Welcome to the Guggenheim. On Google Street View.
Major museums all over the world have taken to Google Street View as a means to keep their doors opened to visitors — myself included — throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. The experience I had exploring a couple of these virtual art museums evoked rather visceral responses — ones that made me question the point of even having virtual art museums, and other things pertaining to the mode of art viewing that gallery-goers take on, knowingly or not. In hoping to pass these questions on to you, the Guggenheim Museum, New York, made an easy choice of museum for me — it was spacious and relatively sparse, a reason that is already very telling of the expectations I, along with many other fellow gallery-goers, have of the “museum experience.” I invite you to “walk” around for yourself, starting from the top, and eventually spiraling downwards (as the gallery seems to have planned for its visitors to do) — just as I had — over here.
Speaking of large spaces, let’s take a look at this piece. Housed singularly in a space partitioned off much like an enlarged office, it enjoys the large blank wall wholly to itself, only that even so, I’d still instinctively zoom in, till the canvas covers my entire monitor. Looking at a painting that commands the space of an entire wall, and looking at another such painting that sits amidst a crowded wall filled with other artworks, suddenly doesn’t feel so different. The Guggenheim Museum has an impressive collection on works — why wouldn’t it use space more economically to display more of its works and attract more patrons?
Mastery of visual space isn’t all that visual art is about either. Nearby, is this work by Haegue Yang, titled “Series of Vulnerable Arrangements — Voice and Wind.” Through your ultra-ultra-wide-format Google view-port, what details do you see? Did you notice the fans? How do you think they fit in or stand out from the gallery space, and the artwork? Do you think you would have caught on to such details more or less readily in real life? Imagine yourself in this physical space, and think of the back part of this work’s title — how do you think that the ambience might have impacted your appreciation of the work?
Just a few steps away lies yet another piece, that calls upon one’s awareness of the spatial context of artworks in galleries. It’s fascinating that there’s a mirror here, yet, through Google Street View, you’re able to look into it without seeing yourself staring back at you. There seems to be a reflection of a man in the left edge of the mirror; how might you be impacted by this awareness of fellow gallery-goers engaging with art, alongside you? It strikes me that it’s no small feat to uncover the title and artist of this piece through this format of viewing. What value do you think the Guggenheim Museum, or Google Street View, places on artworks, as opposed to the museum experience?
As much as we can appreciate the efforts that these institutions have undertaken to digitize entire galleries for the exploratory pleasure of their virtual visitors, I believe it would not be too far of a conclusion to make that this format of viewing completely destroys the art viewing experience. Everything assumes the form of a cumbersome catalog, wherein one click takes you directly to what, in all its pixelated glory, seems the most eye-catching, bypassing everything that you would have passed by on the way there, in real life. Narratives that may have been intended by the museum are, as a result, lost, and modes of engagement with the works become more contrived, as the above examples illustrate.
As I sit in my living room, with the sound of the television going on in the background, clicking around and cursing that the smallest possible virtual step I could take corresponds to far too many in real life, or about how I, as a result, had to view the artwork from an awkward angle, the museum has become no longer beautiful. Nothing there is important, and so of course, I close the tab in my browser; the museum blinks out of existence, like it had never even been there in the first place.
