It doesn’t need to be said: we are all going too fast, in
our cars, in our lives, in our frenetic need for access to information. From
Paul Simon’s lyric “Slow down, you move too fast, you got to make the morning
last…” (1966) to Wordsworth’s “The world is too much with us; late and soon,
getting and spending, we lay waste our powers” (1807) poets have long chided us
for our desire to accelerate and acquire
.
One art institution is making a counter statement. Glenstone,
the creation of wealthy collectors Mitch and Emily Rales, is a museum of world
class contemporary art that opened in 2006 on their 230 acre property in
Potomac MD and which, after months of work, has been dramatically expanded. It now
features five times its original gallery space, new landscaping, outdoor art
installations, walking trails and an online reservation system, very busy since
the re-opening of Glenstone in October.
In fact, presently the earliest reservation you can get is for February 2019.
Why? The Rales couple purposely caps Glenstone’s
admission-free attendance at 400 per day. They want to provide a contemplative
experience for their visitors. This
attitude is counter to the populist approach museums have had for years. Throw
the doors open and y’all come. Even with steep admission prices, such as the
Met and MOMA, the galleries, especially for special exhibitions, are jammed.
But aside from the fact that you “got in” how much time and visual access do
you have with the art displayed? I experienced the infamous “Mona Lisa Moment”
cited recently by the Washington Post’s critic Phillip Kennicott at The Louvre
some years ago. If you’re lucky, you might get a glimpse of the iconic painting
by peering over the shoulders and raised cameras of hundreds of visitors
jostling for position.
Kennicott equates the careful pacing of the Glenstone
experience to the Rales’ interest in the growing “slow art” movement, in which some
curators and designers are looking to offer visitors a chance for “sustained
attention” to works of art. For instance the new indoor galleries at Glenstone were
designed to offer 300 square feet in which to move about, as opposed to the
average of 32 square feet at the Guggenheim in New York. What’s more, there are
no stanchions or barriers between the art and viewer to impede the feeling of
connection and immediacy.
It should be noted this special experience is due to the
Rales’ great wealth and generosity. It is a small institution compared to the
behemoth METs and MOMAs, with huge curatorial, administrative and maintenance
staffs and facilities that need constant feeding. Nevertheless, the Rales are asking: what
comes first - the attendance numbers/income or the visitor’s experience?
The October opening of the new Glenstone received widespread
national media attention and praise , hence the backlog in securing a
reservation. I look forward to December 1 when Glenstone (at www.glenstone.org) will start accepting online reservations for February
forward. But we all better act fast, to guarantee a reservation for a slow experience.
p.s. while waiting for December 1 and the Glenstone
reservations to open up try the video site Slow TV
premiered by the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation. As an antidote to the action hero milieu in
the media so popular today, there you can experience, in its entirety, a 9 hour
train ride carefully filmed solely from the engineer’s cab.
Comments on this post
and others in the archive to the left are welcome at: gplatt63@gmail.com
