Sunday, October 07, 2007

catalyst

Much of my reason to be a docent is sheer selfishness. I hope to eventually do it professionally and in the process embed myself deeper in a cultural institution. That would instill in me a feeling of stability. I realized that, at this point in my life, I don't need to settle for less in terms of what I want for myself. At the same time I must keep an active buoyancy to maintain a deservedness for such better things. I want to be more learned, I want to be in a place where that is strongly encouraged, I want to be elite.

But the thing is, what I want for myself is also to the benefit of others. My selfishness balances out with a sense of altruism. I want the little kids to discover and enjoy what I discovered and enjoyed when I was a kid the very first time I visited an art museum.

Culture, with a capital 'C', is lost on people today. We've given up our sense of place in the world in relation to other places. We'd rather watch it on the internet than actually witness it in person, to see, hear, touch, taste, and smell it. What the huge shitload of us have forgotten is that such things as art, history, peoples, natural sciences, and the other disciplines is fundamentally the history of us. Once we forget we start fucking ourselves over and we lose a profound sense of groundedness. And things like youtube and CNN News and glamorized ghettoization can never replace that.

Philippe de Montebello, the recently retired director of The Metropolitan Museum Of Art, was once confronted at a press conference for making the museum an elitist institution, why has he not reached out to, say, black kids in Harlem or the working class.

His reply was, in effect, "Yes, this is an elitist institution. And yet anyone can walk in off the street, go into the galleries, and learn about the world through the art. No one is stopping you at the door and telling you that you are too poor, too ethnic, too this or that. Everyone is welcome. The very moment you choose to enter The Metropolitan is the moment that you, yourself, become elite."

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