Slipping Glimpses

The tourist trade and the gallery machine have now combined forces. Take the Tate Modern in school holiday season for instance, where swarms descend in search of a cheap day out (compared to Alton Towers), stampeding there way through the super-structure. The gallery has now been adapted to suit this form of speed absorption of artworks, it actively encourages it. After all, the gallery is a business who’s funding is based on getting as many people through its doors as possible (and out again to make room for another influx). The education room, so often incorporated, has a double purpose - an extra space to store visitors; to hold them captive while room in made for them elsewhere. As a gallery assistant I have often been told to, ‘encourage visitors into the education room if elsewhere is looking too full’ (lest they leave without being accounted for). Robert Storr recently wrote an article for Frieze entitled ‘Art Space’ in which he refers to the contemporary museum as, ‘a machine for ‘slipping glimpses’.

‘The mechanisms in play are horribly like those of a sci-fi monster that ingests people in great gulps, pumps them peristaltically through its digestive tract in a semi-delirious state, then flushes them out the other end with their pockets lighter and with almost no memory of their ‘museum experience’ other than a mild anaesthetic hangover.’
Robert Storr

Time and space have been pushed out of the contemporary gallery/museum/shop/restaurant superstructure to make room for more people.

http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/art_space/