“What brings you to the Art Museum today?”
Well I am a student tour guide at the Art Museum, and so since I have a tour tomorrow, I thought I would brush up on stuff that I plan to talk to people about especially since there are objects that have been removed or moved around. I came to refresh my memory and to try to see if there are new ways that I can formulate the way that I present these objects, in a way that hasn’t been done before, with new perspectives. So that is why I am here.
“What’s your favorite part about giving tours at the Art Museum?”
I think the best part about giving tours is that there is a really unexpected element to it because you don’t know what kind of people you end up with and what they are interested in. You do your basic spiel, but what happens next is always really fun and interesting. People will often prompt you to question certain things about objects that you’ve always kind of taken for granted, and then you think about it and discuss with them. Things always seem new when you present them as a tour guide.”
“Are there certain works of art that you think most people really enjoy, do people have favorites that they tend to gravitate towards?”
“They definitely get excited about the Monet. That actually makes it really hard to talk about the Monet, because they have certain expectations of it. Yeah it’s true it was a very radical technique, but there is a lot of other stuff to it too, so its hard sometimes to work with that really strong fixed expectation. But it’s interesting because it also forces me to think about Monet in a lot of different ways.”
“Do you have a favorite experience of giving a tour? Or a favorite encounter?”
“One time I did a Sunday tour, and those are always pretty small, and I had this one old couple with me, and it was just the three of us walking around the museum. It was literally just a conversation, less like of a tour setting. It was really nice because the two of them would frequent art museums also, so they had their own opinions and talked about what they liked about. They talked about this one also because I guess they had seen other Davids in other museums so said “This one is so interesting, it’s unfinished, what is it for?” It was really fun, I think that was one of my favorite experiences.”