Why visiting art galleries can leave you flat on the floor |
Readers, let me tell you the one big problem with art galleries, and especially with Canberra's National Gallery of Australia and National Portrait Gallery. There's too much art in them. Far, far too much.
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If you are seeking a Trump-avoiding/Hanson-forgetting respite from today's epidemic of "news fatigue" by leaving your devices behind and going to an art gallery then beware. Alas at art galleries another species of fatigue, the famous "museum fatigue" (first described in 1910) awaits you.
In recent days I have gone, twice, becoming fatigue-befuddled both times, to the National Gallery of Australia's magnificent (but perhaps bewilderingly magnificent) Ngura Pulka - Epic Country exhibition. Coincidentally into my inbox has just alighted a new piece from The Guardian, Isabel Brooks' Let me tell you one big problem with art galleries - there's too much art.
Back to our theme in a moment but first to how the fine and honourable word "epic", so misemployed in the naming of Trump's attack on Iran as operation Epic Fury, is gloriously restored in the name of the National Gallery's Epic Country.
Better names for Trump's war on Iran would have been Buffoon's Fiasco or Moron's Folly. By contrast the Epic Country exhibition consists of 30 often epically huge paintings (some of them measure three metres by three metres) by First Nations artists honouring landscapes and places in the epically vast APY Lands (Aangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara) in the remote north-west of South Australia.
The problem youthful Ms Brooks has been experiencing now is as old as the hills, and she points to the long and ongoing history of analyses of how and why museum-going/gallery-going can be so........