Largely on grounds of cost, most people don't buy art in galleries. The chief vehicle for selling art on any mass scale is the museum gift shop. This is quite simply the most important tool for the diffusion and understanding of art in the modern world. Though it appears to be a mere appendage to most museums, the gift shop is central to the project of art institutions. Its job is to ensure that the lessons of the museum, which concern beauty, meaning and the enlargement of the spirit, can endure in the visitor far beyond the actual tour of the premises and be put into use in daily life.
The means deployed, however, may not always be on target. Apart from books, gallery gift shops usually sell postcards and associative objects. Postcards are successful and important mechanisms for improving our
engagement with art. Our culture sees them as tiny, pale shadows of the far superior originals hanging on the walls a few metres away, but the encounter we have with the postcard may be deeper, more perceptive and more valuable to us, because the card allows us to bring our own reactions to it. It feels safe and acceptable to pin it on a wall, throw it away or scribble on it, and by being able to behave so casually around it, our responses come alive. We consult our own needs and interests; we take real ownership of the object, and, since it is permanently available, we keep looking at it. We feel free to be ourselves around it, as so often, and sadly, we do not in the presence of the masterpiece itself.
Gift-shop managers have discovered that people also like to buy objects heavily decorated with names of artists and their works, so we have Picasso table mats and Monet tea-towels. Such objects try hard to pay homage to artists. They would like to beautify the world and carry the message of artists deep into our homes, so that the spirit of Monet would be alive when we prepared the morning tea and Picasso would be with us as we mopped away the orange juice from the kitchen counter. The ambition is noble, but its method of execution perhaps less so. The objects in a gift shop do have a faint link to the names they honour. Monet may well have liked tea towels, but it is unlikely that he would have wanted one with his own painting printed on it. The spirit of his best works of art, the things we love in them, may be much more consistent with, for instance, a completely plain and beautifully textured towel. This is more truly a Monet towel than one with his name on it. The point is not to surround ourselves with objects that carry the actual identity of the artist and his or her work. It should be to get hold of objects that the artists would have liked, and that are in keeping with the spirit of their works; and, more broadly, to look at the world through their eyes, therefore staying sensitive to what they saw in it.
One can imagine a different range of products to sell in the world's gallery gift shops: objects that are aligned with the values and ideals of artists, rather than merely with their identities. The urge to buy something at the end of a museum visit is a serious one because it involves an attempt to translate a sensibility weve come to know in one area - on landscape canvases, portraits of ladies with parasols, and so on - and carry it over into another part of life, such as keeping the kitchen clean. This points to the heart of what museums should really be about: giving us tools to extend the range and impact of what we admire in works of art across our whole lives. This is why the gift shop is, in fact, the most important place in the museum - if only its true potential could be grasped and made real.
In general, we are comfortable with the idea that we need to study art. HOW We take the generous view that works of art deserve knowledge and
Should effort on our part before they will unlock their secrets. This has resulted
w с j 'n r'lc emergence of a multinational art-history industry, which has its
У headquarters in places such as the Courtauld Institute in London and
Art? the Department of the History of Art at Yale University.
Some of the dominant trends in looking at and thinking about art, such as technical, political, historical and shock-value readings, were identified earlier. The prestige of these approaches is tied up with the reputation and influence of the great academic machines of art history. There is something reassuring and dignified in this scholarly approach to art. Consider the outline of a course, which you can take at Yale, and that is representative of the current ideaclass="underline"
Italian Renaissance Art Mon. Wed 1.00 pm-2.15 pm
This course will treat the history of Italian Renaissance art from 1300 to 1500. not only the history of painting, but also that of sculpture, drawing and the print medium. Although the lectures will be arranged chronologically, they do not offer a survey. Instead, the course focuses on a set of problems and issues that were specific for the time and place. The lectures are presented as a series of vignettes: important episodes in the history of Italian Renaissance art, viewed from the perspective of one painter or sculptor. Together, these painters and sculptors tell a story of the period.
Here, the assumed task is to help us know as much as possible about what the works in question meant to the people who created them. This is a very generous undertaking. In effect, the course addresses the Italian Renaissance artists like this: 4 don't know enough about your perspective on the problems and issues specific to your time. I'm sorry about that and I'm going to try very hard to put it right.'
The course is deliberately impersonal. It carefully avoids asking, 4vhat do these works mean to me?' Or, 'what problems and issues might I have in common with a painter or sculptor from 1300 to 1500?' This vision of objective scholarship is a culmination of a trend that started in Germany in the late nineteenth century, and was pursued as a corrective to wild projections and chaotic responses. However, it could be argued that the problem the course description identifies has generally already been solved. There is no shortage of good information about the history of art. The worry that not enough people know about the Renaissance may persist, but the solution to that lies in mass communication, not ever more exacting research.
A less evident - but significant - presupposition of academic scholarship is that the message of the work is hard to understand and complicated. Both require a great deal of learning. The facts that are hardest to discover take centre stage. It may require immense labour and ingenuity to discover in which precise year an altarpiece was painted, or reconstruct the power struggles that accompanied the construction of a palace. It is assumed that these are the crucial things to know, if you are to get the most out of art. Influenced, perhaps unconsciously, by these suppositions, we construct a fantasy of what is supposed to be going on in our heads when we 'understand' art properly.
Take the Sistine Chapel (47). Having spent a few years at the Courtauld or at Yale, one might be expected to say of it, The work was painted around 1511. Michelangelo was born in 1475, so he would have been 36 at this point. You can see the heavy shadow bringing out the structure of the muscles. Michelangelo had an ideal of male beauty derived from classical sculpture, some of which was discovered in Rome around this time; in fact, Vasari tells the story that at a young age Michelangelo produced a statue which he buried in the garden of one of the Medici properties; it was then dug up and people thought it was an original ancient work. The pose of Adam is reminiscent of that of the so-called Theseus (although today it is understood to have been a representation of Dionysus), so it may be that Michelangelo is incorporating classical mythology into Christian theology. Adam's right hand, on the far left of the picture, is an example of radical foreshortening, which emphasizes the optical and mathematical knowledge of the artist: the artist is an intellectual, not merely an artisan.'