Two people who pissed me off in the National Gallery of Art on a rainy day in August
Not that it takes much.
1.
I sat to rest my feet in front of a painting I can’t confidently identify now: I wasn’t really looking at the art. I was letting the colours seep under my skin and arrest me. The rich pinks of the Italian Renaissance always surprise me; sometimes it seems as though pink was invented alongside Technicolor, and evanglised in the fifties by ad-men looking to sell identity to women. Pink feels jarring to us because it’s not a “real” colour: if you split visible light with a prism, pink is absent from the rainbow. Purple too, and in Ancient Rome purple was so rare and hard to produce that it was considered a mark of royalty. I think if I saw purple in a Renaissance painting I would pass out.
The painting was the largest in its room, daunting almost, and taking up a whole wall. There was a wooden bench — neither comfortable nor uncomfortable — that seemed placed precisely so you could do what I was doing. Sit and take it in.
A girl tapped me on the shoulder.
“Excuse me,” she said, holding out her phone, “could I… ?”
“Of course,” I said, moving aside before I had time to properly process her request. Of course: she wanted my vantage point for a photo. That, I understood. I often take photos in galleries, just quick snaps with my phone, of things I might want to refer back to later, or just as an aide-mémoire — I always (and sometimes only) photograph the wall text too. I understood that she would not want me in the way of her photo.
Since there was not much else of interest in that room, I began to move to the next, but not before I saw her remove a small, blunt-force object from her tote bag and unfold it into a portable tripod, which she set up facing the painting. I didn’t shake my head, but the motion happened in my soul: surely there were already high-resolution images of this artwork in some digital collection. Still I understood that she would not want me in her high-resolution photo.
But that was not the end of the spectacle. I glanced back from the next room. She stood at the tripod for almost a minute, before moving to sit on the bench. She wore a white dress, and folded her hands demurely on her knees. Her legs were crossed at the ankles. Slowly, she tilted her head. She sat and she sat. Slowly, the horror became clear to me: she was filming herself looking at the art. She was not looking at the art. She was being looked at. She was in the act of preparing herself to one day be looked at.
The video began to unfold in my mind’s eye. TikTok voiceover: Spend a day with me in DC’s National Gallery of Art! Soft focus, subtle sparkle effect. Canva handwriting font caption: West Building. Italian Renaissance. But maybe not even that much detail. Maybe just a crucifix emoji and Jesus Is Love!
By process of elimination, retracing my steps on the National Gallery’s interactive online map and through their extensive digital collection of high-resolution images, I am quite certain now that the painting was Pietro Perugino’s Crucifixion. There is not as much pink in it as I remembered: that impression must have stayed with me from the rest of the gallery. But I remember now the thick frame.
It’s nice that I can go online and see all these paintings to jog my memory. It’s still no substitute for being there: for the contemplative act of a close encounter with a work of art, even one that doesn’t really connect with me. For contact with the past through proximity to a relic. I identify the Crucifixion one layer abstracted, and so I am abstracted from art’s ability to move me: it’s not even déjà vu that I feel; just the shallow quiz show ding of recognition. When I use my phone to take a photo of a painting that moves me, it is an imperfect object, and through its evident haste and bad angles I feel the connection again, I feel in the distance the pull of the art. When someone aims for uncanny perfection to replicate art for the masses, they are severing the cord. There is no chance that anyone watching that TikTok will look at the Crucifixion and absorb every coincidence of history and artistry that has conspired to bring the gold leaf in the frame and the delicate lines of oil paint in front of their eyes. They will look at the girl and think: wow, she’s so pretty. I wish I had a dress like that. Maybe I should go to DC. Maybe I should buy a better phone so I can make videos like this.
She had kicked me out of my fucking seat for this.
2.
My friend had joined me by then, and we stood unsettled in front of an Ansel Adams photograph: Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico. Ansel Adams is supposed to awe you with his sweeping vistas of the natural world, and usually he does, but there was something so deeply wrong about this photograph that at first we could not identify.
It was something different for each of us. My friend worked it out first: having grown up near Hernandez, he could not recognise his home in the photograph. The horizon was wrong. The proportions, the sense of scale that Adams is so famous for, ultimately misrepresented the experience of being under that great sky, facing those mountains.
And the clouds so rarely looked like that.
The clouds bothered me too. A simple rule in black-and-white photography — and Adams was a stickler for and inventor of rules, so it feels more than fair to invoke them here — is that the viewer’s eye is first drawn to the whitest part of the picture. In this case it’s the clouds. They become the focus, and they are so large and uncanny and so unnaturally smooth that it makes the rest of the landscape seem flat. The houses have a drab sameness to the grassland around them. The textural element of the graveyard falls away when seen beneath those clouds. Maybe this was the intention. But that does not mean I have to think it looks nice.
That wasn’t it, though, and at last I managed to put my finger on what really made the image seem uncanny: “The sky is black like nighttime,” I told my friend, “but you can see shadows on the ground.”
The sky is too dark a black for the lightscape suggested by everything else in frame, and it snaps something in our synapses, which, even with the hue removed, can still calculate what we expect from the brightness and saturation, and sense that Hernandez resides in the geographical centre of the uncanny valley.
I went on: “He must have taken it at sunset.”
“Actually,” said a man who had appeared from the ether to stand behind us, “it was taken at night.” With great pomp and righteousness, he added, “You can tell because there’s a Moon.”
We stared at him.
He walked away.
One thing you may know, from your life as a human being on Planet Earth, is that sometimes you can see the Moon during the daytime. A Moon alone does not indicate that something was taken at night, least of all in a medium as subtle as a silver gelatin. If this man had any intellectual curiosity, he might have instead approached us and said something like, “Why do you think it’s sunset? You can see the Moon, so I figured it was nighttime.” And then we might have welcomed him into our conversation. But he did not say anything worth welcoming. He assumed I was wrong, and that it was his right to correct me.
I will not rehash the tirade I went on after that man walked away. The gall to speak so authoritatively to strangers — it doesn’t bear mentioning. But I will tell you how I knew it was sunset.
It’s a naive assumption that a black sky means a photo was necessarily taken at night. It could have been something in how the photo was taken: Adams may have adjusted his aperture based on the light coming from the clouds, which are so bright that all tone in the sky would be lost by comparison, and likely also a lot of the detail in the shadows on the ground. He may also have used a red filter over the lens to ensure that no blue light made it to the negative. Or it could have happened during the printing process: you can turn grey tones black with enough exposure, and this may have helped in getting the Moon to stand out.
You might say, maybe there was a source of light other than the sun, but we can rule this out as unlikely: practically, this vista is too wide to have been lit by one giant floodlight. The clouds also glow. Is this something you can see at night, in a rural area, with no lights visible in frame? It must be the Sun, offstage. Scrutinising the shadows, you can see that the Sun would be setting somewhere to the right and in the foreground of the photo; and from the length of the shadows and the tint of the horizon, you can discern that the photo was taken at twilight.
But you don’t need to know any of this. Once again: if moonrise comes before sunset, you can literally still see it.
Of course, it is always frustrating when ill-intentioned strangers believe they have the right to our time, and our space, but it may seem to you that I’m wasting my time by letting them continue to live in my mind a month later. The purpose of documenting these moments is to illuminate the erosion of the public-private divide. That our public spaces are now canvases for the spectacle. That our private conversations are not just open to interpretation, but a cause worth policing. And that art is the first casualty in our world of images.
