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How can young people be enticed into art galleries? The National Gallery’s latest wheeze is to pay social media influencers to film TikToks there.
And so we find the vintage fashion fan Isabel Chan gushing about Greta Garbo’s appearance in a mosaic; the travel editor Emma Cooke promoting date nights among the Monets and Michelangelos; and the former Bake Off contestant Lizzie Acker baking Van Gogh-inspired cupcakes and talking about reducing her anxiety as a neurodiverse newcomer to the art world.
A few of the creators involved talk with erudition about particular pictures. Most, however, stick to the day job and use the famous space as a means to bring the conversation back to their personal brand: performing comedy sketches or taking photos of film locations, for instance.
A breathless format tends to reduce the gallery’s stunning collection to a near-subliminal backdrop of blurry squares and rectangles, while a colourfully dressed talking head dominates the foreground. Jump cuts, floating bits of text and music add to the sensory cacophony.
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As a viewing experience it’s only marginally less frustrating than trekking to Trafalgar Square to see a much-beloved object, then having your sightlines obscured from every angle by chatty, spatially unaware people holding up their phones.
In this respect, the influencers’ contributions are not so very different from the rest of those on the National Gallery’s social media channels, in which various curators stand directly in front of canvases, gushing approachably about makers or processes while affording only tantalising glimpses of the works themselves. This output is part of a trend in which prestige art venues across the world try to grab the passing attention of would-be attendees using novel means: poems at the Prado, discos at the Musée d’Orsay, cats in cars driving to the Uffizi.
Film technology allows close reproduction of the experience of looking at a painting, lingering minutely over indentations left by the sweep of a magician’s brush before panning out to some spectacular scene frozen in pigment. But you won’t find much of that old-fashioned stuff in gallery marketing these days. Conventional wisdom would have it that you have to keep up with the times; and these times, in particular, involve ten seconds of focus before swiping.
It’s right, of course, that important national collections try to attract new generations of museumgoers. For UK institutions the task seems particularly pressing, for the whole sector is in decline. The National Gallery has witnessed a 48 per cent drop in numbers since 2019. Still, one has to ask whether getting lots of people into your gallery is worth celebrating if all they are there to do is chat each other up or zip through the rooms distractedly taking selfies.
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This isn’t just snobbish harrumphing about irreverent behaviour in a secular holy place. Rather, there’s something about appreciating a painting or sculpture that requires you to centre it as the main event and not as a pretext for other activities. It takes time, total absorption in the task, and the will to come back again and again — all habits in wider danger of extinction.
The philosopher of art Richard Wollheim, for instance, was an advocate for spending whole mornings in front of a single picture, writing that “it often took the first hour or so in front of a painting for stray associations or motivated misperceptions to settle down, and it was only then, with the same amount of time or more to spend looking at it, that the picture could be relied upon to disclose itself as it was.”
The critic TJ Clark wrote an entire book about going every day for months to look at just two Poussin landscapes. In most public contexts, spending long periods staring intently into imaginary space is treated as inefficient or even weird; but proper engagement with visual art positively requires it.
And for centuries, philosophers trying to capture what is uniquely valuable about aesthetic experiences — be they of paintings, sonatas or sunsets — have emphasised the way that a profound experience of something beautiful is temporarily detached from awareness of the self.
There is a kind of sensuous pleasure in enveloping with your gaze a great painting that exceeds any thought of its financial worth, historical connections, or how chic it will look in an Insta story. Your mind is consumed instead with judicious lines, dabs, streaks and smears, collectively resolving in the wide angle to some expression of timeless emotion or drama.
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In the 18th century, Francis Hutcheson talked of a pleasure in beautiful things which is “distinct from that joy which arises from self-love upon prospect of advantage”, while Karl Moritz talked of “unselfish gratification”. Much later, Hans-Georg Gadamer talked of a “distance” that makes “self-forgetfulness” possible.
Put simply, in a best-case scenario you lose yourself in a painting, both in the detail and in the whole. With the news full of conflict and chaos, I can’t be the only one who craves this sort of dreamlike unselfing once in a while. Yet you can’t get this intense an experience by treating the museum transactionally, as a place only to acquire social capital. You have to do something scary: leave your phone in your pocket and commit to one or two objects for as long as it takes, letting them take charge of your senses.
What gallery managers won’t tell you is that if you’re not up for seriously attempting this, it’s probably not worth going at all. And even better, that will leave more peace, quiet, and space for the rest of us.
Kathleen Stock is a contributing writer at UnHerd
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