"The Future Looks Viral" is a weekly series where we profile the people behind an innovative, new online project, be it a parody Twitter account, web series or interesting Instagram profile. They all have one thing in common: the potential to go viral.
Usually the most interesting thing to see at a museum is what's on display. However, the people viewing the exhibits can sometimes be just as fascinating.
That's what Ed Rodley shows with his Tumblr People Behaving Appropriately in Art Museums. Rodley, who by day is the associate director of integrated media at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass., takes a satirical look at how people view art by parodying the stereotypical stuffy and pretentious art critic. The Tumblr features photos Rodley finds online and some submissions of people looking at art in museums accompanied by a short critique of what is right or wrong about what they're doing. You should feel free to submit your own photos as well.
Rodley spoke with T-Lounge over the phone about People Behaving Appropriately in Art Museums, how selfies have impacted the art world and the museums he's dying to visit now. May it inspire your inner art critic.
Where did the idea for People Behaving Appropriately in Art Museums come from?
The whole idea of the Tumblr was started by just some snarky side remarks that I made. These remarks are the kind that art critics that write long op-ed pieces in The Times or The New Yorker make, lamenting about the state of the unwashed masses that go to art museums and do stupid things, like take photographs or selfies or don't behave in the quiet, appropriate manner. I thought I would channel some of that snark into People Behaving Appropriately in Art Museums. Ostensibly, it's a sort of a Colbert-esque attempt to poke fun at the idea that in order to correctly view an art museum, you have to be quiet. Or that it's better if you're by yourself, or if you're with somebody, you should ignore them, or pretend you're by yourself. That is certainly one way to experience art, but it is, I don't think by any means, the only way or the only valid way. So it is me poking fun at them a little bit and just having fun.
Your title is People Behaving Appropriately in Art Museums, but some of the photos are of people behaving, in your opinion, inappropriately. Why did you decide to include both on the blog?
The persona of the blog author that I'm trying to put across is this traditional, 20th-century art museum elite mindset that thinks there is a right way and a wrong way. And thinks that when people do things the wrong way, it's a good idea to mock them in print, preferably on Sunday in as big a paper as you can. The idea is basically to make that kind of position seem ridiculous by both kinds of examples. There's one black-and-white picture in there that I found from like the '50s of a bunch of women at an art museum, and it's classic mid-century America. All the women have hats, and they're wearing gloves. They're dressed in their going-out clothes, and they're sitting there very appropriately with their hands on their laps and their legs crossed. And there's some guy in a suit in the background obviously lecturing to some woman about art. You know, it sort of sums up the whole old establishment ideal of what it meant to go to a museum. This is the voice of authority. You come here to sit quietly and listen and be told what to think about art, preferably by a white male in a suit.
With all of those posts, I try to problematize that conception of museum-going, both in terms of the appropriate and the inappropriate models that I use. Like, do you really need to refrain from displaying any kind of motion, which seems to be one of those things that folks like Philip Kennicott or Judith Dobrzynski, or any of the established critics out there who write about these things, tend to get very pissed about. You know,"These people are being loud. These people are waving their arms around." Pretty much anything that's not standing still quietly is, to them, somehow less valid and, more importantly, part of the reason why Western civilization is crumbling. And you know, that's worth poking at a little.
