Usually the most interesting thing to see at a museum is what's on display. However, the people viewing the exhibits can sometimes be just as fascinating.
That's what Ed Rodley shows with his Tumblr People Behaving Appropriately in Art Museums. Rodley, who by day is the associate director of integrated media at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass., takes a satirical look at how people view art by parodying the stereotypical stuffy and pretentious art critic. The Tumblr features photos Rodley finds online and some submissions of people looking at art in museums accompanied by a short critique of what is right or wrong about what they're doing. You should feel free to submit your own photos as well.
Rodley spoke with T-Lounge over the phone about People Behaving Appropriately in Art Museums, how selfies have impacted the art world and the museums he's dying to visit now. May it inspire your inner art critic.
Where did the idea for People Behaving Appropriately in Art Museums come from?
The whole idea of the Tumblr was started by just some snarky side remarks that I made. These remarks are the kind that art critics that write long op-ed pieces in The Times or The New Yorker make, lamenting about the state of the unwashed masses that go to art museums and do stupid things, like take photographs or selfies or don't behave in the quiet, appropriate manner. I thought I would channel some of that snark into People Behaving Appropriately in Art Museums. Ostensibly, it's a sort of a Colbert-esque attempt to poke fun at the idea that in order to correctly view an art museum, you have to be quiet. Or that it's better if you're by yourself, or if you're with somebody, you should ignore them, or pretend you're by yourself. That is certainly one way to experience art, but it is, I don't think by any means, the only way or the only valid way. So it is me poking fun at them a little bit and just having fun.
Your title is People Behaving Appropriately in Art Museums, but some of the photos are of people behaving, in your opinion, inappropriately. Why did you decide to include both on the blog?
The persona of the blog author that I'm trying to put across is this traditional, 20th-century art museum elite mindset that thinks there is a right way and a wrong way. And thinks that when people do things the wrong way, it's a good idea to mock them in print, preferably on Sunday in as big a paper as you can. The idea is basically to make that kind of position seem ridiculous by both kinds of examples. There's one black-and-white picture in there that I found from like the '50s of a bunch of women at an art museum, and it's classic mid-century America. All the women have hats, and they're wearing gloves. They're dressed in their going-out clothes, and they're sitting there very appropriately with their hands on their laps and their legs crossed. And there's some guy in a suit in the background obviously lecturing to some woman about art. You know, it sort of sums up the whole old establishment ideal of what it meant to go to a museum. This is the voice of authority. You come here to sit quietly and listen and be told what to think about art, preferably by a white male in a suit.
With all of those posts, I try to problematize that conception of museum-going, both in terms of the appropriate and the inappropriate models that I use. Like, do you really need to refrain from displaying any kind of motion, which seems to be one of those things that folks like Philip Kennicott or Judith Dobrzynski, or any of the established critics out there who write about these things, tend to get very pissed about. You know,'These people are being loud. These people are waving their arms around.' Pretty much anything that's not standing still quietly is, to them, somehow less valid and, more importantly, part of the reason why Western civilization is crumbling. And you know, that's worth poking at a little.
How do you find the photos of these museums and decide what you want to put on the website?
In the course of writing posts for my regular blog, for my main blog, I'm always scouring Tumblr and Flickr Commons and other places for images of people in museums anyway. As a result of that, you will often find these hysterical images that scream, 'Oh, look. Here is a classic example of someone 'doing it right.'' Those are the ones that I will dump in a folder and upload to Tumblr when I get a chance.
Do you think there is an appropriate way to behave in a museum?
Well, that's an interesting thing. I think it's one of the reasons why we're seeing this kind of debate all over the place. Selfies are a great example of that. The amount of ink and electrons that have been spilled worrying about whether or not selfies are ruining the museum, literally those are headlines from major newspapers, is kind of shocking. So I do think technology once again has gotten ahead of the social mores. Like we used to know how to behave, or there was a broadly shared unwritten understanding of how one behaved in public spaces. And I don't think we're at the point yet in Western society where we've renegotiated what the new one is. That would be an interesting conversation to have. ... You know, what is an appropriate way to behave in a 21st- century museum? I don't think we know. I think people using digital cameras to record their experience, personally I think it's a perfectly valid way of experiencing an art museum. Will some of them take silly pictures? Sure. They do that anyway. Banning photography is like saying some people don't know how to drive, so therefore, we shouldn't have cars. The better answer is, 'Maybe we need to come up with some rules of the road.' I hope museums will be able to have some interesting discussions with their audiences, like what does it mean to be appropriate?
Do you observe people looking at art in real life and have a similar sort of critique going on in your mind as you do on your Tumblr?
Um, no. Yes, I do spend all of my time looking at people in museums because that's what I do for a living. The Tumblr was really a place to let all the snark out that doesn't get to come out anywhere else. Like, you know, if you read my main blog, I try very hard to be a reasoned voice and basically not get into a lot of the snarky stuff that passes for debate nowadays. I try very hard to avoid that whenever possible, and it takes a toll on the body after a while, and I needed a place to let that out. Tumblr is a really great place to do that. You know, the audience is right for it. The content is right for it. You know, little, tiny doses of satire here and there, every now and again are just enough to help maintain sanity on a long, stressful week.
Other than the museum you currently work at of course, what is your favorite museum and why is it your favorite?
That's such a hard one when you live and breathe it. I can answer the question this way. There are two museums I am dying to visit. If you give me 1000 bucks right now, I would probably buy a plane ticket to go see these museums that I haven't seen. One of them is in Zagreb, Croatia called the Museum of Broken Relationships. It started out as an art project by this pair of artists that had been a couple and had recently broken up and decided to make a museum with some artifacts of this relationship with some texts by them. They solicited contributions, and now they actually have an entire museum full of people's artifacts commemorating dissolved relationships. And some of them are funny, some of them are heartbreaking, some of them are just weird, but it's all actual stuff that people have contributed, and it's all their stories as well. From everything I have read about it, you basically take a tour of all of these failed relationships, and it just seemed like it would be a really interesting museum experience.
The other one that I am dying to go see is in Istanbul, Turkey. You know, the author Orhan Pamuk wrote a book called The Museum of Innocence that's this chronicle of this relationship or this sort of relationship between two people covering many decades. And in the process of writing the book, he collected all of this stuff to help him write this story, because one of the characters in the book obsessively collects stuff that belongs to or is somehow associated with this woman he's fascinated with. And Pamuk gathered so much stuff that he basically put together a museum that's a completely fictional museum of the world of this book. So you can go and see an ashtray full of cigarette butts this woman smoked that still have lipstick on them. You know, it's a completely insane, sort of, artistic endeavor. Can you imagine like filling an entire museum with fictional objects having to do with fictional characters in a novel?
I'm dying to see these things. I hope they don't disappoint, but I'm willing to be disappointed if I get to go see them.
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