Crying at the digital museum

By Anna Kate Blair

James Elkins traces, in Pictures & Tears, the history of crying at paintings. It was expected in the eighteenth century and a sign of deep engagement, but we stopped trusting tears in the nineteenth century, seeing emotion as a trick, a sham, and then we started moving quickly, productively, forgot how to feel. The twentieth century, Elkins writes, was “determinedly tearless.” We cry when we don’t understand changes taking place inside us, when something feels far from us, leaving us lonely, or too close, such that we can’t think. We want, now, a safe sort of pleasure, an education, that doesn’t threaten our existing image of the world.

Or do we?

The saddest note in the Rothko Chapel’s visitor book, writes Elkins, reads only:

I wish I could cry

Pictures & Tears was published in 2001, at the end of a critical decade for museum studies. In 1995, Tony Bennett, in The Birth of the Museum, argued that museums had developed as spaces for Foucauldian social control, while Carol Duncan, in Civilising Rituals, connected the politics of class to contemporary institutions. Donald Preziosi described the museum, the following year, as “a theatre of anamorphic and autoscopic dramaturgy.” He meant that the museum played with our perceptions, offering lenses that caused distortions whilst disguising these distortions, removing us from our bodies and presenting ideologies that we accepted as fact.

It’s hard, now, to say what a museum should look like, especially on the internet. Where does a museum end and a website begin? There are plenty of digital museums, but the form’s still in its infancy; we must write of hypotheticals rather than established types. I don’t want to pin the digital museum into place, to make predictions, which shuts down the possibility, at once enlivening and frightening, that animates our online futures.

I read articles, published over the last few months, recommending online museums to those beset with quarantine wanderlust. “As if you’re actually wandering its halls,” says a blog about the Rijksmuseum’s online tour, but I am stuck beside an unstaffed ticket desk, trying to click my way elsewhere. “Without ever leaving home, […] discover incredible works of art,” says Travel + Leisure about the Guggenheim on Google maps, but I can’t watch the video pieces on display, can’t wander through an installation that’s clearly spatial or even detect if the hanging threads are woven or plastic. I can’t examine paintings closely, despite the eerie lack of crowds, and I am thrown from one floor to another. It is interesting in the way that a glitch is interesting, capturing our inability to truly control the digital sphere, revealing the uncanny of the accidental.

I read an article in Aperture, from 1996, in which Ben Howell Davis argues that the online art museum would be an exercise in fragmentation, with collections taken apart and reconfigured by the viewer, who will create new meaning, while the curator fades out of significance. It seems, now, the opposite: if there’s anything that differentiates a museum from a website, it’s the role that a curator plays in organising information and making it legible.

Is it a coincidence that the period of acceleration for historians’ critiques of museums – institutions born of post-enlightenment obsession with order and rationality, didactic sites in which the visitor is socialised into class hierarchies and made passive, taught to be an ideal colonial subject – was the period in which we were beginning to live online? Is it that institutions began to change, to suggest that they might cede control and open to multiplicity, because the internet threatened the centrality of museums as an educational apparatus?

I wonder if a museum born on the internet, rather than replicated there, offers an opportunity to break away from this history and its accompanying set of codes, to move us from nostalgic loyalties that tie us to something ideologically suspect. It won’t be the same artworks that make us cry in physical museums that move us, online, but new artworks, created for the formats in which we discover them.

At the beginning of Leaving the Atocha Station, Ben Lerner’s narrator watches a man cry in front of a succession of paintings, including Hieronymus Bosch’s ‘Garden of Earthly Delights,’ at Madrid’s Museo del Prado. Lerner’s narrator is fascinated by the man, who he views with intermingled suspicion and envy, with an intellectual interest that seems to border upon awe.

“I was interested in the disconnect between my experience of artworks and the claims made on their behalf; the closest I’d come to having a profound experience of art was probably the experience of this distance, a profound experience of the absence of profundity,” writes Lerner.

I, too, am interested in this. I, too, wish I’d cried before a painting. I want to know, now, how our emotions have changed alongside spaces and modes of viewing. Or, rather, because so much of this remains hypothetical, I want to consider the ways in which they might change.

As critique of museums began to filter into public discourse, the museum’s techniques changed. The shift now known as the ‘Affective Turn,’ investigating the ways in which feelings manifest and operate in our world, took hold in the late 1990s, quickly captivating the art world. Julian Spalding, in 2002, spoke of the need for feeling in the museum, of the ways in which “poetic power” would combat new challenges, creating links between visitors and objects. The art museum, now, is a place where we’re encouraged to register embodied emotion.

As our world has become increasingly digital, art has become more three-dimensional, more interested in space, in resisting the flatness of the image. In art museums, now, we’re likely to find installation and performance alongside painting and photography. It’s often claimed that this change has occurred because we need, now that we’re used to the internet, a greater level of stimulation, but I’m not sure that I agree. It seems that part of it is our desire to be overwhelmed by an artwork, to enter a different world through it, to feel contained rather than to use our thoughts as container.

I find the Guggenheim on Google Maps interesting; Ben Lerner’s narrator notes that he is interested in the man crying at the Prado. Neither of us, though, are deeply moved.

Sianne Ngai, in 2015’s Our Aesthetic Categories, identifies cute, interesting and zany as the prominent aesthetic categories of our age; interesting is the one that we’re most likely to associate with the museum. Interesting, Ngai notes, speaks to a hesitancy in our engagement, a rationality, a reluctance to commit to opinions. We’re reluctant to rest on beautiful, now, though it’s no lazier than interesting. We see beautiful as a little suspect, politically, as if we might be hypnotised or tricked by beauty. We can be tricked by the interesting, too, though. It isn’t only feeling, but also thinking, that might lead us astray.

“You don’t cry when you call something interesting, do you?” asks a friend, over Zoom.

If these are the adjectives of our decade, I wonder what will come next. Everything, these days, changes quickly.

One of the most popular digital art projects is the BoschBot on Twitter, which tweets details of ‘The Garden of Earthly Delights,’ the painting at which the man in Leaving the Atocha Station breaks down. Bosch’s painting is, on a Twitter feed, often zany, sometimes interesting or cute, but rarely something at which we’d weep.

I’ve noticed that most analyses of how technology is changing our relationship with art focus on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, but on social media we seek to produce ourselves, while at the museum we hope to forget ourselves. Imma tells me that, for her, looking at an artwork can offer “a moment of blissful escapism before crashing down to earth – and the parting can trigger the tears.” Kathleen tells me that she is “suddenly hit by the immensity of something, an overwhelming wave of feeling,” that it is “like hitting a breakthrough and then it all tumbles out.” I hear, from friends who speak to me about crying, of moments of intense connection with the work before them, with little mention of the surrounding galleries, while those who tell me that they have never cried in museums almost always cite the public setting as the reason for this. I wonder, considering this, if a strong emotional response occurs when the artwork’s pull, to a particular observer, is such that the space around us dissolves, allowing us to evade our usual self-consciousness.

I don’t, when I think of the art museums that I love, think of the work first. I think of the ways in which my body, and other bodies, occupy space. I remember white walls, often, and the way that light comes through windows at particular angles, and I remember the people that I was with, whether the museum was empty or crowded.

I think, too, of the ways in which gallery spaces change in ways that shape and reflect our engagement. The salon hang, popular in the nineteenth century, seems social, with images and audiences encouraged to group together, to be seen in relation to one another, chattering, while the white cube, dominant in the second half of the twentieth century, encourages visitors to spread out, operate as individuals, within a clinical space. It is too bright, in the white cube, for easy crying. We’ve seen, more recently, refurbished industrial spaces and spaces that seek to suggest the exposure of an institution’s inner workings, which to me seem to speak to a certain irony, encourage postmodern malaise.

There is a romance to museums, as physical spaces, but I’d like to find a romance for the digital museum, too. It shouldn’t be hard. I have felt my heart flutter at Facebook messages and emojis, have cried on Skype, have enjoyed the peculiar flirtation of private messages darting back and forth in a sprawling Zoom meeting, the intermingling of public and private phrases. It is mysterious and playful, now, but new, exciting, with promise.

On a computer screen, we usually have some privacy.

It seems, to me, an intimate space. We stage video calls, watch exercise videos or pornography, google our medical symptoms in private browsers. We’re already accustomed to experiences that activate our bodies, our emotions, online. We write emails to friends, save our diaries in word documents. Our laptops might not keep our secrets, really, but it can feel as if they do.

The computer screen is a small frame, and the frame is a mechanism of containing, of stripping something of its danger, which can also mean its power to move. I might, if the internet appeared to me projected onto a wall, at a larger scale, rather than on my laptop screen, be overwhelmed by a single image.

It is also a space for work. I am writing this on my laptop in my bed in the middle of the night. I like writing like this, when it is dark and quiet; it is easy to tune out the world.

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I find my thoughts sprawling, following the form of the internet, an unruly, multiplying network, unable to be traced in linear form, contained within an essay. There’s a peacefulness to the museum, to knowing that it’s finite, but the cities beyond often sprawl like digital space. I wonder if part of what fascinates us about the internet is this lack of clarity, this potential that can never be entirely exercised; like emotion, too, it’s hard to measure, with tears acting as signs that hint at a deeper current, usually unseen. On the internet or in physical galleries, art must stay unruly or lose its pull.

Is it harder to cry when we have a hundred tabs open? Is it less likely that we’ll be deeply moved with a messy kitchen in our peripheral vision?

The internet and the art gallery are both spaces of yearning: we can’t touch what we see. We feel through words and images. I think of signs and markers that tell us, in the museum, that we cannot touch and the ways in which the metaphor for being touched, emotionally, speaks to the transcendence of such barriers. We can evoke, online, senses that we might believe lie dormant. We experience this, I think, each time we cry at a television show or blink, disoriented, remembering our living rooms as the credits roll. It is possible to create something that breaches the boundaries of the frame even as it is technically contained within it.

Susan Stewart has described visiting the museum as an “elaborately ritualised practice of refraining from touch.” We are anxious when we cannot touch what we see, and museums offer an atmosphere that negates our sense of alienation, estrangement. I think, though, that we sometimes feel safe at a distance, and I wonder if the safety and privacy that the internet can afford might assist us, if physical disconnection might leave more room for emotional connection, allow our psychological barriers to come down.

I watch a video, ‘Art Project 2023,’ in which João Enxuto and Erica Love imagine the future. Google, in their scenario, have taken over the Whitney Museum’s landmark building, designed by Marcel Breuer in 1963, and destroyed it, replacing it with a 3D printed replica that physically augments Google Art Project’s virtual space. Inside, visitors use Google Glasses to build walls and partitions, selecting artworks to display; two people, together, can have completely different experiences.

In the end, though, the museum comes undone. The files are corrupted, start disappearing from backup servers, and the virtual artworks begin to spontaneously blur, melt and violently combust. The visitors, overwhelmed, cry uncontrollably at the sight of these glitches, which remain visible even after they remove their Google Glasses.

I feel something, watching this piece, but I can’t name the emotion. I learnt to critique before I learnt to feel and so, like James Elkins and like Ben Lerner’s narrator, I feel the disconnect first. I wonder, now, if I enjoy writing and thinking about affect because it acts as a safeguard against feeling, swaddling me in the bubble wrap of theory, allowing me to get close to my emotions without risking anything. I still can’t know the future of museums, though, and so I can’t theorise everything, which is thrilling, leaving space for tears to flow.