Comment by qq66
6 days ago
By limiting the hours today, it helps make sure that the people who do see it are the ones most interested in seeing it. Those are the ones who will look up the schedule, schedule their trip around it, etc... while if it's just permanently up, many of the viewers will be random passersby (and the number of viewers per hour of illumination will probably be lower)
Exactly this. When I was younger they did an exhibit of the Great Wave and Ukiyo-e next to where I lived, so I saved the date when the ticket office opened on my calendar. I then found friends interested in coming with me and grabbed some tickets before they ran out. If you just put it on display every day it will just fade away while being yet another print in a museum full of paintings. You're denying future generations the chance love this print and cherish the opportunity to see one in person. Art is not just taking a photo and passing by, it's about appreciating the fact some human made some very special thing we can now enjoy
> You're denying future generations the chance love this print and cherish the opportunity to see one in person. Art is not just taking a photo and passing by, it's about appreciating the fact some human made some very special thing we can now enjoy
I personally don't get this attitude, but I also don't understand a lot of what draws people to museums when we have photographs of works of art. Which is not to say that I don't get why people view works i n person. I just don't understand neurotically trying to preserve a physical work when the author likely didn't even care that much or consider a more preservable medium to begin with.
For many works, even the best photographs don't entirely capture the physical object - particularly those where texture, including brush strokes is important. Many pigments can't be duplicated via the standard printing gamut. This particular work is a woodblock print, so perhaps photography is adequate - I don't know.
I'm not clear that the original artist's materials, with respect to longevity is really relevant, assuming the artist didn't explicitly intend it to be ephemeral.
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Paintings are not simple two-dimensional images. You can't view a painting from different angles from a photo. You can't see the light reflecting off the texture of the paint from different viewing angles. You can't get close and observe the brush strokes. A photo of a painting is superficially similar to the painting, but there's much that it lacks.
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We enjoy seeing art in person because it better transmits the essential human creative spirit of whoever was behind it, in a way that photographs of an artwork simply don't do. This is one main reason why people want to see art in person, those who can't understand that maybe don't have the same emotional notions about art. I wonder if some of them are similar in mind to those who think an AI-generated drawing is no different than anything made by a human creator for their sterile, impersonal apartment walls.
As for why these pieces should be preserved even if their creators were sometimes sloppy about doing the original legwork. Well, in the case of many famous works, they're literal pieces of history dude. Choosing how often and when to display them isn't just about "optimizing viewership". These aren't blog posts or IG reels. It's also about saving their literal existence for as long as possible.
The worth and value of something, especially in art, is often assigned wrong in the moment. But on the axis of history, it has a life of its own.
Just 200 years ago, in a world without most of the technologies we take for granted today, art played a fundamentally representative role in stretching the boundaries of ideas, imagination, possibilities, and in extension, human cognition and social impact.
Preservation is the point. Art is made in the moment. Yeah there can be scientifically proven ways of longer-lasting / preservable mediums, inks/paints, etc. Pieces of art capture inspirations and ideas of the creators and pass that feeling along to future generations to also be inspired with new ideas for their times. They can be a snapshot of one place, at one moment in time, but they can also be timeless.
Photographs of paintings don't look the same as paintings. Dunno about woodblock prints but I'd imagine the same is true.
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There's a nice Japan museum in the Netherlands which was founded by one of the greatest weebs of the 19th century. It's basically his giant house filled with Japanese memorabilia. Watching katanas, kimonos and Japanese lacquer boxes in reality is quite different from watching them in a book!
Ok that is adding an interesting variable of perceived interest and then it's not about # of people anymore, but rather time plus # of _interested_ people. I guess that has to be the reasoning because it does make sense if that's the optimization goal.
Though I'd imagine mostly its going to be a random sample of people that happen to be there that day. I imagine there's likely under 1% of museum visitors actually chasing single works and planning trips like that. So most people that would see it are still just random "museum people" (which under the "interest" metric is still better than purely random people).
> By limiting the hours today, it helps make sure that the people who do see it are the ones most interested in seeing it.
We should auction off the visitor spots, then.
You joke, but visitor slots are limited. I missed it at the British Museum because I turned up without a reservation. Also, BM have two impressions and rotates them meaning that people can see "it" (actually one or the other) for longer. Some institutions like Boston have a handful of impressions so can show "it" more frequently: the last time they cycled three.
Similar to this, the Munch Museum in Oslo has three variations of "The Scream" on rotation, with only one of them shown each day [0]. So you're always guaranteed to be able to see it in some form, but you'll have go to multiple days if you want to see them all.
0: https://www.munch.no/en/The-Scream/where-can-i-see-the-screa...
Money is not a direct factor of who is interested the most so it is not necessary fair.
An example: my partner is working in a relatively expensive "wellness" service. Some people reserve and never show up even though they have reserved for a whole family and lose more than a thousand euros. I am pretty sure a lot of people that cannot afford this service at this price on a regular basis would if it was less expensive for them. I know I do as I only profit from it because I have a 50% discount and my partner doesn't have to pay so we pay a quarter of the price everytime we go together.
So making it an auction and you would still see a mix of interested people and vain but wealthy people for which paying for this would still be pocket change and would just take an "I've been there" selfie and move on without really being interested in the artwork itself. So more money for the museum but not necessarily representative of the interest of the visitors.
Oh, you just suggested your own fix: if people don't show up, you just keep their money (and presumably you let the next guy on the queue in earlier.)