“I’m never taking art history!”
I defiantly proclaimed to my mother, an art historian, during my freshman year at Princeton. (I had uttered “I’m never going to Princeton!” just a few months earlier). And yet here I am: an Art and Archaeology junior in the same department, at the same university, in which my mother teaches. Unsurprisingly, the arts have played a prominent and a personal role in my life.

My first eighteen years included endless visits to art museums around the world during summer breaks, weekends, and interrupted shopping trips. At college, I found myself refusing to take art history classes but still leaving my coat, bag, and pens outside of the Princeton University Art Museum’s glass doors. For me, there was something about museums that was comforting, but also challenging. Knowing that the museum always had something I had never seen before, I was drawn toward the excitement of encountering “the unknown.” This thrill was fueled by my awareness of some greater authority that feared my ability to damage works of art with a single forbidden flash of my digital camera.

I know now that many people feel confused, uncomfortable, or even intimidated in art museums— for a whole host of reasons, many having nothing to do with the art at all. This past summer, I spent a few weeks in southern France, working in a vineyard near Bordeaux. My trip culminated in a train ride to Paris, where I arrived near the beginning of July. In Paris, on the first Sunday of every summer month, museums open their doors free of charge to the public. Perfect timing.

The only things I like more than free things are things that are free for a limited time only. Thus, I charted an overly ambitious expedition that had my friends and me waking up early in the morning to begin an epic museum crawl: we hit the Louvre, the Pompidou, the Petit Palais . . . but then, exhausted, substituted afternoon crepes for the Rodin Museum.

My friends—a history major, a pre-med student, and a chemical engineer—gamely moved from salon to salon, occasionally asking questions and often saying things like “I don’t get it” or “Tell me the answer.” Still, I was struck by the tremendous variety of their responses to the works, and how, when I offered some piece of context or my own interpretive spin, they became so much more interested, asking me additional questions and beginning to formulate their own interpretations. Once they realized that there was no right answer, they had fun with the experience.

It’s that sense of possibility— not my academic track—that compels my continued visits. I can’t remember ever actually being unhappy after having visited a museum. (Actually, I take that back—try spending five hours in the Tate Modern during the heat of the summer while your mother implores your fried, eight-year-old brain to consider the fragmented composition of a Man Ray photogram.) But I don’t think that it was my early, borderline oppressive, exposure to the arts that has allowed me to walk into the Princeton University Art Museum and actually enjoy being there—it’s the realization that I don’t have to be there; I’m there for me and for my own enjoyment.

I’m not saying you have to know something about art to appreciate it. In fact, I believe the opposite: you can know nothing about art and still benefit from it. Like everything else in this world, museums require effort. You have to think; everything isn’t just handed to you. But the brilliant thing is that while it might seem as if those greater authorities I mentioned earlier are judging you based on how you evaluate art—they aren’t. They don’t exist. (Or if they do and they’re your mom, you don’t have to listen to them.) Go into Princeton’s Art Museum and don’t worry about the wall labels. Leave when you want to, and don’t worry about getting the right answer. Go for yourself, and when you’re there, do whatever it takes for you to have a good time. Just try not to hurt the paintings.

Louisa Ferguson Class of 2012