In Praise of First Impressions
The problem with the Da Vinci Code was that it exposed every Tom, Dick, and Harry to the hackneyed idea that every work of art has a specific "nugget of truth" (as an old art history professor used to joke when the class would clam up in front of a particularly abstruse slide). This contributed to a wider trend of "getting" a work, and museum-goers have the idea that "art" is just a contest for who can absorb the most "accepted interpretations" and spew them out when prompted by exposure to an image.
As Smee says in his article:
It's much easier to pretend that art is immaculately conceived, and to focus instead on its "meanings."Robert Langdon, symbologist? Bah.
When visiting a museum, it's not uncommon to see everyone spending all their time meekly consulting their guides or the mounted placards. A surprising amount of people aren't looking at the art. Is it, as Smee says, really due to a sort of inferiority complex? I think so. We're pretty fixated on trying to discern what we think we should be thinking. So why not accept that a fresh eye is just as valuable as a connoisseur's?
This makes me remember how much I loved my creative writing workshops. We weren't expecting to produce the next great American novel within a semester's time (well, not all of us), but we had fun throwing off the humble-student mantle and enjoying the role of author. Talking about the process was the best - how more often than you'd think you write without an agenda and have these happy accidents and look at what you wrote and are shocked not that it makes you feel a certain way, but that it simply produced a feeling at all.
Wooo-ee. Seems that Teacher Training at the museum has worked it's magic on me.
