Timed Entry to Exhibitions: Welcome to Your Special Crowd

 Welcome to Your Special Crowd:

Timed Entry in Exhibitions

 

What is the point of timed entry to exhibitions? It cannot be to lessen crowds: experience all to clearly gives the lie to that hypothesis.

 

Once upon a time I naively thought that the attachment of a “timed entry” label to a show, together with the steepling price, would guarantee a relaxed stroll around the exhibits, with plenty of time and space for pausing and studying.

 

Now I know for sure that, going to any popular exhibition, one should expect crowds. They may be “timed” crowds, but crowds nonetheless. Galleries, I suppose, are not much interested in diminishing the number of visitors at any one time. They want crowds – pile ’em high and sell ’em dear- but they don’t want dangerous uncontrolled crushes on their hands (see below for a salutary tale). Hence timed crowding.

 

Crowds and fashionable shows have been always with us. When the Royal Academy was housed in Somerset House, where the Courtauld now is, the Annual (now Summer) Exhibition took place in the grand room at the top of the building, a room recently restored to its original proportions. In the early 1800s, as now, principal access was by the magnificent circular staircase rising up three floors.

 

Crowding there obviously was. George Cruikshank shows the packed exhibition room.

The throngs backed up down the stairs. Rowlandson caricatured the human domino effect of a stumble on the steps in his Stare Case”, a titivating snigger of an illustration.

 

In later Victorian times the Royal Academy moved to its present home on Piccadilly. It was the turn of the artist William Powell Frith, recorder of many famous contemporary scenes, to take aim at the fashionable crowd at the Summer Exhibition.

 

His picture shows the young Oscar Wilde (whom Frith much disliked) holding forth loudly to rapt hangers-on, whilst recognisable intellectual and cultural worthies of a conservative stripe glare with disapproval (Wilde, the arch influencer, talking a selfie?).

 

Sometimes the trick on entering a crowded exhibition is to move rapidly through to the final rooms, as crowding is often worse towards the beginning. This usually works in the warrens of the Tates (Britain and Modern). 

 

This tactic failed me at the National Gallery, where timed legions of art lovers came to marvel at Van Gogh. Every room was jostlingly full. The only ploy was to stand, patiently and more or less unmoving, like one of Van Gogh’s wonderful trees, near to a work and wait for an eddy in the flow to open up a brief view.

 

December 2024