Have we discussed how people walk in art galleries? Maybe we have. But we all know that nobody walks in art galleries the way they do in ‘real life.’ In galleries the walking is ponderous, thoughtful, heavy, a way of showing that you’re taking the art seriously. And of course it’s not real walking, you walk for a bit then you stand for a bit and then you kind of shuffle from one exhibit to the next, then you walk into the next room in the gallery, and so on. We also know that an hour walking round an art gallery is probably the equivalent of a three hour walk in the street.
No great revelations in all this, but I just found a cosmically perfect description of the phenomenon in PG Wodehouse’s – ‘The Rummy Affair of Old Biffy’ written, would you believe, in 1925. Seems like it could have been written this morning. The narrator, naturally, is Bertie Wooster:
‘Well, you know, I have never been much of a lad for exhibitions ..’ That wonderfully inappropriate and maybe self-referential use of the word ‘lad’ gets my chuckle muscles going, and it continues, ‘The citizenry in the mass always rather puts me off, and after I have been shuffling along with the multitude for a quarter of an hour or so I feel as if I were walking on hot bricks.’
Personally I can probably do 45 minutes rather than 15, but otherwise, this describes my exhibition walking experience perfectly.
