With the exception of the museum personnel whose livelihood depends on them, nobody likes a crowd at an art exhibition. Aesthetic experience isn’t encouraged by peering over the shoulders of a half-a-dozen onlookers, the tinny squawk of audio tours, or waiting on what are often onerous lines. Looking at a painting or sculpture is a one-to-one encounter that benefits from an unimpeded view, an amplitude of time, and peace and quiet. That these attributes are absent from the typical blockbuster show doesn’t mean that a real engagement with art is impossible. Only a cynic could claim that the nuances of a Leonardo drawing couldn’t make themselves known through a thicket of gallery-goers. Nor do I want to insinuate that the glories of art should be the purview of a privileged few. It’s just that there’s no denying that the pedestrian traffic one encounters at a museum can make the solace we seek from art a hassle to obtain.
No artist, not even a Renaissance master, is invulnerable to hype.
Which isn’t to say that the same crowds can’t tell us something about the art they are viewing. The exhibition I saw prior to visiting London’s National Gallery—where a retrospective of paintings by the Venetian painter Tiziano Vecellio (c.1487–1576), better known as Titian, is on display—was the Matthew Barney show at New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Comparing the two shows might seem spurious work. What can such radically disparate events hope to tell