Flashback 1996: A mountain of hype dwarfs measly exhibit

"The Rehearsal Onstage," by Edgar Degas (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

    My wife asked me if I wanted to see the Mary Cassatt show at the Art Institute. "Umm, sure," I said. The truth is, I'm more a waltz-in-and-see-what's there museum goer than somebody who rushes off to catch the hot shows, the must-see exhibits — just the opposite. I tend to avoid them. But I don't think I ever explained why. This comes close.

     So I go to the Degas show last week. Yes, I know, late. The media horde was there and gone ages ago. But I'm not exactly in the avant-garde of the media horde.
     And I'm not sure that I want to be, either. I shy away from openings, for instance. Too many people; too late at night.
     By the time I got to the House of Blues, for instance, it had the languorous air of a local taproom — a few non-celebrity couples scattered here and there, the beginnings of a crowd at the bar. Dozens of empty tables to choose from.
     The beer cost money, but at least I didn't have to climb over anybody to get it.
     There's a weird sort of pride that propels people to go to events the moment they open, and while I'm as susceptible as the next person to puffing myself up, I invariably catch myself in the act of doing it and feel like an idiot.
     There's a great Samuel Johnson episode in which his friend Boswell was expressing wonderment at some popular London entertainment.
     "But will people actually pay to see such a thing?" Boswell marveled, and the great doctor replied, "No, but they will pay dearly to have seen it."
     Awareness of this tendency lets you guiltlessly stay home. I missed the Monet show, for instance, which was the biggest thing in the world for a while. I don't like Monet, so I didn't bother.
     I don't like Degas either, but my parents were in town, and they acted as if there were nothing else in the world. It's amazing the way museums have honed their marketing skills to a fine edge.
     Visitors to Chicago used to think they hadn't enjoyed a Windy City experience unless they ate deep-dish pizza or went to the top of the Sears Tower.
     Nowadays, they have to make an obligatory pilgrimage to pay homage to this year's Astounding Collection of Masterworks Never To Be Seen Again Gathered In One Place On God's Sweet Earth.
     Someday, the Art Institute people are going to wise up and realize that the masses would pack in to see Uncle Mort's matchbook cover collection, if ballyhooed with the right verve and sufficient marketing budget. People would use the same breathless shorthand no matter the show.
     "I just went to see `Toilet Brush' yesterday," they'd say. "And my word, the varieties . . ."
     It would sure save on insurance payments and shipping costs.
     There was, I admit, a certain clandestine thrill to arranging the whole thing. A few months back I had tried to get in, again to entertain visitors, and had come up empty-handed. So with the threat of disappointed parents looming over my head, I called weeks ahead of time, and received instructions out of a Tom Clancy novel.
     Be at the Art Institute on a certain day, they told me, between precisely 11:30 a.m. and 12 noon. They gave me a six-digit number to memorize. They sent me a letter that, among other things, reminded me to hand my ticket to the guard. I was waiting for instructions to wear a red carnation in my lapel and be prepared to answer the challenge, "Who is wearing Salvador Dali's mustache?" with "I am a friend of Ed Paschke's."
     It was just an average day of the show, yet the Degas exhibit was crushed with people. I tried to look at the paintings — Degas seemed to like ballet dancers — but kept being swept away in the torrent. I would glance a patch of orange, a bit of green, something that looked like a tutu. Then suddenly I'd feel my feet lift off the floor and I would bob, like a cork in a torrent, to the next gallery. A glimpse of fuzzy landscape; the backside of a hefty woman sitting on a bench, then my vision would fill with a wall of brown and gray overcoats.
     I won't comment on the paintings themselves. But let's say that under those conditions — it was like viewing an art exhibit in a subway car at rush hour — I wouldn't have appreciated paintings that I liked.
     Then, suddenly, it was over. The big retrospective took about 10 minutes to see in its entirety, and that included a few minutes spent searching for my parents, who kept getting themselves pinioned in corners by the mass of humanity.
     The gift shop seemed bigger than the exhibit. A stunning array of umbrellas and cups and magnets and T-shirts and puzzles that, in my opinion, are the real meaning and raison d'etre behind these huge exhibits.
     I was happy to be done, and hurried to the French Impressionist gallery, which was not only empty but, I was pleased to note, had been improved by the removal of all the Degas paintings.
     It took me a while to recover from the jarring experience of the exhibit, and I couldn't let the matter drop until I remembered the old Borscht Belt joke about the woman complaining after dinner at a resort in the Catskills. "The food was lousy," she says. "And in such small portions."
      —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Dec. 8, 1996