I was in Chicago for a book event this weekend with some time on my hands in the space between doing some publicity things and preparing for an event. After stopping for Cuban sandwiches with my publicist Brittani, we decided to pop into the Art Institute of Chicago for a hot second.
Most museums are very large. There are so many things in there, and most of them you won’t care about at all. Many people view excursions to see art as a chore that must be completed the way homework must be completed. You have to see everything. You have to read all the plaques. You have to appreciate that which you do not and cannot understand. This, I think, is stupid.
One of my most firm beliefs is that you do not need to see everything in a museum. Consuming art, which is inherently personal, as if it is a medicine you must choke down is a huge reason why people feel disconnected from art. And that sucks, because I think spending time with art is a fundamental part of being a person.
There are no rules about how long you have to spend in a museum to make it worth your time. There is no quota of paintings or sculptures you must see to have made it worth it. Perhaps you personally have a quota based on ticket price, but this too can be subverted. Many museums engage in reciprocal programs where if you become a member of one, you gain access to many. Having one of these memberships makes it easy to justify, as I did, spending less than an hour in one of our country’s greatest collections of art. Many museums also offer free nights or days throughout the month. If you treat these as adventures to see just a few things instead of everything, it is much easier to manage the crowds! You can just zip in and out!
To be fair, I have been to Art Institute of Chicago before and did not need to see everything. In fact, all I wanted to see was one painting: Georgia O’Keeffe’s 1965 painting “Sky Above Clouds IV,” which you can see at the top of this blog.
In the Art Institute of Chicago, the painting is hung above a giant staircase between the Impressionist section and more modern works. It is monumental, almost the length of the entire room (24 feet), and positioned high enough on the wall that you can view it easily from the second floor. It was too large to be hung in the San Francisco Museum of Art when it first toured.
The piece was inspired by O’Keeffe’s experience as an airline passenger, and I’ve remembered it several times on the many planes I have flown on in the last year. I look out the little curved window with its blue tint across a sea of cotton ball clouds, and I think about this painting. And so because I have been thinking about the painting the way one thinks about a friend who lives far away and is bad at texting, I decided to go see her. The museum was crowded, but this was fine. We weren’t there to see everything. We could blow by people crowded around Van Gogh’s to get to this painting, and we did. We spent a few minutes there, not many, watching the painting in the light, commenting on a bride and groom having their photographs taken on the stairwell in front of it. How beautiful it can be to be a human.
One thing I love about this painting is how small you feel in front of it, the way you feel so tiny inside the plane peering out. It’s size is part of its appeal. We saw it. We felt small. We zoomed away.
But we had energy still. It did not matter that the museum was crowded because we were not trying to linger in the hopes of consuming it all. We were here for a single thing. And not unlike having a second martini at the bar, having consumed one (the O’Keeffe), we decided we could have another—wanted to have another even.
Brittani suggested we also visit the Thorne Rooms, which I had missed entirely on my last trip to the Art Institute. Narcissa Niblack Thorne assembled a group of Chicago artisans in the 1930s to make miniature rooms at a 1:12 scale. These are so strange and so small and so intricate. We went to see them because we could.
And they were so lovely and mysterious. Approaching one from the side you could see into the miniature where another room exists off to the side. Maybe there’s a staircase there or a dining room table. Maybe a beautiful wallpaper is tucked away inside the side room like a secret. From the front, it appears as only one room, beautiful and ornate, but hiding nothing.
Here we lingered a little longer, but not much. We gazed at the tiny rooms. We pointed at the tiny gilded books in the tiny perfect libraries. We pointed out gardens and little sculptures and a teeny tiny child’s doll on the floor. It was a delight and felt magical, and then suddenly, we were done. I became hot. My brain felt too full. There were too many people. So we left!
We were in the museum for 45 minutes, probably less. I’ve begun to make a habit of this behavior. In Seattle last week, I popped briefly into the Frye Art Museum to see a couple of paintings. At home in Philadelphia, I will briefly pop into the Barnes Foundation to see one or two things. It feels a little rebellious when confronted with the wealth a museum has to offer, to moderate your intake, to choose only one or two things to admire and enjoy. But no one can or will stop you! Granting myself permission to consume art only until I’m full means that I leave a lot of museums earlier than I might have in the past. But I leave them with my mind racing, my body full of inspiration and beauty, not overstuffed and unhappy and too hot.
There is no right way to observe art, no A grade to be given for experiencing the museum the best. Instead we have a more beautiful opportunity: to experience the world at the rate we want, to pace ourselves or gorge ourselves depending on our moods. Lately, I’ve been choosing to pace, and finding myself much more satisfied.
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