One of my favourite things to do whether I’m traveling or at home is to visit art museums, commercial galleries and art markets. I don’t buy a lot of art but I try to support makers where I can.
I made art for interior designers for years but I’ve mostly given up making art over the past 10 years. The desire is still there and I’ve submitted to the Incognito Art Show for the past three years, a fundraising art exhibition. I’ve always called myself an art nerd and teach creative writing inspired by art. Most of my reading and writing is art adjacent.
Art is the through line of my life, the string that runs from my earliest memories of loving my Mum’s Albert Namatjira print to my most recent trip to Paris where I (almost) over-dosed on art.
So I’d be a hypocrite if I didn’t totally understand the huge crowds in the famous museums around the world even if they annoy me because I can’t have the place to myself!
I spent almost 7 hours in the Musée du Louvre on the first day of the May heatwave this year and the air-conditioning wasn’t the only one struggling. The place was packed at 1pm but my timed entry meant I entered the museum via the Porte des Lions rather than lining up near the pyramid.
Around 4pm the crowds thinned out and by 6pm I often had whole galleries to myself. I was able to stand in front of glorious artworks and historical artifacts without the jostling I experienced at other museums and shows.
I’d really love to have a chat over a glass of bubbles with the curators at the Louvre. For reasons that are obvious to me, the Mona Lisa is one of the big drawcards at the museum but unfortunately the reason is often lost on the non-artnerds that pay good money and spend time lining up to see it.
The museum is in the process of building a new room I’ve heard and it’s about time. It’s a mess as it is now. I think they should look at the process to see Da Vinci’s Last Supper in Milan. To view it, you must book timed-entry tickets in advance through the official Vivaticket Last Supper Booking portal or the Cenacolo Vinciano Official Website. Often you have to book months in advance.
The circus in front of the Mona Lisa just leaves a lot of people wandering off, muttering about how small it is. This annoys me so much. The painting is 77x53cm and was never intended to be displayed to the masses. Because people have only heard ‘you must see the Mona Lisa’ they have unrealistic expectations.
How is that good for the museum?
I really recommend timed entries especially if you are short of time on your trip or don’t fancy spending hours in a queue. Buying a ticket in advance will also help you avoid finding out that the museum you’ve always wanted to visit isn’t actually open on the day you’re in that city. We met some people last year who missed out on going to the Vatican Museum for this reason. They were so sad.
Sadly though, I have found that a timed entry doesn’t always guarantee an enjoyable experience.
I went to the Lee Miller exhibition at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris. The works were small, framed original prints of her photographs but the show was so crowded I’m not sure I was able to see everything.
What I did see was amazing and the rest of that museum is incredible. I can’t believe it’s my first time in there.
There was a large group of school students at pretty much every museum or chateau I visited while in Paris. Imagine having all that history ND I considered having lunch at the beautiful restaurant with views of the Eiffel Tower but it was quite expensive and had no vegetarian options.
A new discipline in neuroscience has emerged to investigate what happens in the brain when we look art original art. Art has always had a profound impact on me but until I started reading about it, I had no idea why.
Neuroaesthetics is the study of the brain and art and research shows that artwork stimulates widespread neural networks, triggering the release of dopamine and altering your brainwaves.
The study done in the Museum Mauritshuis The Hague even shows that original artwork has a more powerful impact than looking at a print of the same artwork.
Wouldn’t it be great if museums were better at providing an environment to make looking at art as positive as it’s supposed to be? And wouldn’t it be awesome if museum goers were clued in about the benefits so they could do more chilling, less selfie taking, and a lot less complaining about the size of the most famous painting in the world.
As researchers begin to peel back the layers on these transformative encounters, they have had to create a system for measuring aesthetic experiences. Anjan Chatterjee, MD, a professor of neurology, psychology, and architecture and founding director of the Penn Center for Neuroaesthetics at the University of Pennsylvania, and colleagues created a taxonomy for describing the appearance and impact of visual aesthetic experiences. Using semantic network analysis, they identified 17 distinct dimensions related to the appearance of an artwork (including concepts such as colorful, controversial, balanced, and unimaginative) and 11 dimensions relating to the ways a piece of art made viewers think or feel (such as anger, calm, and pleasure). Those 11 impact dimensions could be distilled into four broad categories, Chatterjee said: positive affect, negative affect, a feeling of immersion, and transformative experiences (British Journal of Psychology, Vol. 114, No. 2, 2023).
You can read more about this interesting work here.
My next Art Inspired creative writing workshop is on August 22 at HOTA on the Gold Coast.
