On The Barnes

And, wow. The Barnes Foundation museum is really overwhelming. I think maybe my favorite museum

experience ever, certainly my favorite art museum experience.

There's a whole graduate thesis
in here somewhere.

My least favorite, for the record, is the new MoMA. Well, I guess it isn’t really new anymore. That is a big dumb museum that all the objects in it are just pieces of “art.” Look at the “art.” On this wall is some “art.” Take a photo with your phone.

I mean, and it’s not just portraits of Madam Vandervlosky in her sitting room we’re talking about here. We’re talking about Duchamp, who is surely rolling his eyes in his grave every time he thinks about it. $22? Are you fucking kidding me?

Ceci n'est pas un joke. 

MoMA is so good at trading on the commodification of objects that it can take any old bullshit and throw it in there, pointing out that an ipod is as much a rarified object that we can pay $22 to take a picture of with our phone as a Gaugin. In that way, the MoMA is a kind of reverse Duchamp, in that rather than de-valuing rarified objects by putting ordinary ones in their midst, they rarify ordinary objects by placing them alongside things someone has already decided are valuable.

Let's not degrade the man who created
 this subtle exploration of human experience.

Just to clarify, I don’t think this is any insult to the Gaugin. I think the truth of the MoMA is actually very true. Painting. Mp3 Player. 17^th Century Tea Set. It’s all rich people’s stuff to me.

John once said that the thing about working at a fancy restaurant is that it’s the same as working at any restaurant, except that your job is to tell people that they are rich all the time. “May I take your coat? You’re so rich! Would you like to hear the specials? Wow! You’re very rich.”

That is what I feel like I’m doing when I go to the MoMA. Telling rich people that they are rich. “Oh, you ordained this good and meaningful? You’re so rich!”

This gets a twist weirder when many of the objects being commodified were designed with the very specific intention of criticizing the commodification of art objects. You paid five bazillion dollars for a wheel nailed to a stool? Wow! You’re very rich!”

The most grotesque manifestation of this phenomenon that I have been a part of was in the Vatican Museum.

The gaping maw of the Vatican
Museum spews the bile that is us

Have you been there? The slough of wretched humanity shuffles through that museum’s engorged, betapestried intestines in a purgatorial perpetuity, holding screens aloft to photograph object after object until each faceless human form is eventually excreted into the gift shop. The Vatican adds insult to injury in that it commodifies art and spirituality in one sprawling vomitous palace.

An art museum casts you in one of two roles. Maybe you are rich and you enjoy the affirmation that cultural treasures and sublime expression are things that can be bought, priced and cataloged, and the further comfort of knowing that the things that a person like you owns will one day become treasures in their own right. (If you’re at MoMA, maybe they already are!) Or perhaps you are not rich, and then you get to walk around and be reminded that the things that consensus says are of cultural value are things that cost lots of money, and you can feel grateful for the relatively cheap permission to rent a glimpse.

But the Barnes is not like that. This is a museum that refuses to let the things in its collection be rendered mere “art.” Instead, they get to be themselves.

Because the items in the Barnes are put together intuitively, with no regard for or mention of their history or generous donors or materials or makers, they get to live only as what they are. Now. The curation of the museum is such that things are together because the feel like they go together. They have an intuitive harmony. And intuition, like everything people scoff at, is democratic. The objects, presented as belonging to a long, universal narrative of human experience-- instead of on a pedestal of alienating rarefication-- belong equally to anyone who looks at them.

Barnes' total disregard for a work’s context, and for its country of origin, ends up allowing the pieces to come together and tell the story of breathing on Earth. “Look,” it says. “We all have hands and eyes! lots of things have curves! Many things are hit in a certain way by light, all over the world! What do you know, all the cultures have yellow!”

In the Barnes, your relationship to any piece of work is totally different than in other museums. Your job is to look. To notice. To think and feel. And you cannot do it wrong. No amount of money or education is going to make you better at it than anyone else. Whereas a museum like MoMA puts you in a position to stand in humility before an object, the Barnes invites you to stand in humility before shared human experience.

It’s an expensive building. It’s very fancy, and it costs $20 to go there. And from the audioguide, you can tell that the museum staff really wish they could elevate Albert Barnes, who curated these pieces, to a sort of rarefied artifact himself. But he hasn’t given them much to work with. “It’s possible that this is meant to highlight maternal relationships” says the audioguide hopefully “but Barnes never explained the reason for his arrangements.” Ha ha. Sorry audioguide. Your guess is as good as mine. Or more to the point, mine is as good as yours.

That may not be what every artist ever wanted, but it IS what art wants. In the end, it wants to belong to everyone. Sure, art may think it would be cool to be “art,” hanging there behind a velvet rope. But once it gets there, it will come to learn that being “art” is lonely and unfulfilling. In the end, art always realizes that it wants to be alive in multiple engaged interpretations, not cryogenically frozen in a single expert one.

The Barnes, and I guess Albert Barnes, let the art in the collection do that because although Albert Barnes was a very rich dude, he cared more about the human story than hearing anyone say “you’re so rich!”

It's a lovely museum. You should go spend some hours there.