Pacific Standard reports that “Surprised museum researchers find many visitors snap photographs of themselves with the masterpieces.”
I’m not sure which researchers are actually surprised by this. But by coincidence I am now reading John Carey’s The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880-1939. He cites Thomas Hardy’s notebooks from the 1880s, and the author’s visit to the British Museum, where he saw (p. 24):
… crowds parading and gaily traipsing round the mummies, thinking today is for ever, and the girls casting sly glances at young men across the swathed dust of Mycerinus. They pass with flippant comments the illuminated manuscripts – the labour of years – and stand under Ramases the Great, joking. Democratic government may be justice to man, but it will probably merge into proletarian, and when these people are our masters, it will lead to more of this contempt, and possibly be the utter ruin of art and literature.
Those millennials, eh?
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