We didn't go in on opening day, but have walked our dogs around the campus of the new Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts a few times in recent weeks. The first time, I half-expected to be shooed off the grounds by one of the several security guards we encountered. But all we got were friendly waves, and a few minutes of conversation with a guard who admired Paris and Savannah, scratched them behind their ears and told us a story about his own dogs.
It was a pleasant first impression.
We went back Saturday to soak up some of the atmosphere. Again I wondered if someone might stop us and ask us for tickets or credentials or to tell us our dogs weren't allowed--like at that outlet mall we'll never go to ever again.
But there was no such drama. Savannah climbed into the lap of a wheelchair-bound visitor who admired her brindle coat and asked if we knew where she might adopt a boxer puppy. (We didn't, but recommended she start with Little Rock Animal Village, where we found our Savvy and where a young man told us they had all kinds of dogs--plenty of purebreds--available for adoption; you just had to check in regularly.)
There were food trucks and photo spots and little girls in spring dresses bounding away from their young bearded daddies toward some obscure prize on the horizon, prefiguring future frustrations.
It seemed like there was about as much enthusiasm for the re-opening of what some of us will always think of as the Arkansas Arts Center (AMFA sounds like an ill-advised academic degree, but we'll probably get used to it) as there is for that new Whataburger out on Chenal. Which is to say, almost an unseemly amount of enthusiasm.
I'm very impressed by the makeover, by the thoughtfulness and interior flow of the museum, the way the architects--Jeanne Gang's Chicago-based Studio Gang--incorporated historical elements such as the 1937 art deco façade and nine existing structures into the undulating natural light-filled complex.
We had a chance to tour it more than a year ago when it was still very much a work in progress, but you could see it was a structure with extraordinary bones and a clear-eyed logic to its design. Ambitious and handsome--obviously imagined as something of an answer to Bentonville's Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art--but not in the ostentatious beauty-pageant way of Frank Geary's Guggenheim Bilbao or Ma Yansong's Lucas Museum of Narrative Art (scheduled to open in Los Angeles in 2025).
By contrast, our almost modest building is most beautiful at twilight, intelligently landscaped and welcoming in a way that most museums weren't when I was a kid, when museums were intimidating places where you were shushed and closely watched lest you came too close to the art.
Museums pretended to be temples, affecting tall ionic columns and propylaea. You climbed steps to reach them, and once inside, you behaved yourself, gazing silently at each painting or sculpture for the requisite 30 seconds before sliding over to register the next artifact.
In those days before cell phone cameras and cargo shorts--before the institution recognized the gawkers as "stakeholders"--there was a religious pall that settled over the galleries. The elect might feel a kind of ecstasy there, but for most of us the experience was a sermon delivered in Old Aramaic.
We could sense something moving in the believers, some ineffable satisfaction that was unavailable to the uninitiated. Art, we were led to believe, was not our native language. We were tourists in its realm.
Somehow, things changed. Most of it was us--we grew older and acquired models and learned things and mysteries fell away. Titian became parsable, we began to understand how gesture and action might be translated through violently flung paint.
Maybe we began making things ourselves and discovered that a few intentionally scratched lines might suggest a city, or that you could pack a universe of emotion into a well-fitted chord. Art is connection--eliciting some kind of aesthetic response from another human being.
It's not mysterious. A kid can do it.
All kids can do it. It's only as we grow up and become self-conscious and polluted by instruction and self-doubt that we retreat from the joy of making things. We allow ourselves to become stilted and serious, and tell ourselves that's what being an adult is all about. We learn to look at art as a commodity, to be held as an investment or displayed as a conspicuous reminder of our wealth and taste.
We learned to look at it in all the wrong ways; art was rare and odd, the product of the cursed and mad, of exotic flighty people unfit for ordinary work. Tragic and romantic people who died young and poor in garrets (whatever they were) of suicide and dysentery or, in rare cases, became recklessly famous and dangerous to be around.
These days all my friends are artists. We move through rooms of made things, invested with something of the people who made them. The impulse is more than common; it is universal and can only be imperfectly suppressed.
Museums are invaluable, for reasons practical and logistic, but art thrives in the wild. No museum, no matter how inviting and well-integrated into the community it means to serve, is a natural habitat for art. A museum is more like a zoo, with some of the same limitations and quandaries.
At best, it is a place to serve as a reservoir of common images where ideals might be housed and those all-important connections made. At worst it becomes a stuffy mausoleum or a warehouse (the average museum displays about 3 percent of its collection at any given time), a fashionable backdrop for society cocktail parties.
A beautiful state-of-the-art building does not make a great museum; a great museum is a site of living memory that offers both spiritual sanctuary and intellectual engagement with fascinating minds. A great museum is both stage and backdrop, but it only comes alive when it is animated by the presence of the messy and semi-schooled laity, the dog walkers and the little kids yet undefined by education and conventional expectations of what a museum is supposed to be.
Philip Martin is a columnist and critic for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at pmartin@adgnewsroom.com.