Tourism has a very bad press. It’s usually analyzed critically. Tourism brings too many over-privileged, historically ignorant people to foreign places. In the case of Venice, which I am writing a book about, tourism is blamed for the extreme gentrification that is making life all but impossible for most of its inhabitants. Many of the problems of contemporary Venice are directly caused by over-tourism. Being an art historian or a social historian is an important, respectable activity. But there is a sense that being a tourist on holiday is unserious. That’s why, with just a handful of exceptions, the literature on tourism is highly critical. Recently, when I offered a draft of this essay to a respectable publication that has often published me, one reader ridiculed the very idea of a positive account of tourism. My present account uses Venetian examples, because I am writing a book about that city. But the basic framework applies in principle to any city with a rich art world.

Like everyone, I dislike crowded streets, hate standing in line to buy tickets, and am frustrated when art displays are crowded. The parts of Venice most visited by tourists are small, and so often (even in the off seasons) that city is uncomfortably crowded. And if you have come to write about the art, it’s easy to be offended by those travelers who are so comically naive as to be amazed at the water in the streets. That said, I urge some critical reflection on these complaints. Venice is crowded because it’s much written about. And so there is an obvious contradiction in publishing yet another critical account about what this over-crowded city is worth visiting. The young, naive visitor may return later after learning more about this city. That’s my experience anyway. As I indicated in an earlier account, the goal of my Counterpunch essays is to identify artworks, books, and scholars whose work deserves critical praise. Here, then, I look at a late nineteenth-century book.

In his late short book St. Mark’s Rest (1877), John Ruskin presents an argument that I want to take up. Taking the visitor around the city on foot and in a gondola, Ruskin draws his attention to some monuments. This, he argues, is how to understand the history of the Venetian Republic. He is instructing the tourist. The title of this present essay should seem surprising, for one doesn’t think of Ruskin as a tourist guide. He visited Venice as a very serious historian, whose The Stones of Venice (1851) is a great massive pioneering architectural history. Like many privileged people, Ruskin had nothing but scorn for the many middle-class English tourists whom he encountered on his research. And yet, St. Mark’s Rest offers a constructive way to theorize this tourism. Elsewhere in this journal, I’ve published a sketch of the historical background. Here, then, I take that discussion a step further.

An art museum, to give a bare-bones definition, contains a selection of artworks organized and curated by a curator. But, as Ruskin notes, there is another way to construct this experience. The viewer traveling around Venice may be instructed on what objects to look at in what order. So, for example, you can understand the history of painting in Venice in the Academia, by looking at the paintings by Giovanni Bellini, then Carpaccio and finally Titian, Tintoretto and Tiepolo, in the setting organized by the curators. But you can have a similarly structured experience by using a guidebook that takes you walking through Venice and shows works in that order, while omitting everything in between. Of course, that’s likely to be more work, for you need to skip everything between the selected works, which may often be some distance from one another. But then, unlike the curator, you don’t need to gather the art of interest and bring it to the museum. You need only point out its locations in the city.

Just as there are many ways of hanging the collection, so too are there diverse ways of viewing the art by walking the streets. And, of course, just as a curator chooses what work to spotlight, so a walking tour involves one way of focusing on the art. This, of course, is what tourist guidebooks do. It’s instructive to examine a variety of books to see the different ways art tourism can be organized. Often, Venetian guides start at San Marco, but it’s possible to start elsewhere. How the walking tour of the city is organized varies from one book to another. Consider one example, the exemplary Blue Guide. After discussing San Marco and the buildings on the Grand Canal, you are taken to the various neighborhoods, the sestieri: Dorsoduro, San Polo, Santa Croce, Cannaregio, and Castello. But of course, there’s no reason that they need to be considered in this order. There is no ‘natural’ ordering; it’s often natural in many museums to start with the earliest art and continue to the contemporary works. What matters is making a distinction between artworks on your guided tour and the other places you want to walk by. But there, too, the curator or guidebook can choose what to include in the museum. If you don’t admire Carpaccio, then you can leave him out of your account. On the other, the amusing tourist guide by a Canaletto specialist remarks that you can skip the famous gallery of Tintorettos, which don’t interest him. Like a museum, these guidebooks make choices about what’s most worth seeing. To pursue this parallel, just as there are controversies in the museum world about changes in the hangings, so in the literature of guidebooks, there are alternative ways of theorizing the living museum, which consists of the art in that city. And the replacement of the tourist guidebook with the smartphone is likely, I suspect, to further change this experience, in ways that deserve future discussion.

Needless to say, most people who use guidebooks to organize their walks don’t think in this way, as Ruskin’s analysis suggests. (I think of these public art displays in this way because I am familiar with art museums. Had I not written a book about museums, perhaps I would not have considered this claim.) But then, probably most museum goers don’t consider the alternative ways in which hangings can be organized. But curators do. What most interests me, still, are the implications of this parallel for our thinking about tourism. Like tourism, museum-going can be practiced in unreflective ways. But if you consider critically the nature of your looking at art, you will discover that many of the concerns of museum going apply also to art tourism. And this indicates why that activity, too, should be taken seriously. Indeed, some critical issues raised by art museum displays may be resolved by displays in public spaces. For example, often museum critics ask what happens when sacred works are placed in that secular setting. In their original church settings, the altarpieces of Venice are in sacred sites.

Needless to say, this parallel between museum displays and art in public spaces tells us nothing in itself about the problems raised by tourism. No more than an analysis of the alternative strategies for museum hangings resolves the much-discussed political issues posed by those institutions. Philosophical analysis cannot do everything.

The post John Ruskin’s Defense of Tourism: Or, How to Turn Venice into a Museum appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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