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My wife and I recently returned from a two week trip to Italy and, aside from being a great chance to get away from the world for a bit (and a great time all around!), the trip has me thinking a lot about museums, scarcity, and value.
We both like history, we both like art, and Italy has a lot of both. So we visited a lot of museums. Museums in Venice, museums in Milan, museums throughout the region of Trieste. And we noticed something interesting about the experience, something new for both of us.
You’re on a trip and you decide to visit a museum. Great! Time to see some old stuff. You wander the white halls of some building, reading small cards and looking at objects lit by artfully positioned spotlights. There’s some religious paintings, some marble busts, and some jewelry packed full of precious stones. Maybe some neat architecture. Awesome, you’re getting what you came for.
Pots
So you head to the next museum. What do you find there? Well… some religious paintings, some marble busts, and some jewelry packed full of precious stones.
More Pots
And the next one? Well I think you get the picture.
Follow this loop a few times and you might end up like us, wondering what exactly makes these particular oil paintings and these particular shards of broken pottery any more interesting or special than those particular oil paintings and those shards of broken pottery.
Part of this, I think, comes down to museum design. The places we visited didn’t go in for lengthy descriptions or historical context; a typical item card contained little more than a name, a title, and a date. Which places the burden on the visitor when it comes to figuring out what makes this Pieta any different from that Pieta. Or this statue of St. Christopher Pierced by Arrows any different from that statue of St. Christopher Pierced by Arrows. And if you don’t know who St. Christopher is, well then God help you, because the museum sure won’t.
More than that though, I think it has something to do with supply and demand. When the supply of marble statues is low, marble statues are valuable - value in this case expressed in time and attention rather than dollars. When the supply of marble statues is high, then the value drops.
Statues
And you enjoy your museum experience less and less with every statue you see. And you start to move faster. And faster. And faster. Until you’re skimming desccriptions. Until you’re not even reading them. Until you’re desperately searching for the exit the sadistic museum designers have stuck past a gauntlet of bleeding saints and looming statues, racing through the halls for the slightest glimpse of sunlight and the memory of life far from these cold dead things you feel you really ought to care about but honestly couldn’t care about any less by this point and really didn’t the Italians have the right idea when they used parts of the Coliseum to build their houses instead of leaving the old thing to bake in the hot sun?
More Statues
I digress.
At the end of the day, museums can be fun. But, like, most things in life, they’re best enjoyed in moderation. Lesson thoroughly learned.
- Jack
