Did I feel smug when I got tickets to the blockbuster Vermeer exhibition in Amsterdam? Sure, a bit. Less when I booked in January than after reviews started appearing, competing with superlatives: “One of the most thrilling exhibitions ever conceived” and “A once-in-a-lifetime experience.” I got smugger when I started reading it was impossible to book, even for bankers’ wives and gallery benefactors. “It’s become a kind of social failure not to have some hat to pull tickets from,” one writer explained, making me, theoretically, a social success for the first time ever.
But my scramble for tickets came from a place of existential panic. “Once in a lifetime” is a compelling – or terrifying – concept when you reach the middle of your own, and “never” becomes a realistic alternative. It’s hard not to get a touch of vertigo thinking about finite time and infinite possibility. I feel it especially with art, weirdly, since it’s hardly ephemeral. But there’s so much I want to see and so much I’ve missed. I discover incredible exhibitions, start plotting a visit, blink and they’re gone. It happened recently with one about Parisian women. I booked a Eurostar in a fit of sweaty Yolo, then life got in the way. Now I move my train booking regularly, admitting to myself that no, I won’t be going to Paris this month (the exhibition ended ages ago). But Vermeer got under my skin – it felt urgent, something I’d bitterly regret missing. I booked a ferry and planned a mad one-day dash, making my husband come even though he had no idea what we were visiting (he only asked about 15 minutes into the journey – there’s a man who will never be haunted by Fomo).
