dissonance this created was painful. It was like listening to a beautiful song on the radio through maddening amounts of static.Fortunately, a visit to the Rijksmuseum and the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam a week later restored my faith. Both were crowded, but not chaotic. Taking photographs was strictly forbidden. Noise was kept down. Guards patrolled the galleries as if their contents actually meant something, and as if their jobs did, too. The visitors – the same multinational grab-bag one saw at the Louvre – took the hint and acted accordingly. It was, needless to say, a much less stressful experience, and ultimately far more enjoyable.Brendan Bernhard is a Contributing Editor of The New York Sun

A Letter From The Louvre: The Art Makes Up For A Lot

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