

Art is Therapy - sustainablepace
http://sustainablepace.net/art-is-therapy

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idlewords
I find it helpful when visiting art museums to do a lot of triage. I only have
a certain number of paintings "in me" before burnout sets in, so I make sure
to only stop and look at stuff that I really feel drawn to. This has made
visiting museums vastly more pleasurable than it used to be, when I would
dutifully look at six rooms of Egyptian antiquities or Byzantine icons and
find I had nothing in the tank when I got to the stuff that had attracted me
to the museum in the first place.

That said, the art museums in Holland tend to be terrific about limiting what
they display. It's not like the Louvre, where you wander for miles through
rooms of mind-numbing portraiture. Dutch museums, especially the smaller ones,
have a handful of masterpieces and then a big cafe where you can eat apple
cake and recharge for a second pass.

If you can manage it, it helps not to read any text, either. It's a non-verbal
medium, and words can get in the way.

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morkbot
I was at Rijsksmuseum a couple of weeks ago and didn't really have any idea
what those post-its are all about. I tried to read some of them in the
beginning but found their content banal and poorly written (only a couple of
days after I read this in Guardian:
[http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/apr/25/art-
is-t...](http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/apr/25/art-is-therapy-
alain-de-botton-rijksmuseum-amsterdam-review)).

Ironically and to my surprise, as I'm far from being any sort of an art buff
and this stuff usually bores me, at Rijskmusem I really enjoyed those typical
descriptions put next to the paintings, with short notes about art history and
some details about described work of art. There they really are filled with
interesting info. To each his own I guess. Or maybe it is unexpected side-
effect of the "Art is Therapy" project.

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sustainablepace
I agree about the short notes in the Rijksmuseum, they are much better than
usually. The Van Gogh Museum war very poor in comparison, it only had
elaborate texts for very few exhibits, and mostly artist and date only.

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SkyMarshal
Interesting article. I would add that in an abstract art museum or section of
one, the thing to do is attempt to identify the subject of which the artist
was working to create the abstract represenation.

Abstract art is, not too unlike software engineering, an attempt at
identifying the essence or underlying of a thing and then re-representing it
in abstract form. The process of deconstruction and abstraction is similar at
a high level in both, though abstract art has more to do with the logic of
psychology, aesthetics, and universal human emotion than with mechanical or
business process logic.

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SkyMarshal
Interesting article. I would add that in an abstract art museum or section of
one, the thing to do is attempt to identify the that from which the artist has
attempted to extract the essence.

Abstract art is, not too unlike software engineering, an attempt at
identifying the essence or underlying of a thing and then re-representing it
abstractly. The process of deconstruction and abstraction is similar in both,
though abstract art has more to do with psychology, aesthetics, and universal
emotions than with pure logic.

~~~
SkyMarshal
Ugh, double-submitted somehow. Would delete this one if possible.

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gdubs
As an art student I'd get headaches and overwhelmed in museums. I mentioned
this to a professor and he said, "Don't feel like you have to look at every
single work in here."

With that simple reframing of the experience, I now can spend a lot more time
in a museum, especially in front of the works I'm particularly drawn to. When
we visited Paris, we spent hours at the Louvre every single day we were there.

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antimagic
Yup, the Louvre is just a monster. It really should not ever be done in more
than 2 hour blocks, but of course you would need about 30 visits to get
through the whole thing at that rate, which is fine for those of us that live
in Paris, but not so good for tourists.

It's an amazing museum though, if you can avoid getting overwhelmed. I
particularly enjoy doing the antiquities sections, with an eye for the
technology used to produce the pieces on display. It gives you a new
appreciation for the technical sophistication of the ancient Romans, Greeks
and Egyptians.

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auvrw
So true.... just went tothe local museum saturday morning... symmetry, colors,
asymmetry. What's not to like?

