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This is a collection of all 3 recommendations for “Are blockbuster art shows worth queueing for?”. You’ll probably need 6 minutes to finish this text.
But with paintings, crowds spoil the art.
I understand that blockbuster shows are part of our New Cultural Experience: in a time when it's hard to get people to pay for anything, only enormous, star-studded, seeing-is-believing shows will get punters to open their wallets. They are economically necessary for our art institutions, and they are – they seem to be – exciting events.
Often, the suggestion that it's better to commune with pictures on your own comes from people who don't like the fact that the experience of art has been radically democratised in the postwar period and that many people much prefer the experience of looking at art together with the supplementary information that an exhibition entails.
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