Once museums re-open, will we see our favourite works in the same way? Will we still resonate to the “soulful heft” of Old Masters works, made when pandemics were a constant worry? “I’m interested by an abrupt shift in my attitude toward [Velazquez’ Las Meninas. It] suddenly casts a shadow of … death and disaster. There would never be another moment in the Spanish court so radiant—or a painting, anywhere, so good”.
Galleries are getting serious about online. New offerings – exhibition walk-throughs, restricted access sales, even robot led tours – are all being tried. One gallerist expects smaller art fairs to be hit but change might be broader than that. Says another gallerist “I don’t believe [the gallery] model will cease to exist but the scale on which we were all operating may well.” A sample of current online shows is here.
Museums in financial trouble sometimes sell items from their collections. Problem – it upsets people. Now that many museums are worried about survival, surely more will do so. Long standing opponents to this practice are bowing to the inevitable. One observer, noting the current dire circumstances, says “the notion of a “public good” has become nothing but academic and journalistic fodder.“
Gallery openings and art fairs offer collective enjoyment of art. Now this is off limits there is an opportunity to focus on “pleasures we cultivate in isolation”. One part of this is awareness of our “isolation and smallness in a grandly scaled universe”. This “fundamentally private” insight can be learned in a crowd “but you can also learn it alone, and there’s no time like the present”.
Humorous stumblings around Google Arts & Culture during lockdown. “If you press a single arrow key long enough, you can set a gallery to spinning like a top. [In] the Uffizi in Florence, I kept having a problem centering myself, so I would slam into windows like a confused bird. Still, if you accept that a Google Arts & Culture tour is nothing like walking through a museum, it has its own strange pleasures.”