"Gimme dat old-time religion!"

 

I’m a dinosaur with superpowers granted me by the Hungarian government.

Dinosaur, because I remember cars with fins, the advent of color television (I was five when we got ours), and the body count of the Vietnam War being reported nightly on the news.

And the superpowers? Since I’m over 65, I can use any form of public transport in Hungary for free. And because I am a school teacher, my teacher’s ID gets me into any museum free of charge.

My summer vacation just started (that other teacher superpower: two months’ vacation) and I have a plan. I live in downtown Budapest, just two blocks from the Opera metro stop. From there, it’s a nine-minute (free!) ride to Heroes’ Square, where the Fine Arts Museum is located. After entering the museum (for free!!!) I plan to head straight down to the classical antiquity section, peruse my favorite objects from the Greek and Roman world (mostly Roman, since Budapest sits on the one-time edge of the Roman empire, and digs have yielded lots of little goodies). and when the time seems ripe, get out my journal and a fountain pen, and explore the universe through the (cursive) hand-written word.

Dinosaur heaven!

A word on the scandal of the contemporary museum

I invite you to join me as I fulfill a dream I’ve had for decades. The contemporary museum offends me to the core. Without doubt, the government officials and administrators who designed the practices of the contemporary museum will all suffer in the third circle of hell for their greed.

Have you ever been to the Uffizi in Florence? After paying an outrageous fee, one is thrown into a flow of the Great Unwashed and hurried along from painting to painting. The gallery houses more than 6,000 paintings and over 177,000 drawings and prints. After paying the fee, people feel like they have to get their money’s worth, so they move from painting to painting, spending about fifteen seconds to take it in, and then move on to the next one. The majority of visitors have no idea what they’re looking at. They have no comprehension of what historical era or cultural milieu the artists was formed by, or what religious, philosophical, aesthetic or scientific concepts the artist is wrestling with. And finally they arrive at the room where the Botticellis are. Again, they don’t really comprehend anything beyond that they are beautiful. They know nothing of the revival of classical themes in western Europe during the Renaissance after the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks. They know nothing of the patronage of the arts by the Italian middle class.

But the whole system caters to this sector.

It hasn’t always been this way.

The name “museum” originally meant a temple to the muses. Museums were to objects what libraries are to books. They were meant to be places of learning and scholarship. But something happened when various administrative bodies (national governments, cities, universities, etc.) realized they possessed a collection of artifacts that people would pay cash to see. It was really only in the latter half of the 20th century that it became an element of tourism to go to museums. Before that, museums were for scholars. But, there was a buck to be made!

If I were king, the way I’d run museums like this: admission would be on a time basis. You want your one-time, one day ticket so you can say you’ve been there, done that and got the exorbitantly expensive tacky t-shirt, then you’re welcome to it. Otherwise, you by a ticket for, say, five hours. You check in on some digital gadget, and go into the museum. You take your time looking at (contemplating) the objects you’re interested in, and once you reach sensory/conceptual overload, you check out. First day you were in the museum 50 minutes. You can go have lunch and come back in a few hours, or go home and look some stuff up on the internet or in (OMG!) real books. When you go back another day, you can go back to some things with deeper understanding, and pick up where you left off. There’s no rushed feeling like you have to see everything in one visit (an utterly absurd compulsion, that I, too was subject to when I bought that Uffizi ticket).

And now you see why I say I’m living the dream. With my free entry and free transport, I can use the museum exactly the way I think it should be used. I can come and go as I please: spend as much time on any exhibit as I like, as often as I like. I will honor the museum as The Temple of the Muses.

And the essays to follow will be the art inspired by those muses. Let me share it with you!