It might be satire, but Colbert asks the big questions that everyone should be asking of museums: What is the point of art?  Is art only good if an art critic says it’s good?  Can “good” art exist without an audience? Who decides how much art is worth? Who decides what goes in a museum?  Colbert even begins by saying: “I don’t like art…and that’s mainly because I don’t get art.” So I ask a further question: How can museums help visitors feel more comfortable around the art — how can we make them feel like they “get it”? (Further, how can we help them feel comfortable with the fact that it’s OK to not “get it” — after all, isn’t that why art is studied: because we never feel like we’ve completely plumbed the interpretations of a work of art?)

These are huge, massive questions. I don’t really think that museum staff have the answer to most of them, and that’s probably why we do what we do — because we want to begin to answer them. I do think they’re questions we should ask ourselves and our visitors, because they can help us learn more about our audience and about our collections and institutions.  So as a museum educator, I’m asking all of you, how would you answer the big questions put to Campbell last night? How can museums help you “get art”? Comment away!

(PS: A final thought… Colbert ends by asking about the art housed in the Met: “Do they [the public] vote? Do you let them vote?” He’s met with a chuckle, but what an interesting web 2.0/feedback venture that would be… to ask visitors as they exit: do you think we should keep this work on view in the Museum; why or why not? Would you want to do something like that in a Museum?)

This post is a little more personal, persay, than I’d ever really planned to write in this blog, but I wanted to share this experience and the thoughts it’s inspired.  I’m in a museum studies seminar this semester.  It takes place in the art museum on my university’s campus and is taught by the museum’s director.

In the course, as you can see, we have the opportunity to engage with works of art literally firsthand.  And one of the things I’m learning from being able to do this is the importance of getting back to the basics.  When you look at art, especially if you know a bit or even a lot about art history, it’s so easy to get carried away by what (you think) you know.  The class emphasizes focusing on what we can SEE — not the figures or objects depicted on its surface or sculpted shapes, but the actual material the painting is made with and on, the substance the sculpture’s been made out of.  For example, even if you can’t pick up a work of art, you can still go to an art museum and do essentially exactly what we did in class this week.  Without looking at the label, and divorcing the work from the objects in the galleries around it as much as possible, decide what material the support (or backing — like canvas, wood panel, paper) of the work is made out of.  Look at the texture of the surface; the way the pigmet (paints or charcoal, etc.) sits on it; look at the edges of the support against the frame.

These details have the potential to tell you so much more about the work of art than simply by looking at what the artist depicted on it (though of course, that’s still important!).  The type of wood, for example, can tell you what time it was made in, or even place — northern artists in the Renaissance favored a heavier, denser wood, southern artists a lighter, thicker type like poplar.  The quality of the paint — if it’s shiny or flat, if it has a yellow tint — can tell you what sort of technique the artist used: was it oil, with many painstaking layers, was it varnished, was it brushed on quickly?

Things like this can only be seen in person.  Of course, that ties back in to the importance of museums and going to see what are really looks like up close.  And obviously the experience of actually holding a painting — of lifting it up to see how heavy it is, helping identify what kind of wood the paneling could be — isn’t something you can do in an art museum.  But looking really closely, examining its edges, beginning to deduce its history?  That, anyone can do.