I was raised to enjoy what I have come to call “learning vacations.” At 4 years old, you could find me running up and down Civil War battlefields as my dad identified some lump of grass and dirt as “Little Round Top.” When I was 12, my family and I hopped across the pond to see Mona Lisa’s world-famous smile housed in the Louvre.
At 19, I marveled at Picasso’s Guernica as part of a class trip to the Reina Sofia. Now 20, I still find myself drawn to museums for the wealth of knowledge, history, and beauty they contain. From ancient historical artifacts to contemporary modern art to blue whale skeletons suspended from the ceiling, I have craved the excitement of learning from an early age. For the wealth of benefits museums provide, the most renowned (and busy) are not free from frustration. Below are six aspects of museums and their patrons that I still fail to fully understand.
1. Can you not bring your 4-year-old along?
While I myself am a child of the learning-vacation-based method of parenting, I have trouble comprehending why strollers and children young enough to need them are even allowed into the exhibits of sophisticated museums. They clog the narrow walkways, the kids find some reason to pitch a fit, and (if we’re being honest with ourselves) couldn’t care less about the three phases of kiln firing the Greeks employed on their terracotta pots depicting mythological scenes in 500 BC. Maybe in a few years. In the meantime, kindly check your child-transporting vehicles, and ideally your child, with the coatroom staff. Thank you for your cooperation.
2. Me when I see people taking pictures of the information card accompanying an artifact:
It’s one thing to take a selfie with Cleopatra’s mummy or strike a pose on the steps of the British Museum, but the number of times I’ve seen people snap a photo of the placard next to something in a museum is astonishing. So...you’re telling me you’re going to go home, import those photos and proceed to read through the information without the aid of having its subject in the immediate vicinity? Oh, you’re taking that picture to jog your memory of the painting, Untitled, when you look at this again in 10 years. Right, okay. Makes sense now.
3. How’d that blurry picture with glare and the reflection of your phone in the glass case turn out? Not so great? Bummer.
It is not unusual to see people who practically view the museum through their phone cameras. They look left. Click. They look right. Click. They move three paces forward and repeat. Not only are they oblivious to the significance of the objects they’re documenting, but I doubt they’re getting quality photos out of this approach either. Capturing the glare of the glass in the harsh lighting while other museum-goers squirm around in the background—another one for the books, am I right? Sorry, folks, not everything is a Kodak moment.
4. I’m sorry. Thirty-eight euros for this keychain?
As if you didn’t already pay enough for the privilege of viewing the main collection, your wallet is wrung out like a damp rag if you decide to venture into a museum bookstore, shop, or café. You sip from a 12-ounce Diet Coke can that cost you the equivalent of a six-pack at the nearest grocery store and munch on “hand-torn lettuce with a pear-apple vinaigrette” for a small fee of your left kidney. Feeling anything but rejuvenated by your two measly leaves of lettuce, now with a dull ache in your back from the operative incision, you trudge on to the next wing in the name of your scholastic venture.
5. Is that Morgan Freeman narrating this audio guide over 16th century opera?
Audio guides can be a fantastic source of easily accessible information. They can provide an overview or dig deeper into a subject while simultaneously keeping people from standing right in front of the information plaque. But we’ve all had one of those pre-recorded guides that ends up being slightly over-the-top. The narrator practically shouts over Tchaikovsky’s Russian Dance from The Nutcracker (which apparently has some relevance to the painting in front of you), discussing the 12-step process of baptism in 19th century Bangladesh. You duly store this information in the part of your brain specially reserved for trivia night.
6. Didn’t know the zombie apocalypse started within this museum.
The “zombie shuffle” is pretty much the only way people move about a museum, shifting their feet forward four inches at a time, scuffling their shoes along the creaky floor. Looking to get around the people in front of you? Not a chance. It’s a family walking as slow as a sloth moves, taking up the whole aisle with a stroller, linking arms like they were pulled out of a barrel of monkeys. So you, too, get to impersonate a zombie, following close behind. You even have the scar from when the museum café took your kidney as payment for that exquisite salad!