A good day at the museum

Tuesday, October 15, 2024

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The Blanton filmed me talking talking about the museum:

I love to copy paintings when I’m here, because drawing makes you slow down and actually look at the thing… We spend a lot of time looking at images. We’re on our phones, we’re scrolling… but there’s something about being in the presence of a real work of art that someone has made with their hands, that someone has sweated over. Seeing it in person and seeing it at scale… it is unbeatable. It’s infectious! It makes you want to go home and make stuff! I mean, a good day at the museum for me is a day that I get out of there and I think, “I really feel like going home and writing!” or “I really feel like going home and drawing!” There is a kind of mania that happens when you’re in an art museum. You start seeing everything around you as art. And that’s the greatest thing that art can do: help you see your everyday world in a new light.

I included the video in today’s newsletter about a good day in the museum, or how I like to look at art.

Fossil records and paper trails

Tuesday, August 9, 2022

We took the kids to the Houston Museum of Natural Science this weekend, and afterwards, I tweeted this thread:

The more I’ve gone over it in my mind, the more absurd and funnier it gets. Here is an institution dedicated to what we can learn from seeing physical objects in the fossil record in person… and they’ve gone “paperless” — no paper trail! (I should note, however, that they do print admission tickets so you can prove that you’ve paid to get in.)

I have also been meditating on my own absurdities concerning my life in paper. For example, my diaries are an attempt to make my own paper trail in an increasingly paperless world. My own “paper of the past.” My own fossil record.

But these archives are mostly for the short term, the short past: they’re to trace my own patterns, remember what I did last week, last month, last year, last decade. I am under no delusions that they will last, although they’ll probably last a lot longer than the hard drive I bought last month.

Meanwhile, I’ve stopped carrying a pocket notebook because I am in love with Apple Notes — the simple “notebook” on my phone that syncs across all my devices. I have files going for the newsletter, new books, shopping lists, etc. I am aware that these artifacts will mostly be lost, probably in the close future. They are the equivalent of “scratch” paper that will be tossed in the recycling later.

One final reach: The big news yesterday was that the FBI had searched the former president’s house to retrieve records he’d illegally removed from The White House. (Previously, he’d flushed paper down the toilet.) To a paper junkie like me, it is thrilling that paper can still, potentially, bring you down.

Like a good American, I have my pet conspiracy theories, and I wonder if the move to “paperless” is an attempt to rob us of our paper trails, the proof that things really happened the way we remember them happening.

So, I keep my paper trails going.

(Paper is a wonderful technology.)

Weirdos who left Texas and brought back art

Wednesday, March 31, 2021

After I wrote about the painter Julian Onderdonk for Texas Highways, editor Michael Hoinski asked me if I’d write another piece, this time about The Texas State Museum of Asian Cultures in Corpus Christi. This posed a particular problem, as I have never visited to Corpus Christi, nor do I plan on traveling there, or anywhere, anytime soon.

What happens when I spend all day in weird old Texas archives pic.twitter.com/DP2FBzmJ8q

— Austin Kleon (@austinkleon) January 27, 2021

I scratched around online and scratched my head wondering how I was going to find anything interesting to say about a museum I’ve never visited until I came across this video of the museum’s founder in the wonderful Texas Archive of the Moving Image.

“Bringo!” I thought, and suddenly, because two is a pattern for me, a weirdos who left Texas and brought back art theme emerged. (I admit I had the Mütter Museum and Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonders in mind, and this idea that often a museum starts with the obsessions and collections of a single individual.)

You can read the piece here.

In praise of classroom and family museum guides

Thursday, July 30, 2020

A little tip: If there’s a museum show you’re interested in, look for a “family guide” or “classroom guide” on the website. They’re often offered as free, downloadable PDFs and have good images and information without museum “artspeak.”

3 tips for a better museum visit

Thursday, January 9, 2020

I was intrigued by Gretchen Rubin’s Met Museum Experiment, in which she plans to visit the Met every day of this year that she’s in NYC. (She lives within walking distance.)

Her experiment and her goals — to waken her senses, to learn about art, to explore the building space, to see more clearly, though she doesn’t feel she’s a visual person — got me thinking about how I like to visit museums.

Here are 3 things I do that make my museum experiences much richer:

1. Draw, draw, draw! When you try to draw something, even with just a rough sketch, you really have to look at it, and you notice all kinds of things you don’t by just standing around gawking at it. I always have a pocket notebook and a pencil or two with me. (Many museums don’t let you use pen or marker in the galleries.) I stand and copy the art I like, often just swiping a detail here and there from different pieces. (I write more about drawing and “slow looking” in chapter 5 of Keep Going.)

2. Enlist a small child to guide you through the museum. Kids are alive to the world in ways we aren’t as adults. They’re also lower to the ground, so their perspective is literally different. (More on this: “The 5-year-old docent” and “Borrow a kid.”)

3. Don’t read the label before you look at the art. Watch people the next time you’re in a museum gallery. They almost always look at the labels first! Don’t do this. Use your own eyes first. Let yourself be drawn towards what is genuinely interesting to you. Spend time looking at a piece without having someone else’s words messing with your looking. (More on this in Edward Tufte’s essay, “Seeing Around.”)