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I am always struck by how quickly the moment one steps out of India and moves westwards, especially towards Europe, the wonderful, seductive world of museums begins to swing into one’s awareness. I was still on my recent flight to Zurich, and had just picked up my copy of the International Herald Tribune, when two items, both in the same issue of the paper, caught my eye. One of them, a simple report filed from Berlin, spoke of the show of "Masterpieces from New York’s Museum Of Modern Art" (MOMA) where people were scrambling to get into the exhibition as it was drawing to a close: "eight hour lines, art fans camping out in sleeping bags, and opening hours extended past midnight". The German capital, the report noted, was the only European stop for the exhibition of 200 paintings — ranging from Vincent van Gogh to Andy Warhol — which the New York Museum, closed for renovation, had loaned to that city. But eight-hour lines? Queues of people sneaking around the building of the museum and camping out in sleeping bags, just to be able to see works of art? But there was more on the exhibition on another page of the newspaper: an article by Josef Joffe. It spoke of two contrasting attitudes towards the show: the common visitor’s who could not have enough of it, and the critics’ who moved into the prickly area of how the American art establishment had, systematically, and over the years, been trying to assert, with the aid of vast sums of money, an ‘artistic hegemony’ over Europe. Whatever view one took of the show, or the American move, the fact remained, the article went on to note, that from the time it opened in Berlin six months ago, more than a million people had visited the exhibition. The first estimates were close to the figure of half a million, with the Berlin museum hoping that these numbers would be exceeded: "700,000", it was felt, would be ‘a sensation’. Now the numbers had been revised, and it was expected that by the time it closed, the total would have reached 1.2 million visitors. More than a million people? All just to be able to see works of art? I was not done with museums yet, however. For, the very day that my flight landed in Zurich, the city was going to be host to an event that has now become a prominent part of its cultural calendar: ‘The Long Night of the Museums’. I have written in this column earlier about this event, but this was the first time that I was going to get an opportunity personally to be part of it. On this night — and the event is specifically designed for the night so as to be different, have a different flavour — the museums of the city were to remain open long into the nightly hours, some of them throwing their gates open in fact only at 8 pm, and then stay open till the wee hours of the morning. Everyone was invited: and by buying just one ticket which gave unlimited access to all participating museums and all modes of city transport, one could go anywhere, stay any length of time, visit any number of special shows mounted for this occasion. Every year the number of participating museums keeps growing: this year as many as 43 museums were taking part. It is not possible to print a complete list of the participating museums here, but the range is astonishing in itself: from art museums to museums of ethnography and archaeology, medicine and palaeontology, theatre costumes and children’s toys, coffee and chocolate, watches and railway history. No one can possibly take everything in; in any case, having flown in that very day, I was in no state to be able to do more than three or four hours of it, starting at 8 pm. But I did take in four museums, each with a distinctly different focus, and such that I do not ordinarily get to whenever I am in that city: the Barengasse Museum which had especially put together a show of those wonderful toy figures with seductive faces that Sasha Morgenthaler was so famous for; the Landes Museum with its permanent collection of medieval artifacts and two brand-new shows, one on the evolving role of fashion in our lives, and the other on how genes work; the Bellerive Museum where young mime players were performing pieces that they had been rehearsing for months; and, finally, the Haus zum Kiel, a branch of the celebrated Museum Rietberg, where an exhibition on Indian pigments was running. At the end of it all — it was close to midnight now and I admittedly felt a bit tired, but also exhilarated. For what I had seen was not only different and stimulating things, but also witnessed the reassuring sight of ‘museum-crawling’ crowds — filled with excitement and curiosity but remarkably orderly — that kept moving throughout that balmy night, seeking new experiences, expanding their minds. I need to close here. But is there, I wonder, in all that I have reported, something for us in India, where museums remain by and large only on the outermost fringe of people’s lives? |
