Why I Hate Art Museums

Well, I don’t completely hate them. I’m a member of all the local museums and I visit them fairly often. I guess it’s the artistis’ and curators’ political agendas that have come to irk me. Life in San Francisco is sufficiently politicized already. It would be nice to visit SF MOMA just once without being blamed for slavery, the plight of downtrodden workers in central America, and obesity in school children.

One might excuse the artists. They are unsubtly directed by their educations and by grants. It goes without saying that artists have unique insights into what troubles America and that their vital role in contemporary culture is to communicate this timely evangel through art. Curators channel that expression just a bit too much for my taste, turning exhibits into sophomoric political statements expressed in overblown and obtuse language.

Consequently, exhibit rooms become crowded with people gathered round lengthy write-ups on the exhibit pieces, trying to decode a curator’s undecipherable complexification which examines [museums love using which as a restrictive pronoun] the artist’s recontextualization of something or other vis-à-vis capitalism’s chokehold on social justice.

Next time at in SFMOMA, watch the crowd. Note the amount of time visitors spend reading about a piece compared to the time they spend looking at it. Standing while reading someone else’s opinion – probably less informed than my own – is bad enough. Reading four paragraphs to discern only something vague about my demographic being the bourgeois oppressors kills my desire to see the art. But there’s other art to see  in the museum.