Going to the Museum

All those upper middle class people looking at a deconstructed barbecue grill and you just stand there, warning them if they take one stop too many toward the sacrosanct line.

Not assembling something isn’t art, you think, it’s not doing anything. A barbecue grill doesn’t come assembled. It comes in exactly the way the artwork before was arranged.

Your mind wanders to the print they sell in the museum shop.

modern art = i could’ve done that + yeah, but you didn’t

The text is set in Arial, black, maybe 20pt. It’s centred on a white background. The print costs more than you make a day. It’s a bestseller. You don’t really understand why they buy it—it’s incredibly easy to copy. You also don’t understand what’s artistic about a pithy statement everyone’s seen on Instagram rendered in the most basic way possible.

The cafeteria’s somehow more sterile than a hospital. You think it’s because the floor is seamless and the bar counter is made of one piece of white plastic. The tables and chairs are so designed as to be uncomfortable and a single platter of mediocre hummus costs €18. The museum has implemented a no tipping policy and made you get rid of your tipping jars. Some people who could be your grandparents smile at you, then tip. The younger ones don’t. They order on their phones, barely noticing you when you bring them their order.

The museum has installed a new video exhibit. It’s part of a series on Marxism. At first you’re excited. You overhear the curator talking about it—it’s supposed to be groundbreaking. It turns out to be a series of closeup shots of the new iPhone, interlaced with an old love song.

You feel like Apple could’ve shot the same video. It feels just as slick, just as helplessly detached from reality.

Next to the séparée, is a long analysis of the piece. They had to take down a set of Kollwitz paintings to make room for it. In it, a contemporary philosopher writes about the significance of the video. It is, he lectures you, an insightful reflection on Marx’s criticism of the product. ‘The object is rendered beautiful, it is a fetished commodity, forever, tantalisingly out of reach,…’ You stop reading, having lost all interest.

You wander through the hall of reflection.

And they have this piece by Damien Hirst and they say it’s made from ‘plywood, glass, metal, printed paper’, but really it’s just a bathroom cabinet filled with packages of common drugs

A few days ago, one of the visitors talked to you. He had the startlingly white teeth of the upper classes and spoke with an accent borne of elite schools and universities. You felt patronised before he ever opened his mouth to ask you how it felt to guard the trash in the museum. He looked nice enough, sincerely interested, but you couldn’t tell him the truth. You smiled and said that you appreciated the opportunity to spend your days around art. He didn’t seem to believe you, but didn’t press you. He smiled at you, somewhat wistfully, then went back to his family, and stopped his grandfather from walking into an exhibit—a disco ball suspended from the ceiling by an industrial metal chain—before turning back to you and smiling—apologetically, this time.

You can’t help but feel like most artists are really scam artists. You think of joining them, but you doubt you could ever make it—you don’t have a degree to sell your disassembled furniture.