Over the weekend, I tried to utilize my I AMsterdam Card as much as possible. Because of this, I was able to observe and explore Amsterdam more and better. First on the itinerary was MOCO—The Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art. On display was mainly works by Banksy—their main attraction. I found it quite amazing—both the art and the museum itself—and not with a totally positive connotation.
When I first got to Amsterdam, I immediately saw the posters for MOCO, and how they had a large collection of Banksy’s work on display. My initial thought was about the irony of displaying pieces by Banksy in a museum setting, it made little sense to me, and there was no way that Banksy actually approved the museum to show his work. This suspicion was confirmed when I arrived at MOCO because all of the pieces there were either taken from their original locations or on loan to the museum from private collections, None of the art was given to the museum by Banksy for the purpose of being displayed. I was glad to be able to see Banky’s work up close by I found the entire experience to be weird because you have to play to get into the museum even with my I AMsterdam Card. The whole thing seemed antithetical to Banky’s anti-capitalist rhetoric.
When I first got interested in fine art, I was perplexed as to how or why some pieces sold for so much money and it seemed to me that the price tag of a piece equated to how good the work was. I had hopped aboard the thought train that some many ride with—that the art itself and the art market were the same, which is completely wrong. Art and the art market have little to do with one another other than the fact that the art has a value. In the art market, that value is monetary, while the value of the art itself is intangible—it is what the viewer perceives is its value. I think that artists such as Banksy, are trying to fight back against the art market with his messages in his art. One such stunt that stood out to me was when his painting of a girl with a red, heart-shaped balloon sold at auction and then got shredded as soon as the gavel fell. While the plan did backfire because the piece got even more expensive afterwards, I can appreciate it for the message Banksy was trying to convey, no matter the ridiculous price tag. People should appreciate the art, not its price.
Saturday was the Rijksmuseum and I had one goal there—to see Night Watch by Rembrandt van Rijn. Everything else was secondary. Walking into the RIjksmuseum, it felt like your classic large art museum, complete with a grand foyer. Having been to places such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, I was expecting a similar layout, obviously, the Rijksmuseum overwhelmingly contains pieces by Dutch artists, I felt that pieces were going to displayed in chronological order and a simple to follow path from the earliest pieces to most recent would be a logical thought. While I was right about the order, I was totally wrong about the floor plan because it made no intuitive sense to me. It was extremely hard to get from one side of the museum to the other without either going the wrong way or back tracking. The Rijksmusem needs to hire an experience architect because the walkthrough of the museum left something to be desired.
Many of the works were amazing, as expected from a collection on the caliber of the Rijksmuseum. However, what stood out the most to me was not the art on display, rather, what they had planned for Night Watch; to do a public restoration of it. I was amazed due to the fact that I have never heard of such a thing being done before for any painting—let alone one of the most famous of all time. I love the idea because it involves the museum goers in a process of museum upkeep that nobody usually gets to see. Getting visitors of the museum emotionally invested into the success of the restoration will get visitors to comeback and see the progress or at the very least keep up with it in some capacity. The only drawback I see is if the restoration goes wrong in some way because it would be extremely hard to hide the fact that there was a mistake if it was obvious enough, but I think that situation is unlikely. I would love to see more museums do public restorations of famous pieces.