Cultural treasures, behind a velvet rope
In the fall of 1999, six weeks into my first semester of college in Nashville, “The View” flew me to Manhattan for less than 24 hours to appear on national television for less than eight minutes. Celebrating its 500th episode, I competed in a game segment, primarily comprised of trivia about the talk show, for a spring break trip to Jamaica — a game in which I finished in last place.
Still, my guest appearance afforded me my first trip to the place that, growing up working class in Arkansas, now a first-generation college student, I’d understood to be the epicenter of possibility: New York City.
After the broadcast, I reserved the majority of my few free hours before my flight back to Nashville to go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a visit that for me held all the sanctity and necessity of others’ pilgrimages to Jerusalem or Mecca or the Vatican.
My entry to the museum was no more remarkable than any other patron’s, but the metal admission button affixed to my sweater breast reminded me of the communicator badges donned on the jumpsuits of officers aboard the Starship Enterprise, and the museum map seemed not so much to direct me through the building’s organization of period and geography as offer a myriad of journeys I might choose to blast through time and space.
I flew past a multitude of masters and masterpieces, but the works that most struck me were Ancient Egypt’s Temple of Dendur and Mastaba Tomb of Perneb, the rows of statues of pharaohs both seated and striding — they struck me not just because of their majesty but also because I’d been introduced to them, images of them, in an art history class only the previous week. It was as if the objects and I had now transcended the page and slide carousel to meet.
But in truth, what I most remember about my first time at the Met isn’t any of its thousands of works of art or 2 million square feet, but rather a feeling — the feeling of opportunity. Before jetting off on my hasty, haphazard tour, I’d simply loitered along the periphery of the museum’s palatial entrance, what I now know as its Great Hall, to internalize as best I could the grandiosity of the room and the sophistication of the people it contained — people who seemed refined not so much because of what they wore as by the shrewdness and nonchalance with which they navigated the whopping space.
Having ambitions beyond my station, I felt like an insider rather than an outsider, simply by virtue of my presence in the museum.
That was then. The Met’s new policy, instituted starting in March, requires non-New Yorkers to pay $25 for admission. Had it been it in effect when I visited, I doubt I would have had that formative experience. As far as I’d travelled to New York, and by such unlikely means, even the Met’s now-$12 rate for students would have been a splurge for me then and, in my inexperience, might not have seemed worth only a few hours’ viewing.
Even so, why must one be a student to receive a rate reduction? Isn’t any art museum’s primary mission to allow its patrons to become students of its collection? Aren’t we all, at the very least, students of life, the many facets of which art reflects and refracts?
When I was eight, my mother and I moved into a house that happened to be blocks away from our county library. It was only due to chance, proximity and free access that I found my way into that library, and in turn to books, and in turn to art.
Even with my mother’s support, it was only due to the vision that books and art inspired in me, and teachers who encouraged those imaginings, that I found my way to college, eventually transcending my class.
I am the child raised by a village. I am an increasingly rare example of the American Dream.
As a writer and professor now, I buy books, rather than check them out, to support writers, and I buy original art, rather than prints, in part to support artists, and I donate money to the museums I visit, to support those invaluable institutions — but I also do so because I am middle class now and can afford it.
Having been a child of the rural South, I remain keenly aware that many of the people who need art in their lives the most are those who don’t have access to it. Having had several hands to help me pull myself up by my bootstraps, I’m alarmed that yet another part of the village that uplifted me is now behind a velvet rope.