There is something wonderful about galleries and museums.
The wealth of a nation outlined for the public at large. The intellectual,
economic and artistic achievements put before the country.
There is so much available now it seems incredible that we
only seem to visit them when there’s ‘something on’. I stepped into the
National Portrait gallery in London yesterday to see the Lucien Freud
retrospective. There were dozens of his works and I was blown away. I recommend
the show to everyone. But then I realised I hadn’t seen the rest of the
gallery. Stepping out and travelling up the incredibly long escalator I was
thrown into a living timeline of my homeland. History, art, culture and the
minds of previous generations were waiting for me like residents in a
retirement home searching the horizon for guilt ridden grandchildren.
I walked into the British Museum today and then into the Tate
modern gallery and was dismayed again at the queues around the block for the
special shows while the real treasury lay open and free (and not £12 to get
in!). The search for novelty, the webisation of the zeitgeist, they have drawn
us away from the foundations of our nations to the flickering, peripheral
flights of marketing fancy. Although Freud doesn’t fall into this category much
of it does; facebooked catalogues of work designed to get feet to fall through
the doors rather than contribute to the spiritual health of the nation that all
art should serve.
Do me a favour, wherever you are. Go and pay a visit to a
free museum (and make a donation). Go and admire Whistlejacket in the national
Gallery, run your hand over the Rosetta Stone in the British Museum, wince at
the ‘Maiden’ in the National Museum of Scotland or stare at Titians for the few
more months they are with us in Edinburgh. Walk through cathedrals and sit and
sketch statues or brickwork of buildings that were thrown up before your grandmothers.
Your nation has collected beautiful things; go and say hello.
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