Museums!

One of the interesting things that veek and I did this weekend was museum-hop. Now, historically, I have found myself to have a pathetically low museum saturation point. No matter how interested I was in the art I was looking at, I would find myself restless and itchy after a little while. This might be 45 minutes or it might be two hours, but it always happened.

Through absolutely zero deception, veek convinced me to get one of those little audioguides that you wear. It's a box that you sling around your neck with a number pad and headphones attached. When you see a painting with a number on the accompanying placard, you punch the number into your guide and it babbles about something vaguely relevant.

Usually, the guide seemed to just give some background information on the painting's subject; it would talk about the myth that it was depicting, or the location it was painted in, or the painter's blood type, whatever. It was almost always the case that whatever had caught my eye about the painting was left untouched. For example, I might wonder about the incredible use of light, or the tortured look in someone's eye, and the audioguide would tell me about how the painter was eating only zucchini during the time he was painting this work. I mean, it was interesting, perhaps, sometimes, but irrelevant.

It surprised me, then, to realize that with the aid of this useless little thing, I managed to remain below my museum saturation point! I think that listening to it did a few things:

* Caused me to focus only on the painting I was looking at, rather than get distracted by the scope of the collection;
* Tuned out the noises of the other museum patrons; and
* Gave me a different source of information to process.

As a result, we stayed a few hours until closing time and saw only a pathetically small fraction of the collection. That was a neat feeling!