Yesterday, I was at a book launch in the Classics library, when I heard a PhD student saying that she hated tourists. She cringed at the sight of a maddening crowd packing up a museum or art gallery while watching the exhibited samples of beauty through a camera lens and spoiling the tranquillity that a thorough appreciation of art required. As she is a US-citizen living and studying here in Edinburgh, I asked her whether she hated herself when she travelled around the country and visited its tourist attractions. She didn’t, of course, because, as she put it quite straightforwardly, when she went to an art gallery or took a picture of a monument or visited an interactive archaeological site, she didn’t do it as a tourist, but as a “connoisseur”. I have lost count of the zillion times I’ve heard things like this. I’d bet you’ve more than once nodded approval to a friend of yours bemoaning that their last trip to London/Berlin/Paris was awful, because all over the place “it was full of bloody tourists!”… like themselves.
Let’s put things straight from the beginning. When you travel somewhere for leisure or recreational purposes, you are a tourist. You might be more educated, refined and aware than your average fellow traveller, but nonetheless you are a tourist. We tend to identify tourism with the hoards of ignoramuses who annoy the rest of us with their eagerness to take thousands of pictures that will certify that they “have been there”. But the pedantic dilettante who hops from the National Art Gallery to the Museum of Modern Art to see the creations of bygone eras in the flesh while pouring contempt upon the oiks who litter the place with their lower-than-him traits is, whether he likes it or not, also a tourist.
It’s true, a visit to any shrine in which culture is worshipped has everyday less of a religious experience and more of an overwhelming time in Hell. After hours of queuing like livestock heading for the slaughterhouse, elbowing our way through hundreds of Japanese OAPs, listening to the platitudes of badly trained guides who should know better, and being ripped off at the museum’s Costa Coffee and Souvenir Shop, we have to conform ourselves with a faint glimpse of that sculpture or paint we had intended to see after ages of thoughtful study and appreciation of it in a Taschen art book, whose pictures and commentary might give us a much better insight into the original, even though they are not as “authentic” as the real thing. Quiet contemplation of art was something the educated classes of the past could be proud of. Not any more; and unless the Pope gives us the right to wear the cappello cardinalizio, we will never be able to behold the frescos of the Sistine Chapel in peace again.
This, however, does not have to be a bad thing in itself. In fact, it might be a sign that the times we’ve been apportioned to live in might not be that bad after all. That our galleries and museums all over the world are packed with a raucous crowd of unsophisticated globe-trotters is but a triumph of democracy. Long gone is the age of innocence and manners in which only the types like Newland Archer and his naïve wife May could visit a silent Louvre and contemplate art peacefully without being encumbered by the masses. For those born with a silver spoon in their mouths, a crowded art gallery or museum might represent a downgraded type of culture. But for the majority of people, it might be the only chance they have to get their share of our common spiritual heritage. That is what modern museums and art galleries were set up for when they were opened to the public.
Far from downgrading culture, crowded museums and art galleries are a token of its strength. Each crowded cultural venue is a spark of the Enlightenment that has kindled the prairie. Each crowded art gallery or museum is a victory of those who think that everybody is entitled to knowledge and to please their senses contemplating beautiful objects, as well as a defeat of conservative doomsayers who want the hoi polloi to know their place. And whether the latter like it or not, nowadays our libraries are full, more books are read than ever, and la Mona Lisa, el Guernica, la Pietà or the Parthenon Frieze have become more widely known than Jesus.
