A good day at the museum

My 3 tips for looking at art

My son Owen when he was 7, drawing a Bosch at the museum

Hey y’all,

Last week my pal Rob Walker, author of The Art of Noticing, wrote a great letter about visiting a museum.

He quoted from Bianca Bosker’s Get The Picture:

I started to imagine how I’d lead my own tour. You’d meet me in the rotunda, just outside the ticket desk, and we’d begin by settling on some ground rules.

One: You don’t have to look at everything.

Two: You do have to look at something for at least five minutes.

Three: Don’t you dare lay eyes on the wall text—that is, the paragraph-long explanation pasted on the wall beside many of the artworks.

These are so close to my own museum-going rules for myself! I want to share those with y’all, but first I wanted to share this video I recorded for the Blanton Museum here in Austin:

Here’s what I said:

I love to copy paintings when I’m here, because drawing makes you slow down and actually look at the thing... We spend a lot of time looking at images. We’re on our phones, we’re scrolling… but there’s something about being in the presence of a real work of art that someone has made with their hands, that someone has sweated over. Seeing it in person and seeing it at scale… it is unbeatable. It’s infectious! It makes you want to go home and make stuff! I mean, a good day at the museum for me is a day that I get out of there and I think, “I really feel like going home and writing!” or “I really feel like going home and drawing!” There is a kind of mania that happens when you’re in an art museum. You start seeing everything around you as art. And that’s the greatest thing that art can do: help you see your everyday world in a new light.

Okay, so here are my 3 tips for visiting a museum: