Art museums don't work

Art museums don’t really work for me.

I want to be transformed by a trip to a museum - to leave an enriched, improved person.

If I am changed by the encounters with art and history that I have in a museum, the change is usually temporary. The transformation doesn’t stick.

Why?

I forget the stuff that museums teach me

One issue is that I simply can’t remember much of what I’m taught.

In the moment, looking intently and reading the insightful curatorial paragraphs on the wall feels enriching. But doing so once for every object I encounter does not actually make me more knowledgeable. It doesn’t help me associate very many facts, insights, names, or historical periods with concrete art objects in a long-term way.

I don’t gain many real discursive skills from the experience. And I doubt others do, either.

Museums are not the only cultural medium that fails to deliver its implied effects. When you’re in a lecture, or you’re reading a book, if you’re focused, you feel the same way as you do when you go to the Met: as if you’re being changed by the lessons being communicated. Like you’re understanding and retaining the information.

The truth is that you will retain very little from these modes of information transmission.

Museums - or at least, the way most people experience them - suffer from similar fundamental issues as books and lectures that Andy Matuschak lays out in Why Books Don’t Work, an essay that is much better substantiated than this little autobiographical note.

Museums overcontextualize things

The grouping and placement of similar objects together in a museum has a dulling effect.

Everything in a given wing begins to look like everything else; details start to disappear as one expects a thing to look roughly like its neighbors to the left and right.

This overcontextualization induces a passive orientation towards the concrete artifacts in front of me; pieces obtain a false sense of familiarity and predictability. Everything starts to seem obvious.

The presentation of pieces in themed batches stands in stark contrast with the way visual culture tends to function in daily life.

Museums are exhausting

All the standing, jockeying, looking, reading, and contemplating… all the appreciating one has to pack into a trip to the museum is tiring.

And there is often far too much to be appreciated.

The sheer quantity of things to see in a museum tends to turn what could be an introspective, lingering series of encounters into a hurried sight-seeing tour.

What is to be done?

I made a little side project with one potential answer to this question.

MetGuessr is a recognition game inspired by geoguessr.

The app shows you a random art work and challenges you to guess some basic facts about it. Your guess is scored by an LLM prompt. You get partial credit when you’re close. You can bookmark pieces you like or want to return to.

The app is built with an awesome public domain dataset from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

I’ve been using it as a chance to grow my web dev skills.