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.

This is indeed a problem, for museums can display this beauty only in the form of “art.” It could be argued that there are two kinds of art: that which attempts to replicate some scene of beauty, and that which attempts to convey some sort of opinion, political or otherwise, belonging to the artist. Landscapes, portraits, and nature photographs would fit into the former category; religious imagery, newspaper photographs, and most postmodern and pop art would belong in the latter. Ansel Adams’ magnificent and massive photographs of natural wonders are a simple reflection of the beauty that occurs naturally in the world; Andy Warhol’s assembly-line, false-color silkscreens are opinionated statements on commercialism and the nature of art itself.

Unfortunately, art cannot really be divided up so easily. It is obvious that beauty is subjective, and therefore that any artist who replicates something that he finds beautiful is expressing an opinion that reflects both his personal experiences and the aesthetic of his culture. Furthermore, the artist selects his scene; he crops it to include what he likes and exclude that which he thinks is unnecessary or ugly, he adjusts the lighting to his whim, he chooses his subjects. Even Ansel Adams would wait with his camera until the sun cast (what he considered to be) the perfect shadows across a mountain, whereupon he would spring into action and take his photograph. Actually, all art fits into the latter category–that is, all art expresses an opinion, whether or not the artist intends it to.

Perhaps less obvious is that all art also fits into the former category, intending to show beauty. Paintings of Madonna and child display the beauty of God, Van Gogh’s landscapes show the beauty of the Earth–this is true, yes, but what about pictures of starving children? What about political pieces? These portray a more unconventional sort of beauty: the beauty of human suffering, the beauty of death. (”What are you doing?” a girl questions Ricky Fitts. “I was taping this dead bird,” Ricky says. “Why?” “Because it’s beautiful,” he answers.) Anything that stirs emotions, be they positive or negative, can be beautiful. Mark Lombardi’s penciled webs of deceit show the beauty of corruption with his painstaking elaborateness and the way the stories unfold across his enormous canvases.

What, then, is art, but a form of culture? As soon as we observe something beautiful–as soon as we manipulate it in our minds–it is pushed through the filter of our culture. It becomes meaningful, and in gaining meaning it loses its naturalness and therefore its original beauty. Museums are full of these filtered visions, and we may find some of them beautiful, but not for the same reasons that the artist did; we are finding the art itself beautiful, not the scene that the artist depicts.

Museums put art on display, and in doing so tell us, “These are beautiful. This is what beauty is.” They do not encourage us to see the beauty in the world around us–to, in effect, become artists ourselves. Rather, museums turn to didacticism and elitism, reflected in their extreme selectivity, their formal atmosphere, and even their majestic, towering architecture. They purport to show us beauty, quality-controlled, at its finest, when really there is just as great a likelihood of encountering beauty in a museum as there is outdoors. The only difference is that outdoors, things are not labeled or processed; they are idiosyncratic and natural. Whereas nature allows us to behold a world of chance occurrences and moments that will never be seen again, museums provide us with someone else’s prepackaged views. Whether it is George Will’s ideal of a classical museum hung with tried-and-true paintings or the Johnson Museum, which features a wide array of both modern and traditional art, any museum is a purveyor of culture.

In this respect, museums are rather like that fine American institution, the mall. Both offer something beautiful to those who come: the museum, its art; the mall, its merchandise. The artist sells his view, just as the designer sells his blouses. Perhaps the most salient difference between the two places is that, while a museum presents beauty as a priceless thing that can only be seen by the trained eye, a mall invites the visitor to become a consumer, treating beauty as something one can bring home in a shopping bag. The mall encourages the visitor to turn his discerning eye to that which is presented, allowing him to decide for himself what is and is not beautiful. The museum, treating entrance as a privilege for the visitor, numbs him into submission and subjects him to a slide show of all that is “beautiful.” The visitor is given a choice: like Will, he can subscribe to an arbitrary aesthetic standard set by the museum; or he can eschew the entire ordeal, renouncing art as something that he clearly is not sophisticated enough to understand. The visitor, overwhelmed by the parade, rendered unsure of his ability to see beauty, searching for something he can grasp, turns to the gift shop–in treating beauty as a rare commodity, the museum sabotages its own goal of bringing beauty to the public and leaves visitors all the emptier for it.