Readers, let me tell you the one big problem with art galleries, and especially with Canberra's National Gallery of Australia and National Portrait Gallery. There's too much art in them. Far, far too much.
If you are seeking a Trump-avoiding/Hanson-forgetting respite from today's epidemic of "news fatigue" by leaving your devices behind and going to an art gallery then beware. Alas at art galleries another species of fatigue, the famous "museum fatigue" (first described in 1910) awaits you.
In recent days I have gone, twice, becoming fatigue-befuddled both times, to the National Gallery of Australia's magnificent (but perhaps bewilderingly magnificent) Ngura Pulka - Epic Country exhibition. Coincidentally into my inbox has just alighted a new piece from The Guardian, Isabel Brooks' Let me tell you one big problem with art galleries - there's too much art.
Back to our theme in a moment but first to how the fine and honourable word "epic", so misemployed in the naming of Trump's attack on Iran as operation Epic Fury, is gloriously restored in the name of the National Gallery's Epic Country.
Better names for Trump's war on Iran would have been Buffoon's Fiasco or Moron's Folly. By contrast the Epic Country exhibition consists of 30 often epically huge paintings (some of them measure three metres by three metres) by First Nations artists honouring landscapes and places in the epically vast APY Lands (Aangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara) in the remote north-west of South Australia.
The problem youthful Ms Brooks has been experiencing now is as old as the hills, and she points to the long and ongoing history of analyses of how and why museum-going/gallery-going can be so wearying.
Ms Brooks, like your columnist, loves art. But she despairs that "There are simply too many paintings [in art galleries]. After about 15 minutes I've had enough and by the time I reach the gift shop I have a powerful urge to lie face down on the floor and go to sleep."
"When I go to a gallery now, hoping that this time I'll feel something, I'm dismayed by the sheer volume of what's on offer. The National Gallery [London] displays more than 2400 artworks and the Louvre up to 4500 paintings."
She cites the experience, common in gallery-goers, of trying so hard to look at so many of a gallery's displayed paintings that one comes away not being able to fully, properly remember any of them.
"Shuffling from one painting to the next," she reports, "I take a series of bad photos that I won't look at until I need to clear some iCloud storage. I try to make [the gallery experience] more entertaining by pointing to an ugly person in a painting and telling my companion 'that's you'."
"But if I did desire a better experience, and had the opportunity to curate my own National Gallery, what would be an appropriate amount of art to display? The fewer the better, for sure. I'd much prefer to go to a gallery to see one painting than thousands."
Amen to that, I say, and adding that in the special case of the Epic Country display, I'd prefer to go to see just one of its paintings rather than its overwhelming 30.
And I fancy that what always gets called "museum fatigue" may really be a kind of museum bewilderment.
The great philosopher-theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote that "Bewilderment is the true comprehension" so that to not have the foggiest idea of what's happening, of what you're feeling, "is the true knowledge".
His is, mostly, a comforting thought for those of us who live bewildered lives, although summoning his big idea when one is (figuratively) lost in an art gallery never seems to entirely help.
Galleries teeming with exhibits, like media teeming 24/7 with news (and what news in these terrible times: fanatical Tony Abbott being raised from the dead and the satanic Pauline Hanson being imagined as our prime minister!) asks far more of the brain than the brain has evolved to manage.
This problem looms especially large with the National Portrait Gallery (those hundreds and hundreds of faces ogling us, judging us!). It looms larger still with the NGA's Epic Country because the 30 paintings are as well as being spiritually demanding also visually magically, almost hallucinogenically complex.
Some of the Epic Country dot paintings seem to be made up of a gazillion dots and with zillions of those dots arranged into trillions of patterns of swirls and twirls. To pick one Epic Country painting and then to spend time staring and staring at it and into it is something like trying to comprehend the Milky Way (estimated to contain 200 billion stars) on a clear dark night.
To feel dwarfed-mesmerised-bewildered by a painting is a dizzying sensation, reflecting great credit on the artists who can cast these sorts of spells, but dizzying and unnerving nonetheless.
Left dizzy and bewildered, by our times, by the blizzards of news and now even by art, one can only hope that Bonhoeffer is right and that our bewilderments are proofs of how well we are adjusted to this bamboozled life we lead down here under the Milky Way.
