I have artistic pretensions. These highbrow-sounding things are actually not all that hard to acquire. In the hierarchy of cultural conceits, they’re probably the easiest to obtain, if you happen to be in the market. All you have to do is demonstrate a love of staring at works of art, not too tough since these are objects specifically designed to be aesthetically appealing, and, as an added bonus, often feature naked people quite prominently.
Of course, if you really want to have street cred as any sort of enlightened haute monde, you’d better be able to back it up. Namedrop it like it’s hot: Gauguin, Monet and Hopper would be some good ones to start with—a nice smattering innovative enough to reveal your tasteful modern outlook
My favorite spot for public demonstration of my cultural sophistication is the National Gallery, but not because it’s free—true connoisseurs never let such plebeian, crass concerns as money get in the way of soaking up genius.
As I wander among these crystallized, carefully honed representations of life, though, I become distracted by the quiet murmur and subtle movement of the actual life around me.
I go to galleries and observe the observers. Museum-goers, each invested to a greater or lesser degree with the same self-conscious artistic ostentations I have, are always shaping their own creation—the performance art show of the culturally adept observer. It’s a giant ensemble cast, this museum-wide display of living art, in which the turnover rate is infinite, but I’ve come to realize that many of the characters are stock.
There is almost always a couple of the artsy breed, the sort who follow their afternoon at the museum with a mellow evening at an anti-Starbucks coffeeshop, typing away on their twin laptops about all the personal breakthroughs the paintings provoked in them. They are united in their studied air of unstudiedness, the just-so arrangement of her loosely cascading uptwist complementing the purposeful clash between his bright sneakers and drab utilitarian wardrobing. They choose the modern wing as the backdrop for their scene, delivering their knowing one-word assessments in low tones, channeling art history graduate seminars as their muse.
A few galleries over lies the province of their foil, the wealthy retiree couple, brimming with the quiet good taste they display in simple well-tailored clothing. They favor the Impressionists, who never rudely assault the senses and smoothly provide entrée for their reminiscences of that youthful summer they spent in Paris exploring the Musee d’Orsay.
This couple has two main categories of gazes, one they lavish on the cultural currency glittering before them, and the other with which they wither the upstart tourists who also love to frequent the Impressionist superstars of the museum.
These camera-toting visitors always look exhausted but determined to pack all the artistic exposure they can into their precious few hours. Many of them have the telltale earphones of the Director’s Tour guiding their path, but the thriftier ones eschew that expense for the budget version and get their explanation from the bare-bones wall plaques.
Like most of the museum-goers, they take great care to affect a gaze of uplifted concentration when they find a picture for which they’ve decided to particularly display their affection. Often, it happens to be conveniently located in front of the couches that grace a few precious rooms. In fact, the only patrons who don’t occasionally slip into this Thinker pose are the kids on field trips, whose wandering attention is usually only arrested by revealing and informative nudes.
There are always a few uninitiated polluting this cathedral of sophistication. They ingenuously park themselves in front of a no-name work simply because they think it’s pretty, or because something about the colors speaks to them. The poor fools probably can’t even dissect the composition and influence of these works they presume to enjoy.
For a moment, I find myself seduced by the purity of their enjoyment. But then I catch myself—I have artistic pretensions, after all, and that just won’t do. I slip back to my place in the tableau of performance art, nodding sagely as the man next to me scoffs that, really, Toulouse-Lautrec is beyond derivative.
