Reforming museums

With all due respect, I have some constructive criticism to offer the French in how they present museums. We've spent the last 2 days exploring the d'Orsay and Louvre and I really must say that the curators need some good old American marketing assistance to help us exhausted tourists. For example, at the d'Orsay I was almost too exhausted to see straight and spent too much time staring stupidly at one exquisite albeit incomprehensible painting only to turn a corner and smack straight into a favorite Degas ballerina or Impressionist landscape with absolutely no forewarning. Too much for the senses I tell you - too much!

And it was worse at the Louvre, where I'd powerwalk through galleries filled with dark depressing paintings of biblical history which I am too ignorant to comprehend or yet another beheading or even stranger, weird paintings of butchered game and fish??!! I couldn't make sense of any of it on a good day, let alone while jet-lagged. Then, just as I was about to give up, I'd run smack again into some masterpiece (the Mona Lisa - lovely, Venus de Milo - very nice, or best yet the Winged Victory aka Nike - a true masterpiece). Warn me, for heaven's sake!

So here's my advice - the French should set their museums up like we do our Wal-Marts or K-marts! No, seriously, bear with me here - you could keep ignorant art history-less tourists intereststed by setting up the works of art like window-shopping displays. Group them, arrange them artfully and most important of all - price them!! That way I could go around comparing prices of works of art and that would keep me endlessly interested and feeling smug while "saving" money on real deals. Case in point - after a couple hours in the d'Orsay I insisted that we get food and take a break before I passed out from fatigue. After an excellent bistro meal, we wandered in the Nordstrom of Paris, Le Galleries Lafayette with the amazing dome in the middle of the store, and suddenly I was rejuvinated! Price tags, grouped displays - it was great! It took us over an hour just to get through the gourmet food section! If the d'Orsay was set up like that, I'd have powered through the entire building in a fraction of the time it took to get through 2.5 floors!

And as for the early warning signals of upcoming masterpieces, I think they should adopt the flashing blue lights like they used to use in K-mart to signal shopper specials. That way a tired tourist would know that something really excellent was coming up - like a lovely madonna and child or Napolean's cornation (which is seriously at least twice as big a my 3-car drive way!) - instead of walking blindly and totally unprepared into beauty.

Clearly, we Americans are exporting all sorts of pop culture into France (I see posters of Hell Boy, High School Musical 3 and Chimps in Space everywhere!). For once, let's export something useful - the best of the American shopping experience applied to French museum curating. Happy tourists = spending tourists and with the exchange rate what it is, the French can't help but love that!