One More Thing
TAoN No. 171: A suggestion for your next museum visit. Plus a new icebreaker, and a 50K subs celebration sale!
Today I have a suggested addition to your next museum visit or gallery hop or art-viewing journey. It’s borrowed from, or at least inspired by, the recent book Get The Picture, by Bianca Bosker1.
Get The Picture got lots of attention for taking a buzzy peek into the high-end art world, including its occasional absurdities. And that is very fun stuff. But also, threaded through the book, and animating its concluding section, is an articulation of Bosker’s evolving sense of how to appreciate art, and looking and perception in general. Some of that material has a very TAoN vibe.
Among other things, Bosker spends time as a museum guard at the Guggenheim in New York, and based on that and all her art-looking adventures, she sketches the parameters for the museum tour she would like to lead. To quote her directly:
One: You don’t have to look at everything.
Two: You do have to look at something for at least five minutes.
Three: Don’t you dare lay eyes on the wall text— that is, the paragraph-long explanation pasted on the wall beside many of the artworks.
These are wise paramaters, and she elaborates on each, adding tips for tackling that five-minute directive if you find it challenging. (She also allows that you can “glance at” the wall text after you’ve spent time with a work — but she’s adamant that should get and stay “in the work” first. Fair enough!)
—> But the best part of her proposed tour is that it continues after you’ve left the museum. Her imagined itinerary from the Guggenheim spills into Central Park, to consider “pencil portraits of tourists” sold by street vendors, and break dancers by a fountain. And then, “there’s an installation I want you to see,” she writes, with enthusiasm:
“Look at this hot-dog cart wrapped head to toe in the most eyeball-jittering, borderline pornographic drawings of chili cheese dogs you’ve ever seen. … Look at the cart the way you stared at Brancusi’s Miracle. Stop. Notice. Wonder.”
I love this idea: When you leave a museum, your perceptions amped up from the heightened sensory state of experiencing art, carry that state into the everyday: add at least one more thing to the day’s attention agenda. It obviously doesn’t have to be a hot dog cart — but the point is it could be! It’s up to you to settle the gift of your attention on whatever you want.
Earlier in the book, Bosker describes the influence of walking around with her artist friend Julie Curtiss, who delighted in the everyday beauty she noticed around her — the glow of traffic lights, a column of steam rising from a manhole, rectangle patterns formed by office towers. In time, Bosker too started “viewing the everyday the way I looked at art,” with considered attention, openness. Elsewhere she writes:
“Beauty is that moment when your mind jumps the curb. Beauty is the instant you sit up and start paying attention. Whatever makes that happen for you can be beautiful. … But you have to be open to seeing it. Beauty doesn’t find you. You create beauty by looking for it.”
So next time you go to the museum, take the time to add an extra step to the experience — find your hot-dog cart!
50K+ SUBSCRIBERS SPECIAL!
Excited to have passed a (free) subscriber milestone — 50,703 TAoN readers can’t be wrong! Marking the occasion with a 20% off sale on one-year subs.
If you enjoy TAoN, please become a supporter with a paid subscription. You’ll get access to the full archives and supporter-only bonus posts and discussion threads — and, most important, you’ll help keep this project alive!
—> Just can’t swing a paid sub? Get comped by referring friends; details here.
Or drop a line to my email address found toward the bottom of this post and we’ll work it out. (Or better yet send your request to my physical address listed below — I love mail! Just make sure to include your email.)
THE NEXT FREE EDITION IN TWO WEEKS
Noticing is about other people, too. The Icebreaker series aims to help with that. There’s a central collection spot for all the icebreakers to date, here.
Today’s icebreaker comes from reader Jake C.:
"How did you spend time regrettably last week, and if you could retroactively get that time back, how would you spend it?"
Thank you, Jake!
Please send your favorite icebreaker (whether you made it up or found it elsewhere) to consumed@robwalker.net. If I use your icebreaker you’ll get a free three-month sub to the paid edition of TAoN (or some other fun prize if you’re already a supporter).
IN OTHER NEWS
“Making use of a public Wi-Fi network and Shazam’s song-identifying software, Bop Spotter identifies the songs it hears and generates a public, ever-expanding list of the street’s music.” More: “This is culture surveillance,” Walz wrote on the Bop Spotter website. “No one notices, no one consents. But it’s not about catching criminals. It’s about catching vibes.”
Browse BBC’s massive sound-effects library and “create your own soundscape.” Via.
Artist finds an audience with still life paintings of junk food. “A lemon has got its own beauty, but it’s not as connected to who we are today.” NYT gift link.
Appreciating the mid-century bowling alley.
Find out what the weather was like when, and where, you were born. Via.
Reminder: Flaming Hydra has a Kickstarter, partly to fund an anthology (and restore the online archives) of seminal internet publication The Awl — tentatively including a piece I contributed once upon a time.
Reminder: The Lincoln Institute of Land Policy has published a book of 20 of my columns for them on cities and technology. City Tech is for an audience interested in urban policy and planning, so if you or someone you know might be into it, more here.
OKAY THAT’S IT!
As always, I value your feedback (suggestions, critiques, positive reinforcement, constructive insults directed at me, not at anyone else, etc.), as well as your tips or stories or personal noticing rituals, things we need a word for, and of course your icebreakers: consumed@robwalker.net. Or use the comments.
—> Tell someone about TAoN! Maybe we can get to 50k subs by year-end! Or just click the heart symbol. That always makes my day.
And thanks for reading …
rw
RobWalker.net | NB: I use (some) Amazon Affiliate links
All this by Rob Walker PO Box 171, 748 Mehle St., Arabi LA 70032. Send me mail!
To unsubscribe see the bottom of the email, or go here.
My arty friends keep telling me to read Get the Picture by Bianca Bosker, but I think this newsletter finally convinced me! "Beauty is that moment when your mind jumps the curb." -- what a perfect sentence. That's going in my commonplace book today.
Love the suggestion about remaining in a heightened state of awareness outside a museum. I will say from my own experience that some museums are far more conducive to this sort of thing than others. Pop Art and very conceptual art really gets me looking at fire hydrants and hot dog carts with fresh eyes…. The Broad in Los Angeles is unparalleled for this sort of post-museum experience. I sort of like that post-museum experience better than I like the contents of the Broad itself…