This essay was written, as usual, for my Semiotics class. We were supposed to write about museums in the form “I used to think _____, but now I think _____”. I didn’t really follow those directions. It’s not exactly my most cogent piece of writing, but I think it’s interesting that I, a usually avid supporter of museums, came down so hard on them in this essay. I knew everyone else in the class was going to write the stale “I used to think museums were boring, but now I think they’re swell!” essay, so I decided to go with something a little different.

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In an article entitled “‘Privileging’ Postmodernism,” George F. Will relates an event at a museum wherein a worker covered a bronze sculpture with burlap and duct tape to protect it from damage, only to inspire a heated artistic discussion among visitors when wind blew a corner of the burlap free. The visitors “discussed the deep symbolism and implication of the artist having covered his work in burlap and why he allowed the public only partial access… the appropriateness of the texture of the burlap in relation to the medium used… and the cosmic significance of using degradable materials to hide the true inner beauty.” Will finds this scene laughable, presumably because, unbeknownst to the museum visitors at whom he pokes fun, there was no artist, no person who sat down and deliberately created this spectacle.

What have we come to that we have to rely on people manipulating the world to make it interesting for us? In the movie American Beauty, Ricky Fitts, a troubled teenager, shows footage he taped of a plastic bag being tossed by the wind–”dancing with” him, in his words–and he remarks, “Sometimes there’s so much beauty in the world I feel like I can’t take it, like my heart’s going to cave in.” This is precisely the concept that Will lacks. He is wrong in his assumption that there is no artist; the artist is nature, the art a happy coincidence. Beauty does not have to (and perhaps cannot) be created; it is all around us, in the world we inhabit. Most museums assume us incapable of noticing this beauty. The problem is that we live up to only what is expected of us.
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Another victim of the accidental film mis-processing. Oh well.