How To Visit a Museum: Social Media Deprivation for Your Creative Health

A Visit to the Art Institute of Chicago: Insights about Art, Attention, and the Construction of Reality through Art

Long story short—If you want to be creative, you need to get off your phone. If you knew what was best for you, you wouldn’t even read this. You would put your phone down immediately and go make some art, read a good book, lie in some grass in a park, pet a dog. Anything under the sun is better than being on your phone. We all know this, and yet we resign ourselves to this miserable existence—vacantly scrolling with the one true wish to be present in our own lives. Not convinced? Fine, we’ll keep going with the long version.

Today, I’d like to share a recent trip to a museum. Visiting a museum can feel awkward. What do you do with your hands? How does one furrow their brow just so, to impress their viewing partner with their attentive gaze? How long should I stand here before moving on? I found myself scratching my head in the contemporary art wing, reading artist statements that didn’t seem to have a clear connection to the piece. I’ve left plenty of exhibitions utterly confused. Art is confusing. Museums might provide access to visual art, but don’t often help the viewer engage with what they are actually seeing.

This will be the first of a series of posts about my visits the the SAIC museum. If you’d like to browse the collection and let me know what pieces you’d like to hear about, I can go see it for you and report back!

When I go to the art museum, I prefer to go alone and without my iPhone. But first, I’ll indulge myself with a little fit check. The thrift store finds have been immaculate, lately.

I keep a flip phone on a second line for these days when I need to escape the matrix. I oscillate between life in two worlds: one part of me exists in the overbearing, fast-paced cacophony of memes and culture wars on my phone, and the other in the serenity of my home and garden. When my phone dies, I am overcome by a sense of relief. Value is restored to the objects and people that immediately surround me. I am back in the present. I go outside and take notice of the coiled tendrils of cucumber vines climbing the net in my garden. Everything is alive.

Last week, I awoke to a slew of notifications on my phone and fell into a deep trance watching the parade of images run across my screen. This state of being is akin to sleep paralysis: everything within me is begging me to put down my phone and take a book outside, and yet I continue to scroll. The only tried an true method I know of to awaken from this spell is to set a timer on my phone for 15 minutes and name the images that come across my screen. I recorded these observations in my journal:

Supreme Court criminalizes homelessness. Joja Siwa doing that dance again. News article stating Gaza now has the highest rate of child amputees. A monkey wearing overalls attaches a wheeled cart to a goat and rides around in it. Another Kamala Harris Coconut Tree Meme. Another heinous one-pan casserole recipe.

I name the images, and the spell is broken. I decide that I need to unplug for the day and visit The Art Institute. I gather my materials for the day: my flip phone, a book, a sketchbook, my journal, some pens and a portable cassette AM/FM radio player and a couple tapes. Today I have Plantasia, Pasty Cline, and Anita Baker with me. I make my way to the take the train downtown.

I listen to side A of Plantasia and take notice of my surroundings. Every passenger aside from myself is on their phones. I reflect on my morning doom scroll and recall a fact I heard recently—users of social media see, on average, a thousand images a day. A person in medieval times might have seen nine thousand within their whole life times. Images hold a power over us that most do not consider. They influence our consumption habits, shape our perceptions of reality and manipulate our emotional states in subtle but profound ways. They distract us from the every day magic that exists all around us.

I arrive at the museum and stumble upon a new acquisition: a screen from Soga Shōhaku titled “Mount Fuji and the Mijo Pine Forest.” The piece includes 6 panels on 2 folding screens, painted in washes of black ink. The screen is behind glass, lit from above in a dark room.

The image depicts the four seasons. It is a depiction of the artist’s view of Japan in the year 1761. It is a portal. The screen exudes immense serenity. Although a third of it depicts a violent storm tossing sailboats about in the sea, the set of screens exudes a macrocosmic calmness. Chaos is present, but as a necessary force within the beauty of life.

I sit with it for a long time. I look closely and far away. I examine the parts and the whole. I become entranced with it, noticing the deft black brush strokes describing minute subtilties of the landscape in a single value. As an artist who’s failed miserably at Sumi-Ink paintings, it feels impossible, and yet it exists in front of me and was made by human hands. I sit and watch other patrons pass in front of me, who might linger awkwardly for a moment to inspect the details, but select one or two random pieces within the composition to snap a photo of on their phones and move on.

I want so badly to invite just one of them to sit with me. I want to ask: did you notice the dragon concealed in the rain storm, kicking up the rain and wind? And what about the scattered tenements encased in mist? Or the distant landscapes in the background? Or the craggy rocks that lead the eye back to Mount Fuji?

In so many ways, the value of art has been bastardized by the capitalistic institutions that have acquired them. We stand and line and pay a fee to enter a museum to take a digital photo of an image as a way of affirming that we consumed our tiny morsel of culture for the year. We rarely stop to think of the image as a piece of art, and the context it was made in. If we pay deep attention to the art beyond aesthetics and learn to read the art correctly, they will draw us nearer to the truth of our humanness, and our inherent value.

I’ve had the privilege of free admission to this museum in the past decade of life in Chicago, courtesy of the Museums for All program. So many times I’ve flashed my EBT card to stand in front of A Sunday on La Grande Jatte. I first stood in front of it at 22, cocked my head to the side with squinted eyes to appear engaged. I was captivated by this image, but never sure why. After dozens of viewings and hours of reading art history to realize that the painting itself was alive.

A Sunday on La Grande Jatte — 1884

An enormous crowd perpetually surrounds this painting. The crowd in the picture plane is a mirror image of the crowd that stands in front of it: the composition depicts aristocrats intermingling with the working class in a public park, and is viewed by clusters of tourists wearing expensive labels, taking photos of it with sophisticated cameras—and me, the lowly EBT card holder with no where else left to go. This may be the only place left in society where the social classes engage in leisure together.

This painting's significance transcends its price tag. Its assertion that ordinary people are worthy of sharing a picture plane with aristocrats and their pet monkey is what makes it alluring. The scene evokes the innate value of our shared humanity, even in moments of rest. Art is not important because it moves $70 billion globally on an annual basis; rather, its intrinsic value lies in its practical function of sharing our perceptions of reality with others. Through art, we actively participate in constructing and reshaping our understanding of reality.

Knowing where exactly to place our attention is the great dilemma of our time. We must name and protect the value of our attention. There is an infinite selection of media at our disposal at any moment, yet we passively allow an algorithm created by technocrats to curate the images that shape our perception of reality. When we find ourselves in the sunken place of Instagram, we should actively name the images broadcasted to us and ask: 'Do I accept this reality?' Because we don’t have to. If we bring our awareness towards what is real—the people, objects, and stories unfolding in our immediate environments—we restore to them their value. We regain control over what is real.

When we are burdened by the algorithm and it’s constant onslaught of images, what is real will feel boring art first glance. Deprive yourself from the internet and it’s images and look closer. The most mundane moments of our lives are where the magic hides.

Flowers of Autumn and Winter, Suzuki Kiitsu