The fatigue of museums

These are days for finalizing trips and buying tickets for the museums in the chosen destinations to avoid queues. Visits to great art spaces have become an obligation. Taking a photograph of the city's quintessential masterpiece, be it La Gioconda, Van Gogh's Sunflowers, Rodin's The Kiss, or Grant Wood's American Gothic becomes proof of the visit. It is the guarantee of having been there. The painting or sculpture that justifies the queue and the ticket is the objective to be met. It's not so much “look at this marvel” but rather “I was there”.

But the massive pilgrimages to museums have a complementary image that doesn't appear on social media: the exhausted and saturated spectator. A crowd of people sitting on the museum exit stairs, children stretched out on marble benches who have lost interest in the tour, and visitors who take advantage of the guard having gone to stretch their legs to sit in their chair. Some watch the educational video three times in a loop to rest on the poufs a little longer. Those who follow a guide's explanations listen with their hands on their hips or develop an accentuated praxitelian curve, bearing the weight of exhaustion on their hip.

If the first forty-five minutes of the visit were a stimulating experience, after an hour, tourists begin to quicken their pace. They cross the rooms at full speed and with a glance deem five hundred years of art history to have been observed. At most, a quick selfie will suffice to tick the box with that feeling of guilt for not having participated in the contemplative ritual expected of a sensitive visitor.

Ending visual overload

If you are a victim of these rushes, you should know that it is not your fault. It is theirs. The museum's. And a phenomenon that the North American intellectual Benjamin Ives Gilman already described in 1916. Closely linked to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, he systematically studied how people observed works of art. He attributed the concept of museum fatigue, museum fatigue, to the visitor's discomfort and physical and mental fatigue. The phenomenon is related to visual overload, cognitive exhaustion, and difficulty concentrating. Since then, different authors have been expanding the theory and have specified the influencing factors that deflate the visitor. Contemporary museology has studied the elements that mitigate fatigue by transforming spaces, dividing rooms, redistributing works according to different perception criteria, limiting pieces, or planning alternative recreation areas. Lighting, the hardness and color of floor materials, and signage systems have also been modified to reduce the effort of movement. They have complemented this with sensory audio guides and other creative methods to offer information in a more enjoyable way.

The pressure to demonstrate that one has devoured and enjoyed all the offerings of a city contrasts with the loss of global attention span. Strictly testimonial presence has become more important than individual emotion. We live immersed in a society addicted to scrolling on our phones. We are eager to photograph everything, but we don't spend more than three seconds looking at images. In museums, they will end up installing conveyor belts like those in airports. Mobile corridors that cross all rooms to uniformly move the public. A light and pause-free journey that will guarantee a complete tour, a front-row view of the work of art, and a well-calculated duration of the trip to avoid wear and tear. And if you then want to spend time contemplating the work of art, you will look at the photo on your phone when you get home.