Museum Visits and Museum Publications
Posted by Peter Blaiwas on Fri, Mar 18, 2011
During the 20 years I've lived in Boston, I have seen a great deal of change—for better and worse. Because I will always be a New Yorker at heart, my default position traditionally has been that each new addition to Boston paled beside something similar in my hometown. However, I'm glad to report a notable exception: The Museum of Fine Art's new Art of the Americas wing is a true original that has inspired in me a strong feeling of civic pride.
I first came to the space the same way I approach museum catalogs, starting from the back. Inadvertently sidestepping the visitors center and spectacular atrium, I walked a straight(ish) line through the European galleries and up a small flight of steps into the plummy world of Boston at the end of the 19th century. I found myself surrounded by art, furnishings, and decorative objects displayed together in a way I had never experienced. Particularly impressive were the, for lack of a better term, dioramas—reconstructed or imagined rooms missing their third walls in which paintings, sculpture, furniture, textiles, and decorative arts revive that opulent, bygone era. I was struck by the thought of how many more people can experience and admire this art now. It's no longer the preserve of the privileged few who originally paraded through those rarefied parlors.
Returning a work of art to its historical context, or a reasonable facsimile thereof, changes the relationship between object and viewer. It becomes less one of worshiping at the altar of art and more an opportunity to learn, appreciate, and enrich the way one perceives the world. These new displays allowed me to make unexpected connections and to understand relationships among objects that triggered long-dormant recollections. I left the museum realizing I now knew more than anticipated about many of these works.
The great success of the curators and exhibition designers in bringing the past to life underscores the wide range of senses that are engaged in a museum visit. For me, the MFA's new galleries offer an overwhelmingly tactile experience, in spite of the dearth of "Please Touch" labels. Leafing through the museum's excellent new publication, A New World Imagined, refreshed that experience and expanded it through the heady scent of ink on fine-quality paper—one of the many reasons I love museum books. So, as I witness the seemingly inexorable march toward digital publishing, I find myself wondering how we will replicate this sensory experience through nontactile (or antitactile?) digital media.