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ABSTRACT
When the pandemic temporarily closed U.S. museums in March 2020, it also halted on-site museum tours. Some museums responded by developing or expanding their virtual programs, including online tours. The author, an in-gallery docent at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, trained during the pandemic to give virtual tours. Comparing in-person with computer-mediated art museum tours, she acknowledges that virtual tours are an essential part of museum outreach and education, enabling those who are unable to travel to an art museum to strengthen their critical thinking skills and learn more about American art and culture. But she also advocates for in-person museum-going, arguing that our bodies play a key role in viewing art objects and in experiencing their spatial locations.
Acknowledgements
My thanks to the Journal’s editors and the outside readers for their helpful suggestions. To Nathan Appel, Barbara Melosh, Kyoko Mori, Maxine Rodburg, Patricia Spacks, Eileen Sypher, and Ellen Todd: thank you for your incisive readings and support. I am also grateful to the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s wonderful docent community and to the staff, especially Carol Wilson, Richard Sorensen, and Laura Baptiste.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 For a history of slide presentations in the discipline of art history, see Nelson, “The Slide Lecture.” See also Savedoff’s comprehensive critical analysis of using photographic reproductions of art works, “Looking at Art Through Photographs.”
2 For a study of using copies that includes digital copies, see Hubard’s “Originals and Reproductions,” which compares student responses to an original painting, a postcard copy of it, and a digital copy.
3 Scholarship concerning the role of the body in learning is rich and growing. See, for example, Merriam and Bierema, Adult Learning, 127–37, 142–5. For embodied learning in the context of art museums, see especially Kai-Kee et al., Activity-Based Teaching in the Art Museum and Hubard, Art Museum Education, 121–37.
4 Alpers, “The Museum as a Way of Seeing,” 27.
5 Ibid., 32.
6 Rosenbloom, “The Art of Slowing Down in a Museum,” NYT (Oct. 9, 2014). See also Burnham’s “If You Don’t Stop, You Don’t See Anything” and Roberts’s “The Power of Patience.”
7 Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking Glass, 142.
8 For descriptions of Project Zero’s Thinking Routines, see http://www.pz.harvard.edu/thinking-routines.
9 Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking Glass, 226–7.
10 For a brief but excellent history of scale in post-World War Two art, see Meyer, “No More Scale: The Experience of Size in Contemporary Sculpture,” 3–7.
11 Austen, Sense and Sensibility, 233–4.
12 Virtual tours are not the only factor in the tendency to overlook an artwork’s dimensions. In her introduction to Scale, Roberts provides several reasons for the difficulties we all experience in perceiving scale: our eyes necessarily rescale the objects we see; in their representations, artists typically rescale the subjects they depict; and, in fact, “elasticity of scale” is intrinsic to the discipline of art history, which depends on rescaled images of artworks while stressing the importance of scale. 10–15.
13 One has only to think of Charles Ray’s out-sized “businesswomen” sculptures. They may be disturbing in their own right but not because the viewer could ever mistake them for actual women.
14 “Art Talk: An Interview with Nick Cave at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston.”
15 “Nick Cave: ‘Thick Skin’” | Art21 “Extended Play”
16 “Meet the Artist: Nick Cave on Soundsuit.” This video focuses on the Soundsuit in the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
17 “Nick Cave: ‘Thick Skin’”
18 I am indebted to Fisher’s analysis of museum space in Making and Effacing Art, 40–7.
19 Stunda, “New Ways of Seeing: A Conversation with Teresita Fernández.”
20 Giles, “Art Talk: Why Size Matters to Artist Teresita Fernández.”
21 Fisher describes modern abstract paintings’ “monumentality and intimacy” not as the “merely quantitatively large and small” but rather “as alternative instructions about response,” Making and Effacing Art, 25.
22 Rilke, “Archaic Torso of Apollo.”
23 Asbury, “See Me program lets those with memory loss and their caregivers connect with art in the comfort of their own homes.”
24 Burnham and Kai-Kee, Teaching in the Art Museum: Interpretation as Experience, 63.
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Deborah Kaplan
Deborah Kaplan taught in George Mason University’s English Department for more than thirty years, during which time she published a book on Jane Austen and articles on topics such as Restoration comedies in performance and teaching Holocaust literature. After retiring in 2016, she trained as a docent at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and has given tours for student groups, walk-in visitors, and community organizations.