How to museum
The first thing you have to do is go to a lot of museums. If you go to a lot of museums, you learn how to skip stuff, and skipping stuff is how to museum.
You should go to big museums & small museums, weird museums by eccentrics and glittering museums that billionaires funded, famous museums and no-name museums, museums that are a single room, museums with art that was stolen, museums that were themselves stolen, museums that are an art piece unto themselves. You have to do an awful lot of looking before you can see.
Don’t stop
The endgame is to go through museums quickly. Stop for what grabs you. Take as much time as you must. But you must set “ignore” as your museum default. Power walking is not unreasonable.
I once went to a major art museum in Los Angeles with a friend, and the elevator doors opened to a massive Jeff Koons balloon puppy. As my pal slowed to admire, I said “I don’t stop for Koons,” and kept walking.
One should generally never stop for Koons, of course, but I’m sure that there are more controversial artists for whom you, too, are uninterested in stopping for. Bar his monumental canvas in the atrium of the Barnes, Matisse has never really hit for me. Ellsworth Kelly should, given my general tastes, but no. I know these artists are “good” and worth one’s time in a more general sense.
This is discernment. It’s not a matter of who’s good. It’s a matter of whether the art will hit. You are chasing the hit, the surrender, the process of staring gobsmacked at something for 25 minutes.
Museum fatigue
You walk past Koons because he is milquetoast Instagram-ready nonsense that signifies nothing, but also because you can’t be wasting time. Museums have a cap. That cap is two hours. You have two hours before museum fatigue settles in, regardless of how fit you are, or how many stimulants you put in your body that morning. Seeing, walking, seeing, standing, seeing, and standing takes a truly shocking amount of energy. You will beg for benches by the time you’re done.
You will, over time, learn the contours of your own specific museum fatigue, which is different from everyone’s museum fatigue. As you flump onto a bench in front of a 25’ pointillist canvas that every living being can instantly recognize, you contemplate embodiment first, art second.
Museums have a way of reminding us that we are garbage meat sacks. By the end we just wish we could astrally project our consciousness into every room at once, becuase it would be quite a bit more convenient than fighting the crowds.
Road not taken
In the largest, most iconic museums, one must follow what I have come to refer to as the Robert Frost Rule: if there is a fork in the road, always, always take the less popular one. This is useful for both your sanity and for your variety of experience. There is always something underrated and cool inside of a big fancy museum, away from the beaten path.
If you do this in the Louvre, you will end up in the basement within 10 minutes, alone with the largest collection of ancient Egyptian art & artifacts outside of Egypt. If you do this in the Uffizi, you will leave the Uffizi and do something fun, instead.
Take it in
Museums should connect us to the rest of the human race, to history, to future possibility. The goal is to find what works for you, what hits for you, what shocks you into a sense of awe and wonder.
You aren’t ticking any boxes. You are chasing the feeling.