Slowing Down to Sketch : A Flashmob Challenge

Two stories out of Paris have me wondering whether an intersection of the two might not lead to something interesting, if not even important in this "been there, seen that" era we're living in. First was this tid-bit on Artforum.com:

FLASHMOB FOR MICHAEL JACKSON AT THE POMPIDOU

Multitasking mobile phones are also making an impact at Paris’s Pompidou Center, just beyond the museum’s walls. As Agence France-Presse reports, nearly 250 fans offered an homage to Michael Jackson by participating in a flashmob in his honor in front of the Pompidou’s entrance. Following the instructions sent by a text message, participants began dancing the choreography of “Beat It,” much to the surprise and the enthusiasm of crowds lingering in front of the museum. Rehearsals had taken place earlier in the day at a dance center in the Marais while the radio station Skyrock took care of the music. “With a handful of friends, we wanted to pay homage to Michael Jackson by taking up the idea of other flashmobs that took place on the same theme in London and Stockholm,” explained the Paris organizer Roxane Planas. “Everything was done very quickly, with small means.”

Next, Michael Kimmelman posted a dispatch from Paris in the NYTimes, titled "At Louvre, Many Stop to Snap but Few Stay to Focus":

Almost nobody, over the course of that hour or two, paused before any object for as long as a full minute. Only a 17th-century wood sculpture of a copulating couple, from San Cristobal in the Solomon Islands, placed near an exit, caused several tourists to point, smile and snap a photo, but without really breaking stride.

Mr. Kimmleman's piece is a thoughtful reflection on the reasons so many people seem to fly through museums these days. In musing on how we got to this place he traces the differences in viewing art at museums from the era of the "Grand Tours" in which "Travelers ...spent months and years learning languages, meeting politicians, philosophers and artists and bore sketchbooks in which to draw and paint" to today:

Cameras replaced sketching by the last century; convenience trumped engagement, the viewfinder afforded emotional distance and many people no longer felt the same urgency to look. It became possible to imagine that because a reproduction of an image was safely squirreled away in a camera or cell phone, or because it was eternally available on the Web, dawdling before an original was a waste of time, especially with so much ground to cover.

We could dream about covering lots of ground thanks to expanding collections and faster means of transportation. At the same time, the canon of art that provided guideposts to tell people where to go and what to look at was gradually dismantled. A core of shared values yielded to an equality among visual materials. This was good and necessary, up to a point. Millions of images came to compete for our attention. Liberated by a proliferation, Western culture was also set adrift in an ocean of passing stimulation, with no anchors to secure it.

So tourists now wander through museums, seeking to fulfill their lifetime’s art history requirement in a day, wondering whether it may now be the quantity of material they pass by rather than the quality of concentration they bring to what few things they choose to focus upon that determines whether they have “done” the Louvre. It’s self-improvement on the fly.

Thinking about this reminded me of how, when I lived in London, I must have visited the National Gallery a few dozen times (more or less). My approach to visiting it, after my inaugural three-hour stroll around, had been to decide on one room or even simply one piece before heading over to Trafalgar Square, and then spending the entire visit enjoying that very targeted exposure to its vast collection. Of course, the main thing that made this approach feasible for a 20-something fresh out of college and barely scraping by was the fact that there is no entrance fee to the National Gallery. The other factor leading to this luxury, of course, was back then I had a lot more free time than I have now.

The fact that this seems impossible in my life now, though, only makes me more determined to find some solution to the problems preventing it. Kimmelman suggested an approach to a cure, I think:

Recently, I bought a couple of sketchbooks to draw with my 10-year-old in St. Peter’s and elsewhere around Rome, just for the fun of it, not because we’re any good, but to help us look more slowly and carefully at what we found. Crowds occasionally gathered around us as if we were doing something totally strange and novel, as opposed to something normal, which sketching used to be. I almost hesitate to mention our sketching. It seems pretentious and old-fogeyish in a cultural moment when we can too easily feel uncomfortable and almost ashamed just to look hard.

Of course, Kimmelman is currently on a Grand Tour of his own that few of us not working for the Times can hardly afford. Still, putting the two Parisian observations together, I wondered whether it might not be possible to organize flashmob events at which dozens, if not hundreds of people would stop all at once in this or that museums across the world, sit down, and sketch. Just sketch what they see, regardless of how good they are at it. For at least 15 minutes. Then they could carry on with their very busy lives. Clearly it wouldn't have the entertainment impact of seeing choreographed dance routines, but it could benefit its participants all the same.

I'm not sure how to organize a flashmob event, though. Anyone?