What I learned about and from Leonardo

Leonardo involved a lot of queueing and looking at the back of other people's heads

Patience is a virtue, but not one of mine, so the queues that were a prominent feature of my visit to the Leonardo exhibition at the National Gallery today were not my idea of great visitor experience. There were queues snaking outside the building to buy tickets (fortunately I escaped those as I had one already), queues to get in the galleries, queues to look at the pictures…

Fortunately the exhibition is, very much, worth the wait.

I’ve been thinking a lot about audiences and visitor experience recently so beyond enjoying a fantastic exhibition, I was also interested to observe so many people engaging with art. Also, as I don’t actually know anything about Leonardo da Vinci, despite having a PhD in History of Art, it was interesting – from a professional perspective – to be in the position of a visitor with little prior knowledge of the exhibition. (I acknowledge I’m accustomed to galleries so not equating myself with a first-time visitor).

So, for the first time in my life, I used the audioguide and found it an incredibly useful and interesting source of further information that enabled me to get more from visiting the exhibition.

I was also struck how many others (probably the majority) were also ‘wired for sound’. Those works which had an audio track were by far the busiest as people studied them as they listened to the curator explain more about the work on display. As I have often noticed now that so many people are surgically attached to their iPods in public spaces, wearing earphones seem to either make people oblivious to others or give them permission to ignore you. So the experience of being in a very crowded room with lots of people wearing earphones wasn’t great – I got stood on, shoved, pushed and rudely walked in-front-of quite a lot. I rather like talking to other visitors and listening to what they are saying – which doesn’t happen when you’re all wired up. But on balance, having access to that extra info as a solo visitor was great and meant I didn’t have to bother reading the labels unless I wanted to know who owned the work (not sure I’d want the audio guide if visiting with a friend though – as I often do – it felt very anti-social).

Overall, this was a very interesting (as well as enjoyable) gallery experience for me in terms of thinking about galleries and museums. Many of us talk about galleries being a space for people to make their own meanings, to discover art for ourselves and ourselves through art. I still subscribe to that vision about the museum and gallery as a civic space where we can come together to enjoy art and share art with one another. That involves experts facilitating those experiences – but also recognizes that much of what we value about art is the personal and collective experiences it enables us to create, be those aesthetic, spiritual, emotional, intellectual, political, social.

But I was reminded today that not everyone wants that kind of collective or co-produced experience. Some people want – what I must stop thinking of as a more old fashioned – passive experience of consuming or receiving.  Sometimes – such as today – I want that. I knew nothing and I wanted an expert to help me understand what I’m looking at so I could get more from the experience – more everything, more knowledge about Renaissance painting, patronage and society, more appreciation of the skill and beauty, more understanding about art history and conservation, more food for thought about art and its role….

Other times I want to get a big red pen and cross-out the labels and wall texts which tell me what to think. The challenge for the gallery or museum is how to cater for these very different needs.