I once complained to a friend that human beings had no beautiful public buildings to compare with churches. How unfair it is, I moaned, that if you want to spend some time in an exalted, high-ceilinged place with nooks and crannies for sitting in and gorgeous light, you were out of luck if you weren’t religious. (Yes, you could go to the park or some other outdoor public area, beautiful and exalted certainly, but perhaps not in a heavy downpour.)
My friend responded that my peevishness was unfounded, as we had art museums in cities and they would satisfy my every desire.
And yes! That’s true. Especially in Washington, D.C., where many such institutions are free. But what is the price of this space being truly public?
On a brutally hot day in late June, sweat collecting on the bridge of my nose, I ducked out of the conference session I was supposed to be attending and slipped into the East Building of the National Gallery, where the twentieth-century art collections are kept. From anywhere in the building I could hear a steady murmur, or rather, a multiple overlapping murmur of hordes of people looking (or not-looking) at art. The rising and falling hum was broken occasionally with spurts of loud laughter or a child yelling mommy, but was always present.
And speaking of children, in a public space like this – filled, this June, with Calder mobiles and dark and light Rothkos – there were screaming brats running around literally screaming, so that when I entered the almost-all-black Rothko room at the outermost turn in the Rothko passageways, I thought, grrrrrowl, put those children into this blackness, or perhaps, instead, ah, yes, here in the blackness of my heart.
But the parents dragged the screamers away, and again I could discern the humming sound of the crowd, steady, comforting, no longer a distraction but quite the opposite. The walk through the rest of the museum was interrupted only once by the sudden yawp! of a security guard’s walky-talky. And up in the Dubuffet room, just below the spiral staircase to the Matisse cut-outs (access limited to 16 hours a week), I could pause to write this essay, scrawling it in the margins of my free museum map.
And so I reluctantly give in: part of the beauty of beautiful public spaces is their constant marring by the public. Graffiti, an old sock left on a stone wall, castaway McDonalds french-fry bags drifting in the wind, the endless boo-hooing of a baby who would rather be at home.