That Belongs in a Museum!

Does anyone else bristle when he hears that Indiana Jones truism?  I suppose he studied a lot of Aristotle to be able to assert such a tenuous teleology with such certainty.  Whose museum exactly does it belong in?  Because I certainly doubt that after Indie beats the Nazi's butts once again, he donates the artifacts to the governments of the nations in which they were found.  Not to say that those governments have a metaphysical right to determining the ends of old stuff buried in their backyards either, but just from the perspective of proximity, it at least seems a more reasonable logical fallacy and lacks the ugly colonialism implied.

At any rate, this whole preceding paragraph is a bit of a tangent.  But it does touch on a dilemma that I've been thinking about, on and off, since a conversation I had with a friend and art appreciator.  We were discussing the fact that to this day, lawsuits continue for the repatriation of pieces stolen during WWII, sometimes even from museum collections.  She was saying that was pretty cringy, to rob the public of fine art.  I begged to differ, saying that I wasn't a big fan of museums in the first place and anyway, anyone who stuck it to those Roman fascists was okay with me.  We then embarked on a learned dialogue about private ownership versus the public ownership of art in a museum (ironic, since her family apparently possesses some pieces that Louisville's museum couldn't afford).  In positing my philosophies on the matter, I must admit I am a completely unqualified art appreciator, though I find it hard not to feel an innate sense of superiority towards anyone who spends 4 years looking at pictures of naked statues and creepy byzantine Madonna's.

I will not delve further into the pragmatic problems that museums tend to create, i.e. stealing from Jews and weaker countries, keeping the best pieces in the basement, limiting the definition "public" to those who happen to be lucky enough to live in a particular western urban center, the fact that by the time I actually reached the Sistine Chapel I was so inundated with old stuff that I barely looked up as I trudged through yet another visual orgasm, the fact that rich people donating their collections just means they care more about posthumous reputation than their families, (who seriously gets rich enough to own a Picasso by altruism?) etc. though all these facts do very much play into my opinions.  I guess my perspective comes from intuitions about transience and theories of beauty and response.  And my grandma.

The way I see it, museums serve to sterilize.  They take a painting, or a statue or an artifact out of its environment, and place it somewhere shiny at just the right temperature and humidity and then it spends the rest of its days being "preserved".  It's like a hospital or a photograph.  Everyone dies, but we still waste our days trying to prolong them.  Everyone experiences beauty in a way that no one else in the world will but we still try to make photo albums out of moments of sublime wonder.  What is left of the wonders of the world?  A bunch of fences and entrance fees and overweight tourists and cameras and everything discovered and mapped and killed, and whatever created the wonder in the first place is excised, local culture replaced with a bunch of jaded tour guides.

My grandmother was an artist.  The majority of the paintings on the walls of my parents' house belong to her.  She spent her free time at art fairs, selling the stuff for 35-50 USD.  And I have never once regretted that fact, because that was how the pieces lived, and grew and probably rotted, forgotten in some basement in Lombard, Illinois.  But if Mr. Guggenheim himself walked into our house and recognized her as one of the great geniuses and offered to buy the collection, not a single member of my family would think twice in turning him down.  Because we love her art.  Because it lives in our house, it is something that continues to exist in its natural environment, something that we still sit late at night examining and enjoying.  And maybe generations down the line will forget, or not appreciate it and give it away, or sell it, or let it rot in the basement.  Then so be it.  But don't tell me to begrudge someone who wants to love and is willing to pay dearly for something that would otherwise just be sitting on life support in New York or London or Rome.  They can keep their Picasso's (he never moved me) and I can keep my Francis Gates'.               

I do not hate museums, I will probably continue going to them on a regular basis, but I almost never find joy in looking at something I readily recognize from repeated working and reworking and copying and criticizing and historifying, I take joy in discovering something new, something that takes me by surprise, something I can make special to myself.  Anyway.