The Art Museum of the Future

I love art. I love the numinous experience of going to a gallery, the echoing footsteps and the walls crowded with work. I love the knowledge that not only was this object made 100, 200, 800 years ago, but that over the years and the centuries people like me have looked at it and felt their inexpressible emotions expressed. I love going to galleries in different cities, all over the world, and seeing different traditions or paintings by famous artists that are new to me; I love going to curated exhibitions with loans from all over, exploring one aspect of an artist, or a time period, or a style. But I also recognise this isn’t the only way to experience art.

It can be stifling, going to a gallery. If you take a friend and want to discuss the art, people stare at you, angry. When you see art, even restored art, you are seeing centuries of decay and discolouration, you are seeing the framing and curatorial choices of one person, you are seeing it the ‘proper’ way. Art is elitist, exclusive, it can only be seen from three feet away and goes back to its rich owner at the end of the exhibition – to the Crown, to the vault, to the investment conglomerate. Art galleries are no place for children and remarkably inaccessible to disabled people. Photography is banned. Art discourages social engagement at the same time as being there solely to be engaged with, to be felt without being discussed. And yet, we try. We take school trips to the Tate and the National Gallery, we ship priceless art globally to bring it to new audiences, we are surrounded by postcards and digital prints and souvenirs with Van Gough, Kahlo, Degas on them, rendered in 2D, mass-market, consumable wares. We are trying to engage with art, without thinking perhaps it’s the tradition rather than the art itself that is inaccessible. That it is deliberately so.

Whistler and Berger. That’s what it comes down to. Whistler wanting a space, unlike the salons of the 19th century, where art was only for the people who appreciated it. Where art was gratia artis, not for the sake of gossip and social phenomenon and seeing royals and socialites and nudes. Whistler making the most inaccessible gallery he could, all in white, to explore what it meant to display art, and he being so important and revolutionary that it became the norm. Berger, questioning how we engage with art, validating children’s ideas on Caravaggio, telling the average television viewer that they are a critic, that art does not simply lie on a wall, inert, but that discussion can thrive about what we are seeing, and why and how we are seeing it. There is room for these two perspectives in art – but not in the same museum.

Imagine if we could touch the artworks. If blind people could engage with the brushstrokes and the shape of the oils on a canvas. If children could play, and stare, and laugh. If the Old Masters were in a room with the Blue Riders, if we didn’t have to guard the paintings from natural light and thieves and damage. If a museum were full of copies – proper copies, good copies, not merely 2D postcards – and we could engage with them and discuss what implications that has on the value of the art, and accept that it could still be a quasi-religious experience, a different kind of enjoyment, without the history.

We have been scanning art for decades. Almost as soon as x-ray technology was available, we applied it to art. We have been looking under paintings, fixing them, exploring their hidden histories and putting it on the plaques next to the art. We know about re-using canvases, changing models, disagreements and biographical points because of this. Art museums don’t talk about restorations very much. They don’t tell punters that they have used microscopes to chemically recreate pigments to daub onto existing artwork, hired specialists to repair flaking paint, scrape away dirt, examine and maintain works ancient and modern. We don’t discuss the role of forgery and copying and studio work in centuries of art history – from Michelangelo to Hirst, most artists learned from copying the work of others and have assistants in their studio to execute their instructions. We don’t talk about the how artists from Da Vinci to Warhol created multiple versions of their masterpieces – about woodcuts and lithographs and photography, and how all those are still art, still valuable, still have that essential connection. What is the difference between using technology to restore an artwork and using it to recreate it? Why can’t we 3D print an exact copy, and put that on display? Wouldn’t it increase engagement, allow diversity of opinion, create a new generation of art lovers? Perhaps that’s exactly why it isn’t done.

There’s no denying Whistler’s conception of the gallery deliberately created an art elite. It has long been the idea that there are some people who know art, understand art, are valuable to art… and that the rest of us may as well look at a postcard for all we recognise the chiaroscuro. Rich people own art, collect art, donate art, and art’s subjectivity makes it prime fodder for a corrupt industry that only cares about protecting its investments and remaining elite. Any argument for a museum of copies would have to acknowledge that the potential for art to lose its value would mean it was impossible to even begin. But I don’t think art could lose its value – anybody who has tried to copy a copied cassette or photocopy a photocopied sheet knows the deterioration that comes, rapidly, with a chain of imitation. But more than that, most of the value of a piece of art is in the numinosity I mentioned at the top of the article. I love art because others, just like me, centuries ago loved it. In the National Gallery there are medieval altar pieces that women just like me kneeled in front of to pray, 800 years ago. The idea that Seurat’s brush made deliberate, painstaking choices, that Gentileschi made emotional, practised sweeps, that Hepworth’s chisel worked slowly, methodically, and their aching wrists created this magic cannot be denied. A copy can never replace an original – so why are we denying art lovers the opportunity to see differently via copies?

The Tate has a service where you can buy a recreation of any painting in their collection. We bought my dad a Turner, and it hangs in his bedroom. This copy is simply airbrushed onto canvas, and yet he still loves it, still feels connected to it – and still visits real Turners every chance he gets. The art museum of the future needs to accept that it cannot do everything, that there are different ways to experience art – and to commit to doing the absolute most to facilitate both types of experience.