Museum Photography, a Rant

Roving art reporter Andrew Cattanach reveals what really annoys him about international galleries

Feature by Andrew Cattanach | 05 Jan 2009

Unfortunately, even after finally overcoming my intuitive hatred of museums, some presiding deity has taken it upon him/herself to place yet another obstruction in the way of my enjoyment: people are now allowed to take photographs in most major art museums in Europe! Hooray, you might be thinking, I love taking pictures of old art in Europe. If so, you’re a delusional pervert, and I here intend to tell you why it is so. Brace yourself.

I always thought it one of the fundamental rules of the museum space not to take photos of the art works – up there with not eating them. It would appear that times have changed and now museums like the Vatican Museum in Rome and the Louvre in Paris allow the public to take as many photos as they like. As if liberated from the wicked hands of a totalitarian leader they swan about these ancient and wonderful museums snappy-snapping everything they can lay their eyes on short of my miserable coupon.

You want to see the Mona Lisa? Not only does the barrier prevent you from getting close enough to clearly determine the sitter’s gender (forget any enigmatic smirk) she also seems to have a permanent retinue of strobe-lit chimpanzees doing the Hokey Cokey. It’s thoroughly distracting. Why? I ask myself. What do they think they are capturing when they press that release button? An aura, perhaps. Maybe Leonardo’s reputed genius will be replicated onto their memory card for future reference – 2Gb of Renaissance genius in your pocket.

Yet still worse, some exhibits attract a particular brand of imbecile that not only wants a picture of the exhibit but one of them standing next to the exhibit, smiling. Who do they think they are, Howard Carter? Is this to show to their disbelieving friends that they actually saw the Venus de Milo when in Paris and didn’t just say so for a joke? Imagine being that paranoid. You think to yourself: that’s a nice sculpture, wait until I tell my friends about this. But hang on, my friends probably won’t believe me and presume me a liar, I'd better document this occasion so as to evade doubt. If this is a true representation of your thought processes then 1) you are mad and 2) you probably don’t have any friends anyway, so relax.

Maybe I’ve missed something and in fact a new craze for scientific diligence has undermined any remaining trust we had in human consciousness and this advanced stage of scepticism dictates that we must concretise all visual experience in an electronic format to be correctly processed at a later date. This would place the museum at the forefront of the posthuman condition – which is cool and might work in its favour – but I doubt this is the case. Museums are proper old school, for a start, and although I’m sure they utilise digital means to document their exhibits I hardly suspect it’s central to their ethos. And anyway, they’ll pay people lots of money to document the exhibits, which, I might add, are normally available for resale as either inexpensive postcards or part of a more comprehensive book – so please, stop with the photo quackery.