This is a plea. Maybe it can be dismissed as a plea made by a grumpy Non-Gen X,Y,Z,A male blogger. But maybe you should pause a moment and consider it.
First, what we are not asking. Keep your phone on whilst waiting for your case to be called in court. The Judge is playing candy crush on her screen on the bench, so there is no reason why you should not be trying to advance to the next level.
Keep your phone on during that bad Hinge date because maybe you get a Tinder match and can hook up once you ditch Mr. I’m getting an MBA to work at Goldman Sachs and then in twenty years I’m going to use my Art History Degree to open a Bed and Breakfast in Bend, Oregon and decorate it in post modern 1870’s Egyptian Street Art, or Ms. I left my job at an advertising firm and make 40K a month as a food and bar influencer for NYC concentrating on FIDI so please take my IG and Tik Tok…
We get it. You need your phone. We all do.
Flash back to last year. Rumpole is blissfully wandering through the Van Gogh exhibit at the Met in NYC on Fifth Avenue. We are a member so we don’t wait in lines. In the galleries there are an overwhelming number of tourists. We can tell by the foreign languages they are speaking. And we can tell because they ALL- EVERY ONE OF THEM - have their phones out and are relentlessly and furiously recording every single picture. A middle aged Asian woman from China, her brow furrowed, darts from Van Gogh to Van Gogh, a ten second video and vroom! She’s elbowing her way to the front of the next one to do the same. It’s like the paintings are the plans to the Atomic Bomb and she’s Ethel Rosenberg. *
Recently, some idiot tourist sat on a crystal chair in the Palazzo Maffei in Verona, Italy, breaking it. Last week a tourist in the Uffizi in Florence backed into a 17th century painting of Fernando de Medici, tying to replicate Medici’s pose for their selfie.
In the Met, few were contemplating Van Gogh’s masterpieces. The golden wheat fields, the beguiling self portraits, one done months before the artist took his own life. The impact of art on the soul was lost. The experience became one long post card- a picture of the leaning tower of Pisa, or the Eiffel Tower, or Buckingham Palace- I was here- LOOK. LOOK AT ME NEXT TO VAN GOGH’S SUNFLOWERS … I WAS HERE… I DID THIS….DON’T YOU WANT TO BE ME?
No, we don’t. There is not one piece of art that has not been digitized and is not available for free on line. So why lose the experience of art on the desperate desire to prove you saw the painting?
It makes no sense.
We can spend an hour looking at one or two Rothkos and get lost in the wonder of how a few stripes of paint on a canvass makes us feel. And then we can repair to a favourite coffee shop in the West Village and debate Rothko’s influence over a dark espresso and crusty croissant. Is there not a better way to spend a day? How can anyone who races through an exhibition with their phone out recount how the art affected them if they don’t spend time contemplating the picture?
It makes no sense.
One last analogy. Imagine watching Tom Seaver in 1969 pitch a two-hit shutout as the Miracle Mets were on their way to an improbable World Series victory. Seaver was one of the great pitchers of all time. We saw him do this at Shea stadium that year. The sound of the ball popping in the catcher’s glove is indelible. The frustrations on the faces of hitters who could not figure him out remains with us to this day. And we had no phone. No camera. We just sat and watched and were washed over in the experience of being there.
That is what our phone generation is losing- the experience of seeing and feeling. They are replacing it with the proof of presence. I WAS THERE. I DID THIS.
But can they answer the most important question of all: How did it make you feel?
* Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were innocent. But that is a post for another time.
3 comments:
Ethel’s conviction and subsequent execution was a travesty of justice and a cautionary tale regarding public hysteria. Julius? I don’t think he should have been executed, but historians believe he was guilty.
We also differ on the texture of the ideal croissant. A delicate, ever so slight outer layer of crunchiness before the tongue reaches that pillowy interior of honey-combed fresh butter and bread flour is preferable to what I would call an overcooked crispiness.
Otherwise, this was a first rate post and timely post
I agree with your premise and wish people would put their phones down. That having been said, Tom Seaver was my favorite pitcher. I stopped being a Mets fan when they traded him to the Reds and didn’t have his back when Dick Young made personal attacks on him. But that’s what the media does. Anyway, I went to every World Series game in 1969, home and away. Seaver didn’t pitch a two hitter but he did pitch a 10 inning complete game. It was Jerry Koosman who truly had the more remarkable series.
I’m interested in what you’ll write about the Rosenbergs. Julius was not innocent. But Ethel may well have been. Her big mistake in life was having an ass for a brother.
The number of people left on earth who even know who Dick Young was could fit into a small REGJB courtroom. The number of people who know how Young drove Seaver out of town and bullied the Mets into doing it could fit into a phone booth. Very impressed with your comment.
Young was one of the great sportswriters of the last generation. I didn’t always agree with him and he was totally off base about Seaver. But I miss reading his columns. Those days are sadly over.
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