Something that started bothering me at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, and continued to bother me at the Alte Nationalgalerie on Tuesday: the proliferation of "audio guides" inside art museums.
On a certain level, they're pretty handy, especially when you're in a poorly-signed museum in a foreign country: punch in the number that appears next to a work of art, and a voice (usually that of a Cultured English Person) whispers into your ear, telling you more than you'd ever want to know about the item in front of you.
The problem appears when you're at a crowded museum that gives everyone an audio guide, like the Van Gogh museum. Then you end up with a crowd of people standing ten-deep in front of the most popular paintings, staring slack-jawed into space as they wait for the audio guide to finish its entry for a particular painting, thus granting them "permission" to move on to the next item. People may be done with actually looking at the painting, but that doesn't mean they'll step aside so that newcomers can have their chance; the audio guide's not done yet! All you can do is elbow your way into the herd, hoping that you'll get your chance in front of the art as everybody slowly shuffles along, following the Officially Approved Numerically Increasing Audio-Guided Path.
Even in an uncrowded museum (the Alte Nationalgalerie), once an audio guide was placed in my own hands, I was surprised to find how much it was influencing my viewing habits. That's an interesting-looking painting over on the other side of the room -- but wait! The guide hasn't finished telling me about this painting yet! I caught myself looking around each new room, hoping for paintings with an audio-guide number on the wall next to them. I found myself lingering far longer at certain paintings than I normally would, just to hear every thrilling detail about how the artist died of tuberculosis three months after finishing this, his last painting.
Thankfully, the Alte Nationalgalerie was small enough that I was able to reach the end and tear my headphones off before I completed the conversion into becoming one of ... them!
Posted by Kevin at April 22, 2004 07:56 AM