Alain de Botton on Art Is Therapy in the Rijksmuseum

thank you very much pleasure to be here and I want to start really by thinking a little bit about what the museum is and why museums exist and it's my theory that the rise of the museum in Europe is linked to secularization there was a marked decline in the number of people who believed in God and the whole apparatus that went with God in the mid 19th century in England and of course there'd been museums before but at that point there's an explosion in the number of museums you can chart on a graph the number of people who go to church and the rise in the number of people and the number of museums that are built you know the two graphs intersect and that moment is about the mid 19th century so there seems to be something odd going on people start to think of going to the museum as in some ways a replacement for going to church and you now hear sometimes people say things like well cathedrals are our new museums you know and I think that's in a way a very beautiful idea because it's really the idea that many of the things that people traditionally look for from religion can in some ways be found in art and if we think what these things are they're things like a feeling of community a feeling of guidance of ethical morality a sense of consolation for the hardships of life a dignified portrayal of the darker stretches of everybody's existence some of these things are in common you know the realm of art and the realm of Scripture has things in common and in the in the mid 19th century when voices like that of a John Ruskin or Matthew Arnold star started speaking up for the role of art in a secularizing society their view was absolutely that scripture should replace so that the scripture should be replaced by culture but people who had previously gone to church should suddenly have this new thing which is art now as I say that's a beautiful idea and it's a lovely theory but we've forgotten all about it and the proof that we got all about it is that if I went to a church today and fell down on my knees and started weeping because I've made so many mistakes in my life I'm such a fragile idiot and what am I really doing you know people this will be the right place to do it people would you know make some room and I've seen if I did the similar sort of thing if I if I if I found Rembrandt's beautiful beautiful painting of Jeremiah are upstairs Jeremiah at the height of disaster everything has gone wrong for him you know it's a it's a classic moment of utter debasement utter loss of hope if I you know was in front of Jeremiah and started weeping and said I understand you how should I live Jeremiah guide me I will be escorted out by the guards I'd be I'd be out in Amsterdam in minutes right I think it's pointing to something which is there's a kind of coolness an institutionalized coolness that is demanded of us by the artistic establishment so even though we pay lip service idea it means so much art is so important at etc actually in the museum itself and the way we look at art there's a remarkable academic quality you know what does it say on the caption it tells you when the picture was done it doesn't tell you to weep or not weep does when it was done and by who and all this sort of stuff and with the artists have cared you know with the first thing that Rembrandt of thought would you know is it was in 61 or 62 would he have cared no you wouldn't have cared but the people who guard Rembrandt care a lot and they incite us to care and they shape our journey through the museum um I'm here to introduce this new show which comes off a book the book was called art as therapy and the show here is rather confusingly but accurately in a sense call art is therapy it's a it's the practical demonstration and it was very bold of the Rijksmuseum to do this and in their boldness they I talked to the designer lovely lady called ilma balm and she said well this show is very modern and so we must have a very modern atmosphere around its kind of Punk and I want to suggest that what about post-it notes and I went well that's that's lovely it's just very very interesting but could have something more more classical no no she would no no no everybody's no no no it's more Punk its playful it's just a disposable thing it's not really anything that's old or established it's just so ironic and I was a lone voice and so we went with the post-it notes that you will see outside you know I can see their charm and they're very very nice in many ways but very important to say one thing which is I'm the old guy and they are the young punks because the Rijksmuseum is built on a very modern ideology for most of human history most civilizations have believed in my view of art my view of art the art that I'm suggesting might live your be which is essentially a didactic utilitarian propaganda based view of art all the major faiths have had this the ancient Greeks had it so you know in Aristotle in Plato in st. Augustine and st. Aquinas in Hegel in the theories of the east you find the same set of ideas which is that works of art are arenas in which ideas are made sense are made are given a sensory form in order to seduce their audience towards a set of beliefs that are held to be important by the society by the sponsors of the works of art so whether that's you know an altarpiece by Bellini or a you know sculpture of the Buddha or a Greek god that's been had lots of attention lavished on him all of this is designed to use art as a system of propaganda for all sorts of things now this really worries the modern world I actually don't think it should worry the modern world as much as I it does and I want to come back to that but the important thing to recognize is that the modern world is founded on this very odd idea that art has no very clear meaning it has no overarching purpose that's why the question what what is art for is an impossible question to answer ask in a in a modern arena it's not supposed to be an answer art is enigmatic essentially private not really political despite the old political ambitions of the artists themselves it's essentially not meant to be political it's a private experience and it has no particular desire to change the world it exists within the art world it's its own planet and you don't really step on or one good as I'm on it but you can't necessary journey between the two to the rest of life so art has lost a lot of its former ambition really to act as a didactic force helping you to live and to die and this show though it's on post-it notes goes back to that older tradition it's trying to argue that the art in this building and the artist who created it absolutely believes in a didactic a vision of art almost all the religious objects of course and others too you know Vermeer's little street is a piece of political art it's the Netherlands founding document it's telling you what a good life is it's trying to change you you'll notice in the cabinet rooms upstairs these dedicated cabinet rooms they have a tradition of prints from the 17th and 18th centuries of moralistic prints again the idea that prints would be moralistic very strange but there are all sorts of you can see them there lots of you know lovely prints of say around the theme of money that will have a picture and then they will have a caption to it like the greedy man doesn't get to heaven like you can't have it any plainer than that but this is a sort of Oh like really is this can this be good art the greedy man is it and but that idea of didacticism was absolutely central to the way people used to look at art and an in a sense what we're doing with this show is returning to that earlier vision and pointing out that it's okay that it's not on a slippery slope to some horrific propaganda ideal and that that we should learn to be at home with it so let me take you a little bit through the theory of why you know if one's arguing that artists therapeutic what does that really mean what what does that word mean first of all that word is a bit scary because it seems a bit American so let me quash any fears right in that area to be therapeutic the goal of the therapeutic process is not that you become happy all the time it is that you are mature that you become emotionally mature which means and will demand a real acquaintance with tragedy because tragedy and loss and grief are written into the contract of life and therefore a proper acquaintance in negotiation with this belongs to maturity so that's what I'm saying the journey of the the ultimate goal of the therapeutic process is a mature human being not a grinning idiot right as one might feel so III we use that word therapeutic it is a polemical word you know we could have said art as away art as a journey towards the more evolved mature human being but the crowd would have thinned so we did we did use a slightly polemical word on on purpose but but you know I wanted a new asset with you now now so we're in the what I want to start with is where we are today in culture which is art is tremendously valued very prestigious it seems like everything's going fine with art I mean essentially we're alleging there's a bit of a problem with art but it doesn't look like it because it's long queues outside there's tons of people around Sotheby's and Christie's record prices it seems like everything's hunky-dory with art so you know there's not an immediate you know going to get immediate receptivity to say there's a crisis in our attitudes to art but I believe that there is and the crisis is that it's really crisis of decadence right we are decadent as a civilization in that we cannot tie down neatly and accurately enough what we want from art and I think this is a symptom of a slightly dislocated society that doesn't understand some of its deepest needs and I want to try and bring this into focus so um what you've got here is a Rothko and I remember when I discovered Rothko's a moody teenager I was very drawn to him and felt great power emanating from these campuses I didn't really know what I was supposed to think and I remember looking at the caption and it was all about how was painted on a critic and acquired by the collection of so-and-so and moved from that museum so nope what was going on and so like many people I had powerful feeling but very undirected sort of you know something powerful was going on but I couldn't put it into words and in some mood that might have been irritated if someone said try and put into words I thought no it's more precious just vague anyway but then years later I was reading an interview that Mark Rothko and it was a rather intemperate interview that Mark Rothko had given from a blessedly slightly dim interviewer well not dim but down-to-earth interviewer from Time magazine and basically the guy was saying mr. Rothko what are you up to and your canvases and Rothko was going this way and he's gonna and he kept going but what is it about and at the end you literally feel Rothko losing his temper and he says my canvases are an occasion for the sadness in me to meet the sadness in you and that way we'll be less lonely and I thought yes that's brilliant goodness thought that's what it was about just didn't know I was allowed to think that why didn't they stick that on the caption letters right because you're not allowed in acrylic and the dirt so you're not allowed to but I think we absolutely should because that's an example of art you know if I say art is instrumental okay don't panic because some people go oh my god are you from the government do you want art to produce you know increased GDP or something yeah you know by saying it's a dramatic it's really just a tool for something in other words it's a tool for making you less sad that's a function of art right so what doesn't have to say you know it's going to inspire the peasantry to revolution or raise the GDP or any other sort of grand and slightly brittle visions of what art can do it can be something like make you a bit less sad that too is a tool and these guys understood it I mean when you know Bellini was painting this altarpiece it was absolutely accepted that that's what art did art I mean this art was made the way it was in order to try and make that the truths of the Gospels seem more appealing it was a constant reminder to live a little bit more like Jesus and take the attitudes of Mary etc so deeply didactic a very great work of art we've got this assumption sometimes that if the moral can be written on a postcard then the work of art must be deeply shallow absolutely not true a work of art can as a construction in terms of its artistry it can be of unbelievable complexity and yet what it's saying to us can be written in plain language in a few sentences and this is you know reading all those catalogs you know you're familiar with the museum catalogue one of the most baffling genres of publishing today often reads like they're translated from the German and if they're in German from the Dutch I mean it's just deeply puzzling would just doesn't understand what's going on and yet one can and should be able to speak in this plain language now look let me with you through some of the areas in which I think art can work its therapeutic potential our art has displays its function now one of the most obvious and basic was worth just restating is that art helps us to remember stuff because we forget stuff so this is John Constable on Hampstead Heath in the 1820s and he got very fascinated by the clouds that were constantly scuttling overhead and he found them very beautiful and he wanted in his words to bottle them literally wanted to put him in a bottle and I think about a bottle as you put them in a bottle and then they're more readily accessible when you need them and his genius was to capture this fleeting phenomena and lend it weight and make it permanently available so whenever we want to see it there it is the sky is bottle and it seems that in many ways that's what all artists are doing in many of their moves what they are doing is taking something precious something we would otherwise lose sight of and putting in a bottle and the more their name and the more that their craft is distinctive the more that area of experience comes to carry their whole name so when we you know arrive in America and we taking the car out on our first drive outside of you know Arizona outside of Phoenix or something and we go wow that's so hopper esque what we're centrally saying is hopper came along very skillfully bottled a particular atmosphere and mood and now it's got a name and it means that we are less strange to ourselves and we can communicate with others so I'm a great believer as a writer in putting words to visual experiences I'm not at the school that says you'll break it if you write about it no that can't agree with you that but of course an artist is great not just for bottling but not his becomes great the more they're able to bottle what seems the right thing so hopper didn't just pick any old thing in America he seemed to pick a particular atmosphere that was valuable for me there's been any ole thing even about this woman he seemed capture the particularity z' of the light and the atmosphere which means that we call it a great painting but really what it is is a great set of choices about what to capture about what to memorialize if you like so art as a process of bottling the most significant experiences that we have making them readily available one of the problems of museums incidentally is that we go to museums when we don't eat need art very much because when we go to museums we tend to be on holiday when quite a cheerful mood and the the message of art that art has to us often is messages for quite extreme emotional states and so often the time when we really need these works of art are in the bathroom in the kitchen moments of domestic life and the kids are running about in the car at them so that's when you need your Caspar David Friedrich landscape or you're calming work by Vermeer or your beautiful clouds but you know but they're not there because they know they're off in the tate and in the the Rijksmuseum etc that's why i think that one of the most significant places of any museum is the gift shop because that's where you can take the lessons from the museum out back into the world and that's why I think the postcard and the reproduction is deeply valuable because whatever it loses in terms of absolute authenticity it gains because it's more available to us at the moments when we desperately need it okay but get back to my main point another great thing that art can do for us is well let me show you this postcard this is by Monet and the water lilies and it's the most popular postcard in the world it's in any one museum in the world it's it's on sale at the Met and it just sells in the hundreds of thousands every year and this is very distressing to thoughtful intelligent people because it's so cheerful and it's so pretty pretty pretty pretty pretty no one likes pretty art and this is also very unfortunately very popular work of art people just can't get enough of this they love it so pretty simply right and serious people like Adrienne cirlove the deities on this well look what about the children in Syria they are dying what about going on in the heights of Pakistan what about the Ukraine etc right now that their model of life is that we are naive and we need art to open our eyes to the true state of life since classically you are the bourgeois I am the artist or friend of the artist and I must initiate you into the darkness of life the problem is that you'd have to be more or less living in a cave to think that life was all sweet and lovely you just I don't know there's anyone that the real dangerous that most of us are facing are not naivety and sentimentality what we're really dangerous a sing is clinical depression because things are so difficult and so tough and the world has so many problems and we're reminded of them at every turn so these works of art which are really works of art we call it pretty but actually really what lies emotionally behind prettiness is hope they are works that carry hope the hope that we need to get through the day I mean insofar as life is precious it's precious because of things like this and things like this that's what makes life precious and we need a reminder of that occasionally because we get so aware of the converse that we lose sight of this very basic quality and that's why when you go to museums all over the world what do people buy flowers and spring children running through meadows blue skies people love it and it's not that they're stupid it's not that they've forgotten the children in Syria it's that they're so aware of the children in Syria and the darkness and the problems etc that they need this to buy up their mood and I think this is fundamentally misunderstood by the 20th century art criticism that really has it in for these sorts of works of art and I mean take this this is a bunch of roses and it's very very pretty so this must have be paid by an idiot who thought life as a bunch of roses but of course it wasn't this is by Fontana Latour a very dark and very tortured character in the history of French painting art more generally the 19th century was full of tortured crazy geniuses and this man what really tops the league I mean he had every problem you know syphilis problems his parents promises the misters money problems political problem add them all his life was a nightmare and yet he spent significant part of his life painting flowers and he wasn't soft in the head it's just that he knew how important flowers were and how important a spring day was etc because he knew about pain you know how it is with children children never appreciate flowers thank goodness because they haven't suffered enough you need to suffer quite a lot before you appreciate a flower and by the time you're getting to my advanced age or your to know what when it advanced age like mine you you start you start to really be moved by spring in a way you never have before you think wow this is so lovely because previously you think well the whole of life is going to be perfect I'm just going to sort out everything everything then you realize that they're intractable problems in your life in life generally so anything well in this patch of ground something really lovely is going on these daffodils are really pretty and they're going to be dead in a week and I'm not going to be hung up but I just love the look of them right now so in a way against a wider backdrop of pain and complexity these things start to see much much more important so let's not have it in for the pretty it's a very important emblem of hope and we need that and serious people need that as well now another thing that art is good for is when you're alone with suffering what compounds that sufferings precisely what I've said that you're alone with it the sense that we are alone with suffering doubles the suffering and what people have traditionally looked at works of art for is an echo of their own suffering but given with a little dignity and in a public way so if I look at this work which is by Richard Serra and it's called Fernando Pessoa Fernando Pessoa the great Portuguese poet of pain it's a monumental work in a way it's a sort of Nelson's column of pain and it's very good that exists out there in the world in its sober form because it's it's in a way legitimating you know many of us go through Sarah moments where we feel a bit like that and it's very nice that we can go to a public place and that mood is acknowledged as it is indeed in this Caspar David Friedrich and of course this doesn't necessarily depress us people think oh it's sad art so it must depress and of course it doesn't because like listening to you know a bar cantata when you're melancholic or a Leonard Cohen song or whatever these things echo and therefore redeem and alleviate the sense of loneliness around a sad feeling in a way the whole of art in this area operates a little bit like hoppers Asher ette this painting which you know half the screen shows some people at cinema there they are and they're laugh uproariously at the latest Hollywood film and in a way that's what most of the world does so seek care can be seen to be to be doing sometimes in some mood but there's one person that the painter and that we've got our eye on which is this lady oops which is this lady here and of course she's the heroine of the picture and the light falls upon her because she's the witness to suffering just sad as we don't know what the sadness is but in this sort of happy jolly for the superficial place she's the guardian of these more private Agony's that in fact we all feel so in fact we are all the usherette and yet we're up against a world out there that seems not to recognize that so art as a as a medium in which our own pains and some of our O's private moods are are explored now there's something else that people who thinking in this area often come up against which is the striking phenomenon that people have different tastes in art people cannot agree on what is attractive work of art and this would seem to doom the idea that art can be properly didactic because if I like this and you like that how can we ever agree on what's important to have around us etc I think there is a relatively easy way of interpreting the psychological mechanisms that lead people to have the tastes that they have I think that the art that we love contains in a concentrated form qualities of character virtues of character orientations moods that we are deeply attracted to that we are deeply loyal to but that we don't have enough of in our lives that we can't reliably hold in our own characters and when we see them externalized in works of art and what we're seeing is a kind of an ideal that is just out of reach and when we say I am moved by a work of art or it it touches me really what we're seeing is almost like a little bit of paradise that's kind of somewhere else but it's not securely in our grasp the feeling that the pain that sometimes accompanies the sight of beauty comes from an awareness that the beauty depicted is not securely present in our lives and that's why some art bascially the most beautiful art can make us feel simultaneously happy and happy that it exists sad that it doesn't exist enough in our own life but look um this is an interior by minimalist architect in London called John Paulson it's a minimalist flat and I really like this to a flat totally empty nothing on the walls completely blank etc um and that's because I'm not really like that enough my life is chaotic is too much going on there's staff there's clutter etc I look at that I think well that's really where I belong but I don't really belong I don't actually belong there it's not my home but it's what I would like my home to be like and I think in terms of interior decoration it's just the same as with art we we our tastes reflect our aspirations not in the kind of superficial in the deeper sense our psychological aspirations and you could always ask of somebody well what might they have been afraid of in order to fall in love with a particular style of art what I'm afraid of is chaos and that's why you know I like this style of decoration this is the Palace of Versailles very different or you know it's what we would nowadays rudely call Russian taste or sometimes used to be called Arab taste yeah lots of dole is it now what on earth of people who are attracted to their to that that such as what are they afraid of well they're afraid of being very very poor peasants in the mud etc you have to be very scared of simplicity in order to go for this kind of style you have to be traumatized and of course both in the history of the ex-soviet Union and in history of the Arabian Peninsula you know there was a long time in which precisely those foreigners very easy to see where those fears might have come from so people people's tastes emerges from lacks in them things that are lacking in them and things that are trying to compensate for and reach out that for but but this keeps changing as societies change so the thing we're lacking changes so for example this is I think probably you probably think was a lovely rural cottage and the Queen of France thought so too because this is at the bottom of Versailles the garden Versailles this is Mary Antoinette famous model village where she'd had enough of this she had too much of this she would have been quite safely there she'd done nothing she wanted little bit simpler that peasants are now most of Britain's housing now looks like this it actually looks like this and the reason most of Britain's housing looks like this is because Britain is very very scared of the modern world and very technologically advanced and going crazy with urbanization and only a nation that would be like that would find any choice I mean if you show this to the average peasant they'd go my god that's horrible get me out of that but so you have to be very very far from the conditions in which these buildings were first created in order to see their charm but as a nation we now do I was looking at a kitchen magazine the other day actually and it struck me turning the pages that they're basically two kinds of kitchen that you can buy the first kind of kitchen is like the sort of John Paul's minimal kitchen so totally empties steel and you're pared back and the other kind of kitchen is the shaker style kitchen a sort of wooden you know nostalgic crafted thing and I thought well really this shows the two things that we're really like many people in society are lacking nowadays you know with a minimal thing we're lacking piece we're lacking harmony I'm annoyed our lives are chaotic and the other thing we're lacking is contact with nature contact with the natural rhythms of the earth we lost touch and when we decorate the kitchen we think all that's beautiful that cabinets beautiful don't really know why but I think it's because of that thing that we're that we're lacking so anyway that's a theory of why why we're attracted because you know as we walk around the museum we'll all fall in love with slightly different things and it's a fascinating thing to ask somebody what did you fall in love with what is the thing that is most touching you it's a royal road into the deepest parts of themselves it's good to be sitting down with a cake in the in the in the cafeteria while discussing this because you might need a seat now the other thing another thing that art is traditionally done but we're a bit scared of now is that artists traditionally try to warn us about things and encourages towards others so this is Frangelico warning us that if we keep stealing the money and we're not nice to our children and the evil in politics etcetera we will end up down there in hell a boiling being torn apart our limbs going to be in one area rest of body in another head chopped off eaten by weird things anyway it's all fairly graphic and that's what it's telling you so just be careful you know do letters now it's piece of propaganda on half of Christian philosophy and we're very very scared of the word propaganda because we associate well really we associated with this guy when we hear the word propaganda that's what we imagine we're on the road to now I think it's really important to rehabilitate the word propaganda propaganda is merely a concerted effort to convince you of something and it can be very nice so this thing piece of propaganda but on behalf of something really quite nice which is Buddhism and particularly theories of renunciation acceptance of suffering the five fold path it's all in there and the idea is you should look at the Buddha and you should try and imitate him should be a bit more like him so you should take your cue from the Buddha and govern your life and it's been done through a work of art that is unashamedly a work of propaganda but you see lots of works of art in a way have this impact even if they're not overtly from a religion or whatever this is args portrait of madam divorcee now in a way that's kind of a piece of propaganda on behalf of a certain attitude to life if we say oh she looks really nice such as that she looks beautiful she's symmetrical etc there's an attitude to life coming out of her face just as there is from the Buddha and it seems to me she seems to be that sort of person who'd be quite strict but open-minded in some areas why sympathetic you could really feel like you go and tell her quite a personal problem and she wouldn't panic she's seen a lot of life she's she's quite calm but we could go on um argh is making a little piece of propaganda about a character and he's inviting us to take those characteristics those virtues of character slightly more seriously it's a classic move that painters and artists have made and it works of course also in the abstract form so this is a Korean moon jar from the British Museum beautiful a medieval object and it's making an argument for what life's about it's saying if you're slightly wonky and miss shapen that's not necessarily a problem because life is like that too and there can be real dignity in being a bit misshapen and wonky and if you're you know slightly chipped and glazed and life scratched you a bit that's okay too because we're not going to try and make this pot perfect we're going to relish the imperfection so there's all sorts of mostly Buddhist inspired philosophy emanating from a pot so you can have a pot in the corner of your room or you know in ER in a shop window whatever and it can be speaking an advanced piece of political philosophy it can be didactically telling you things about the a that life should be and I think that we have so separated out the world of ideas from the visual realm that it seems bizarre to freight visual objects with any kind of meaning in the way that I think they're very creators would have wanted them to to have and there's something else that art can usefully do and it made me think in relation to these guys now these are some people who are very very glamorous and apparently that I'm told they're very famous they are famous I'm joking they're very famous and they're there in Hollywood and having a lovely time and they're very glamorous a glamorous people and the thing about glamour is that we're exposed to it all the time in the media these people have opened this restaurant these people are having a party these people they got married etc and it's really really nice and this picture is delightful the problem is I wasn't invited and nor will you and this is a real problem so we are outside of the Charmed Circle of all those lovely things going on and on a good day we don't mind and on a bad day it really becomes very annoying that our life is so ordinary and stupid and boring and why doesn't anything good happen to me I want to be on TV then then we're in absolutely the right place in the Rijksmuseum and in the home of dutch 17th century art which had an attitude that was squarely on the ordinary the dutch contribution to happiness is an acceptance that an ordinary life can be dignified and can be enough at a time when the Dutch Republic was founded there were a lot of ideals about what a good life was and chiefly it was three ideals the first was the aristocratic ideal right that you can be a great nobleman of a huge estates etc the other kind of ideal was the religious ideal you can be ashamed to martyr and the third religious ideal and third ideal was the military one the great military commander and at this point the Dutch arrived at this very unusual but still deeply interesting and moving idea which is actually staying home and doing the laundry is quite interesting in itself so upstairs you'll find laundry cupboard women doing the sheet things children playing etc and it's a piece of political philosophy and didacticism that the New Republic was going to be a bourgeois Republic based around the family and we continue to be exactly what the Dutch were in 17th century commercial societies based around family life and yet we're quite awkward about it and we can't quite adjusted it and there's many tensions around it and in some ways this museum has lots of lessons in that area things that we find quite tricky so you know the average Dutch still life you know we'll spend a lot of time on a lemon and we're not used to spending any time with lemons because you can pick them up for you know a few euros and no one thinks about them twice and it's very good to be shown works which take you back to a time when people knew to appreciate first of all industry and labor you know we're so aware of the dark sides of Industry and labor and commerce that it's quite useful to come to a commercial society of the 17th century that it recognizes its danger there's lots of moths and things Naurang at the fruit and butter is enough of that but there's also a real joy in depicting the loveliness of material goods so there's a kind of acceptance of some of the nicer aspects of consumerism but it's also ordinary life the end of the day this is just a table it's not a king or a queen or a saint or whatever and art does this a lot this is the Danish painter cupca who spent almost his entire career around the lanes and streets of copenhagen painting shrubs and little things and bridges and the sky at night etc and they're completely delightful and utterly ordinary and the ordinary becomes extraordinary in the hands of an artist who is alive to the the delight that we are overlooking because of glamour because the the media has rubbed us against an image of glamour images of glamour which are a very unhelpful to our attempts to get on with our lives let's come to the whole idea of museums so this is a floor plan of the National Gallery in London and it's just about the most stupid floor plan you can imagine even though it is absolutely typical of the way that all museums are laid out across the world if you have a look here it says paintings 1290 to 1500 fifteen hundred sixteen sixty at sixty sixty burro seventeen hundred so it's done the most normal way which all museums in the world arranged chronologically sorry 18th century wing 90s actually wing etc and the way that it's arranged like they're the reason why it's arranged like this is because curators think the most important thing about a painting is when it was done because that's how you're trained and and therefore you know depending on which side of you know December 1799 it falls you know you'll either be in that building or that building or that room of that room and that's the way in which museums arrange themselves it's crazy because imagine arranging your record collection by you know when each record is made or your book collection by when each book was published it's it's one way of indexing it but just about the most unhelpful because really what you want to do what you want to do when you arrange your bookshelf or your music collection what you do quite naturally is you do it by theme right you do it by oh that's that's the kind of history but or those are the kind of quiet novels about family life and those are the driver and that's how you arrange them but we don't accept this in the world of museums it's a like a giant filing cabinet and it's really unhelpful there are people who do it a different way this is the Ferrari Church in Venice that's a complete mess at the level of chronology because you get a Bellini altarpiece you get a Donatello John the Baptist you got a VIN it's Jana it's a total mess everything everywhere different media as well you're a sculpture etcetera so it's a total mess at the level of chronology but at a level of theme it's utterly coherent and the theme is how to redeem your soul with the help of Jesus Christ so it's squarely on that and it's arranged all the material to try and help that process to go better now I think we can really learn a lot from this church and other churches like it our mission is not to redeem your soul fire Jesus Christ but let's imagine what might a comparable mission be common mission might be well it's our old friend talking about maturity right the goal let's imagine that one of the goals of art might be something like to advance civilization to its best version of itself and its members towards more mature versions of themselves let's imagine now how would you arrange art differently if that was your mission what you might do for star is to give rooms over to Sir themes not to say and here we are in the 18th century which means nothing but to say something like here we are in the room of anxiety because anxiety is a real constant you feel anxious I feel like we're all anxious all the time but one thing or another it dogs us design have anything to say about anxiety of course it does so many wonderful works of art that deal with anxiety um if I was designing my ideal gallery my deal museum I do think about this in the early morning the ideal museum my ideal museum would start with a room on anxiety and you might put something like Belisarius begging for arms by David because one of the things we're all really afraid I was losing our jobs and losing our status and having no role in society and being humiliated and this is what happens to poor Belisarius who was once one of the great figures in the Emperor Justinian armies he falls foul of politics and he's there to beg for arms and look even if we don't lose our jobs we're all moving from position of independence adult independence one day towards a position of dependence so one of the great journeys of life we're all going to face it and anyway this daveed very movingly portrays where the pathos of that journey from independence and strength to weakness and chattin dependence on the charity of others has a huge amount to say to us about that other things make us anxious the fact we're all going to die and if we're going to die quite good to look at Ansel Adams these are trees in autumn and stunning huge photograph which in a way what it does is to you know often when we feel pain and suffering and the onset of our mortality we sometimes can feel for easy to feel personally persecuted by the why me what there's everybody else seems okay and I think what this picture does is it it very movingly shows us that it's written into the script of nature just as the earth has its cycles there's tree have these cycles you know we too will go like the leaves in autumn and it's written there it's not a strong didactic message but we pick up on it it's there so I think that would be in my room of anxiety the other thing pause the other reason why we lose the other reason why we get so anxious all the time is because we lose perspective right we think it's somewhere the keys I'm going crazy where these we just can't you and at that moment you need a tsujimoto this is very very calming it takes us out the immediate and it just gives us a big horizon and there's something almost dumb but very true in the way in which our mental horizon is shaped by what's in front of our eyes if we got a big view we take the bigger view etc and this is this sushi motor seems to recognize that it's giving us a very large canvas as it were a very large perspective which helps to relax us but probably the best artists for this but the greatest artists of the 21st century so far floats above the earth it's the Hubble telescope and these images that really that really we need probably most kitchens one needs a version of this this is NASA's version of a globular cluster far out there and so many situations in life when this would be important to have quite close up against one um but if I was if I was doing a am ideal music I'd also probably have a room dedicated to love the great struggles of life is is love and it's one of the main problems of love is that we if we've been together with someone for any length of time the thing is we stop noticing them we just we just burnish them and we become very spoiled and on the first day when we with them the first night we spent with them is so exciting we couldn't believe that they'd allowed us to to be beside them it's just you know perhaps we couldn't sleep we looked at them and thought it was so beautiful and perfect and where's that gone now well it's been bottled by pizanno in his famous deafness and Chloe and so we need that at the beginning of the gallery of love because that's what we need to remember it was once very very special the course then problems come along and a good relationship is not a relationship without problems it's a relationship where problems have in some ways been harmonized like jagged rocks that have somehow been put together in an artful way even though each of them is quite different in itself and that's why we need Richard Long who seems to do precisely that shows the irregularities made smooth and and more regular in my gallery of love I might also hang a Leonardo these wonderful studies of fetuses Leonardo is a hero of curiosity because most of us spend our lives thinking we know pretty much everything and particularly in relationships we go I know you just like your mother in this area just like your mother and doesn't go no just ask me what I am now it's you and on it goes we don't ask and and that's why relationships get to it very very brittle leonardo stopped and actually went out and found out so how are babies born what what happens but going to go and actually check it out so human being has been around for a long time but no one had bothered to actually go and check it out and leonardo is it is a advocate and a hero of this process of of curiosity the another thing of course you know link to the Pazhani thing we cease to appreciate anything and one of things we proceed to appreciate is the person that we're with Monet painted some asparagus and of course we think asparagus are really nice cause they are yeah yeah yeah but actually we don't pay them any attention here's a great artist spending a lot of time with some asparagus and when we look at them we think god they really are nice and we buy the postcard etc etc and a very basic moral is being suggested to us which is stop and look around your world it's full of lovely things that you haven't even bothered to think about perhaps starting with your spouse so that's what the gallery of love would do we've got some strawberries up here in the gallery by Adrian quarter that show very much the same moral so if any of you in the group and we will have a full group therapy session are just starting in a few minutes if you want to walk I'm joking but if anyone's suffering in a relationship as feel taking their partner for granted we have got I think it's true to point eight or something there's some strawberries that you might want to look at as a model of this in my ideal gallery my deal museum I would also have something about politics now think about politics is that we're very very embarrassed about feeling proud of our country is really an embarrassing feeling the only area where we can feel proud is in sport now when when a sports but win it yeah it's great we can celebrate the rest of time it's really really hard to to celebrate the nation and this is an area where I think art can really help because sometimes what artists are involved in doing is distilling the best sides of their nation in order to make those sides more readily available and in a way more present in society it happens particularly when artists and architects are asked to design embassies so this for example is the Swiss Embassy in Washington DC now Switzerland my own country is one level a land of African dictators who stashed away their money Nazi looters and all sorts of deeply unpleasant xenophobic immigrant phobic people but but it's also wonderful land of social democracy equality elegance dignity respect for nature etc now when Steven Holl was asked to design the the embassy in Washington he wanted to hang on to what was best about Switzerland not from a naivety that nothing else existed but precisely from a desire to make those things more readily visible and available and he designed the beautiful one of the most beautiful buildings similarly this is what Oscar Niemeyer designed as the capital of Brazil now those of you know Brazil no it's not like this and when Oscar Niemeyer was asked this he said that Brasilia would be like this in a hundred year the Brazil would be in a hundred years so we still got a little bit of time to go but really what it is is an ideal it's a direction of travel it's where it's where the artist architect wants to take his society and I think this is something that a lot of works of art do they try to define what might be an ideal we're very suspicious of the word ideal because we think oh if that's just an ideal have you forgotten about the reality you want to know of course I haven't forgotten about the reality it's just that the ideal like a caricature we accept count we accept the journey the other way we accept that you can have a caricature which makes things worse than they normally are but brings out the salient features of why they're bad well this an idealization it works in the opposite direction it's also simplifying but it's simplifying in order to hang on to what's good about something and upstairs you'll see lots and lots of works of idealization of Dutch life and that isn't necessarily a problem because we're not mistaking them for reality we're understanding for what they are which is directions of travel goods to the nation to be more like it could be at its best and that has been a traditional function of our was slightly uncomfortable about it now but I think that we should we should defend that that mission I mean this is another great ideal of what city life should be like not many cities are actually like that but again let's hold it but before us I think a lot of the reason why we love museums and we love art is because the world is not perfect if the world were utterly perfect if all cities were beautiful if everybody looks at strawberries all the time if everybody's relationships were marked by gentleness and kindness and forgiveness we'd be a lot less moved by the art we see I think that art matters to us partly because it encodes values which are in short supply in the world outside and I think ultimately if we think well what's the Rijksmuseum what is ultimate mission yes it's storing the nation's treasures but really it's bound up with a much broader mission which is that the values that are encoded in these works should have more of a life outside and this is my problem with the gift shop that the gift shop doesn't part from selling you postcards really do what it should be doing which is to make Holland more like the pictures upstairs give more tools to that political kind of process and you know people who say things like well I loved everything in the museum but pity about the rest of the city or whatever you know that's a disastrous point of view we want to see continuity in the ideal utopia we'd shot museums we wouldn't need them anymore because the whole world would be so perfect art is born in a way out of disappointment it's because the world can't be made pub is intact that we place such emphasis on these little moments of perfection but I think again the direction of travel should be towards improving the world and using works of art as a modest but important feature in growing ourselves and our societies in an optimal direction I'm going to stop it there thank I think we've got some time for questions so there's a microphone or confessions or yes I was also wondering why you picked what why did you pick the Rijksmuseum for your for your art is therapy yes um look partly with just coincidence that I happen to meet the direct of impe IDs at a party and he said to me what are you doing and I said I'm writing this book that's basically the basic message is you've missed the meaning of your life and you're doing everything wrong and I apparently are allowed to talk to Dutch people like that you're allowed to stare at people and just tell them really quite insulting truths and so long as you've got to smile on your face Dutch people just think that that's how they speak to each others really strikes in Britain everything's so polite but that people seem to like this I became Dutch towards vim pineys and and and he bless him was very kind and he said well please send it to my office tomorrow so I sent her to his office he then called me that afternoon and he said I'd like you to do a show I said really what would it look like he goes I don't know I'm coming to London well let's have lunch and discuss it and from then on he's been the most responsive and the most open to this in a way that I just can't believe I mean we've sat in meetings and I've said things like wouldn't it be great if we sort of had like a giant sign saying artists therapy blinking at the city in the mid of the night and you went you know and I said what I said what I mean so so yes or no he goes yes like this I know in England if someone does that that means no and definitely no it means you're crazy can you be quiet but I've come see in Holland this actually media will do it and I actually didn't believe until I arrived here two days ago that this show was actually going to take place because I just couldn't quite believe that they would really do it but they really have done it and and it's brilliant so look I think also Dutch people are open I think it's such a settled society in some ways it's it society that's so confident because many things here are right I know if you live here you think you can only see the problems but so many things have actually gone right here that I think that this country is up for experiments it's it's really to take chances and to shake things about because it knows they're basically solid it knows that you know I can't injure the Rijksmuseum I'm not going to ruin you know the Rijksmuseum so they're going to they're going to take some risks and and so it's been wonderful we've got two other exhibitions much less important to me and then this one and one is opening next week in Canada at the Art Gallery of Ontario and another one in a few weeks in Melbourne at the National Gallery of Victoria but this is the key one but it's a it's a technique for that you can apply to the interpretation of art well I think it's very interesting thank you art helps us to keep in touch with important values and and emotions but I might say okay but some Kitsch pictures also evoke that responsible and lest of puppies or a crying gypsy girl so can I conclude from that apart from interesting art there's also interesting Kitsch well this really raised the question of what good art is and you know if you if you're just working with a art historical vision of art and a formalist view of art then it then it becomes relatively easy to say well that's good and that's bad because you know the brushstroke is wrong or the subject isn't so you can start to judge things by formal criteria as soon as you say look I'm judging art by therapeutic criteria what do you do when somebody is deeply moved and deeply helped by a so-called bad work of art this this is quite sort of troubling look I think the answer is to say that a good work of art is one which properly addresses an underlying problem it is it is a perfect treatment of a problem maybe that problem is the inattention to some strawberries or the neglect of parental relations or political cynicism whatever it may be that it is at a formal level a good assault on that subject right and the other thing that you need is somebody who needs that message at that point so in other words a therapeutic vision of art does accept that in fact we've got one picture here a religious picture where we say probably you're bored looking at this picture we just has it and probably it might be better for you to go to the cafeteria which is just around the corner at this point and the reason we say this is that the picture addresses something which might have afflicted someone in the Calvinist faith who'd had thoughts about Catholicism at a particular point in Dutch history and that's about naught point naught naught naught naught naught naught percent of anyone who's likely to visit the museum now in other words it may be a very good painting but it's like saying yeah he's a great dentist right you may not need the great dentist now you don't need the dentist right if you don't need the dentist it doesn't matter that the picture is great right so in a way a therapeutic vision of art means that you might not need everything all at once and at the same time and it's those empathy emphases on the moment where you encounter a work of art and one can say that a bad version of something can still have an effect but I think the key point is a good version would have an even more effective what is kitsch art kit chart tends to be based on exaggeration which is a form of desperation it's like someone who shouts too loud then maybe saying could be quite interesting but it'd be more interesting if they spoke less if they shouted less so it's having an effect but a good work of art I think would have an even better effect I don't mean it will have no effect it will have some nourishing qualities yeah thank you I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about how you see the role of the museums in as far as they seem to be a concentration of works of art but separate from the real world and linked to that then charging a price to actually enter into museum to live the artists therapy hmm um that's such a good question I'm not sure I have the full answer but I first of all I think as I say it's a good questions I think it's an unresolved question it could be you know it could seem like we thought we know what museums are doing that's not this thing I think we're still asking I think we should be asking some really basic questions what's the museum for I don't think this has been fully resolved look my kind of idealistic answer is I think that museums are the repositories of things that are valuable not in themselves not not whatever but for the nation for the the community that is funding the museum that is that to which the museum belongs there there that nation that territories treasures and why are they treasures they're treasures because they have things to offer them not just because they're old or whatever they have things to offer them maybe they offer them their memory maybe they offer them hope maybe they offer them a political vision something and I think that museum should be sure of what it's trying to do for the nation for example there's a museum in London called Tate Britain and if you read the Charter of what Tate Britain is doing it says that it's Charter is to acquire the most significant works of art from the period I think it's 1500 to the present day that that is what its mission is and you think well if I was in charge of that museum I would say that the mission of the British Museum should be to acquire those works of art painted at any time that could most help the British nation at this moment in history in other words that the responsibility is to the nation not not not to record its history at that maybe part of it but it may not be the whole thing so once you start to apply more therapeutic vision up to the actual museum you start end up with with quite odd results you're not going to have necessarily a museum that's just devoted to collecting one particular genre within one particular period I also think that the journey in a museum people who work work in museums talk a lot about outreach there was involved interests in outreach and outreach often means things like educational programs for the disadvantaged and for children so an enormous effort in the modern museum is devoted to getting kids into museums and also people who've never been into a museum before normally because of socio-economic circumstances I think that's very good but only a small bit of the answer because really what they're trying to do is can the museum change the nation not just the lives of you know the kids Lopez been to the museum whose only purpose is then just to learn about art or what's the point about learning about art that just defers the question right if art matters we should be able to get the kid in but then also explain not just that art is important because it's important because it's old because it was painted by a great person that's a circular answer that goes nowhere um ultimately if we equip ourselves as I believe we should with a proper vision of what arts for we'll start have a much better sense of what the museum for and if you believe that the purpose of art is to help the individual in the nation to flourish as I do then the purpose of our the purpose of the museum is to assist that process and that can mean all sorts of things that could mean getting you know lots of business people in to look at certain works of art it could mean it could mean that the Gift Shop is you know rather than saying okay we're going to buy a Vermeer tea-towel because we like Vermeer we really like Vermeer so next step I've got to do something to enshrine my love of Vermeer oh here's a tea towel I'm going to buy the Vermeer detail right hopeless task because really what Vermeer's about is simplicity and peace and harmony and the domestic so really what the people in the Gift Shop should be doing saying okay those are the most important things what we need to do is find a way of selling the broad sense selling that right so if you've loved for mere you should love peace and harmony so how can we sell that to the Netherlands is not going to be a tea towel don't quite know what the answer is I met the man who does the merchandising here at the rights we see and I said could I have a chat with you he said please come this afternoon so I'll know more afterwards other thoughts just I think don't a boy use such a sunny day a couple more questions one question two questions one one more okay yeah do you think there will be any chance that museums will be so inspired by your thought that they will reinvent the way they present art no but oh I'm looking out for somebody who's made twenty two billion dollars in foreign exchange and complex mathematical forms of trading and he's maybe Moshe's maybe sixty two and the children will cave cared for what everything's fine was a bit bored and dinner to give it to the Opera or to this museum who wants a new wing for the asiatic collection etc Ted and I hope to make an encounter possibly at an airport or somewhere and and I want to say to them have you really thought what cultures for and does it work as it should etcetera and at the end of that conversation at Heathrow Terminal five or wherever we will have a sketch and and the building designed by Peter zoom tour will take shape I don't know I think I think a pilot project could happen but I don't see mass conversion because it's people's jobs and you'd have to know whether it's not a cosmetic business you know you'd have to have to change what the idea of a curator is you'd have to change the full layout I mean it's a it's a big job and I know institutions they don't change institutions unless there's a war or absolute collapse things are too good for museums at the moment not going to change because they don't need to so I think in this area just like in many areas of business the only change you get is disruptive change on the side is in fact a miracle that the Rijksmuseum accepted to allow me in this part it really is they really are so confident and strong in what they're doing and they're they're wonderful so look I think we got to end it there but thank you so much thank you too all for coming and I know that you're all friends of the museum so there's you know nothing but no better institution to be a friend to but I hope that what I've said will spark some thoughts that you know perhaps the friendship can change in some ways perhaps we can keep keep the Rijksmuseum at the cutting edge of thinking about what a museum could and should be thank you so much you

Channel: Rijksmuseum

Views: 44,854

Rating: 4.8829269 out of 5

Keywords: alain de botton, rijksmuseum, art is therapy

Id: ZMb5mik9H7w

Length: 61min 47sec (3707 seconds)

Published: Mon May 12 2014