Frame it for young eyes

A brief museum foray can bring artworks to life for a curious child

September 03, 2010|Sebastian Smee, Globe Staff

Museums, it’s easy to forget, were once for adults. High-ceilinged places with a muffled, whispery ambience, punctured sporadically by the echoing clack of adult shoes, they were ideally suited to illicit rendezvous on rainy days or courtly, courtesy-filled outings for retirees.

Now, every museum this side of Tbilisi sees it as central to its “mission’’ to function as a kind of day care for kids and a crutch for desperate dads and moms hoping to kill a few hours and provide — against all odds — something culturally edifying into the bargain.

Well, I’ve done my fair share of it, too — but, up until recently, almost never willingly. Exposing one’s children to great art in great museums is all very well for most people. But for me, a professional art critic, I’ve long suspected it’s the dumbest mistake in the book.

Mine are only 5 and 3, but already I can see the writing on the wall. “My old man was an art critic,’’ I can hear my son yelling from the top of the fireman’s pole as his crew gears up to respond to a shrieking fire alarm at the Museum of Fine Arts. “I spent my whole childhood being dragged through museums. Let the damn place burn!’’

If my Crocs-wearing kids have ended up on the squeaky, unyielding floors of an art gallery, it’s always been incidental to my job — a sort of logistical inevitability (shows to review out in the Berkshires, wife suggests making a weekend trip of it, can’t in good conscience ask visiting grandmother to stay behind and baby-sit).

There are exceptions: It’s always good, for instance, to take the kids to the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams, the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, or the DeCordova Sculpture Park + Museum in Lincoln. These places are virtually designed for families, and visiting them, as my family does frequently, is almost always a pleasure, irrespective of the art (which, mind you, is usually very stimulating at all four places).

Still, as a general principle, making every effort not to take the kids has always seemed like common sense. One, I don’t want my kids to hate me. Two, I don’t particularly want my kids to hate art (although I can live with that if they’re good at putting out fires or rescuing oil-drenched birds, or even, hey, banking). And three, I don’t want to hate my kids: After all, when contemplating Titian’s “Danaë,’’ who wants to be tut-tutting the children, telling them not to touch, not to run, not to blow raspberries on her belly button or point and giggle at her “crazy little boobies.’’ It’s really a waste of everyone’s time.