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.
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...).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.