I never thought of myself as an art museum person. And if you're expecting me to say, "But I was wrong," you're gravely mistaken. I still very much do not think of myself as an art museum person.
I've been to some of the most famous art galleries in the world. The Louvre. The Guggenheim. The Art Institute of Chicago. The National Gallery in London. The Vatican Museums. The Musee d'Orsay. The Tate Modern. Gosh I sound like such a douche bag typing all of those out. For someone that's not an 'art museum person,' I'm not doing a very good job at not liking them.
But in all of these incidents with no real exception, I walked into the museum ready to see "art," and I walked out feeling mentally fried and not feeling like I had learned anything major or gathered any new appreciation for art. I just went in, and I tried to absorb it, and it didn't realize absorb, and I left defeated.
That all started to change on a roadtrip I took through Southern California last November. I was meandering up and down State Street in Santa Barbara when this storefront window displaying what can only be described as a steroids-laced 4-ft-tall pop-up card caught my eye. I peaked through the window and saw at least five or six other similar pieces hanging on display, which was enough incentive for me to overcome my paralyzing fear of art snobbery and walk inside.
Walking into an art gallery is sort of like walking into your first SoulCycle class; for the first few minutes, you're certain that everyone is staring at you and asking what you're doing there. But thankfully that feeling of intrusion wore off when I started chatting with the woman behind the desk at the gallery and learning from her about Charles Fazzino, the artist whose larger-than-life pop art pieces were being sold in that gallery. And as she talked, I did small laps around the room — which was no bigger than your average one bedroom apartment — digging through Fazzino's work and taking in all the details and intricacies of his pieces. It was absolutely fascinating.
Later on that same trip I landed in La Jolla and had a similar experience there, wandering into the gallery of photographer Peter Lik and spending what felt like an eternity standing in front of his "Spirit of the Universe" photo, asking myself how something that beautiful could be made from some glass and light sensors. I non-ironically told the gallery worker, "This is one of the prettiest things I've ever seen in my life."
And it was around that moment when I realized what my problem was when going to art museums: I kept trying to get in the headspace of someone that really appreciated art and understand for a moment why they like every single thing they do. What about Monet was so revolutionary? Why is this painting of a perfectly symmetrical green square so provocative? How is this Picasso piece noticeably more impressive than any other cubist's work? And is cubism really that impressive in the first place? And I was spending so much time in this headspace that I didn't really leave any time to just relax and find what actually inspires or moves me.
In other words, I was way too focused on what I didn't understand that I couldn't focus at all on what I liked.
It's art. Sometimes you just won't like things. And you can't always sophisticate your way into liking it. It's not necessarily that you don't like something because you're just not thinking hard enough about it; sometimes you just won't like it or won't find it interesting, and you can sit there staring at the symmetrical green square asking how exactly it's all one big metaphor for the Watergate scandal, or you can just accept that you don't like it and move on. It sounds so simple, but I've found it way more valuable and refreshing to go into art museums now looking for the things I actually find interesting rather than the things I think I should be finding interesting. It's much more valuable to take something small you like and be able to thoroughly articulate why you like it than to take something big that everyone sort of likes and be able to article why everyone sort of likes it.
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