It’s strange to picture an art museum empty. To think of the Metropolitan Museum of Art without its joyous hubbub, or the Frick Collection without its respectful hush, is to think, in practical terms, of an enormous liability. When, in March, the swift advance of COVID-19 closed museums across the country, some predicted losses of tens of millions of dollars. “Our primary responsibility, and our most valuable asset, is creating a condition for human beings to be in the same space as works of art,” Gary Tinterow, the director of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, tells Vogue. “That first physical, visceral, emotional experience. It’s going to the stadium and watching the football game with 60,000 people, versus watching it at home with some of your friends.” Great art, like any great event, demands that you show up in person.
Yet as the Met, the Frick, MFAH, and other institutions have demonstrated this spring, even a categorically, irrefutably different experience of these collections can also be singularly rewarding. Forced to quickly reconsider how they functioned online, many museums are now reaching more people—and in more intriguing ways—than ever before.
“One of the things that museums do so well is they offer a space for contemplation,” says Nancy Ireson, deputy director for collections and exhibitions and Gund Family Chief Curator at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia. “At a time that can be quite upsetting, we wanted to make sure we didn’t disappear.” If quippy commentary from scholars and artists was already de rigueur at many museums and galleries, under lockdown, it acquired a compelling new immediacy and intimacy. In “Barnes Takeout,” a new YouTube series, members of the museum’s staff discuss a favorite work from the collection for ten minutes, mixing needful art historical context with more personal musings. “We can’t be the candlelit dinner, which might be the museum on an ordinary day,” Ireson says, “but we can still be a place that offers you sustenance. ‘Your daily serving of art’ is our little tagline.”
Since the museum closed, the Barnes’s YouTube subscribers have increased 900%. “People are saying, you know, ‘I make a point of stopping my day at lunchtime and listening to talk about art for five or 10 minutes,’” Ireson continues. “We realized that lots of people are still working from home, or they’ve got childcare commitments, so it wasn’t about disrupting your day entirely. Just that point of contact is crucial.”
Tinterow has observed much the same of MFAH’s largely local following, who have dialed in for events like “Coffee with a Curator” and the “MFAH on the Mat” weekly yoga class in droves. “Our members, our supporters, our donors, our community members miss us and they want to stay in touch,” he says. “Previously, our website was very transactional. Most of our visitors wanted to know, when are we open? How do I get a ticket? What film are we showing tonight? And so now that none of that is available, I expected the traffic to our website to fall. But they’re now checking to see what we might have on offer while they’re in quarantine.” And it’s as good a time as ever; at a juncture like this, art history has a great deal to say. “Going through our galleries, you could see that people have lived through plague. Even when there’s tremendous death and destruction, civilization can endure. There’s a lot to be learned from the evidence of works of art about getting through the times that we’re in now.”