Museumstexte: Kunstvolle Einfalt oder elitäre Verwirrung?

Museum Experience | rbb24 Inforadio

Visiting a museum can be enlightening, entertaining – or utterly bewildering. As our columnist Hendrik Schröder recently discovered.

During a recent museum visit, I encountered a text next to a painting that read: „The artist utilizes a linguistic image, transforming it into a painting using oil and acrylic to imbue the metaphor with new meaning. Or conversely: a painting is metaphorically endowed or encoded.“ What?? I read it again: „A painting is metaphorically endowed or encoded.“ I looked at the painting, then back at the text. I couldn’t make heads or tails of it.

I began to question myself. Perhaps I lacked sufficient knowledge of art. Then, in the next room, another perplexing text awaited: „Despite the disdainful gaze that ridicules cliché-ridden notions of the Western art connoisseur, Lichtenstein creates remarkably empathetic homages and pseudo-contemplative symbols on the futility of material existence in the face of universal processes.“ Pseudo-contemplative symbols on the futility of material existence…one must truly have a knack for such fanciful language. Why do they do this?

An Air of Elitism?

One stands amidst these overcrowded exhibition rooms, already struggling to focus on reading, only to be confronted with such texts? Either the individuals on the curatorial board are so immersed and entrenched in their field that they fail to realize that most people do not speak, or can’t speak, about art in this manner, addressing no one but themselves with such writings. Or perhaps there is an air of elitism involved? Similar to the unnecessary complexity found in some academic texts. The motto being: Not everyone should understand this.

However, it remains questionable whether one truly fits in their role as a museum plaque writer in both scenarios. Well…maybe it was just a case of a rogue AI, and we will be seeing more of this? In any case, this experience is starting to leave its mark on me, making me consider adopting a similar style in my concert reviews for rbb24 Inforadio:

Through the performative driven dissonance in a four on the floor rhythm and a voluminous habitus that seems to offer an exorbitant decibel tolerance threshold as a temporary escape, the vocal work particularly highlights the dissociation with the normalized or partially normalized society from a consumeristic to a post-consumeristic motif.