Reimagining museum tours
Using humor, pop culture references and games, guides try to make visits more fun
On a recent Monday afternoon, Sarah Dunnavant, a 27-year-old actress and guide with the tour company Museum Hack, gathered her group of eight at the entrance of the Art Institute of Chicago, promising to reveal the “salacious, sexy and scary” parts of the museum in an animated two-hour “un-highlights” trip through the museum.
She led the way to American folk art whirligigs, a fake Caravaggio and the arsenic-laced green paint favored by Vincent van Gogh. She passed out candy to keep spirits from flagging, discussed Beyoncé’s references in video and photography to the Yoruba goddess Osun in the African gallery, and photographed the group posing as the characters in Georges Seurat’s A Sunday on La Grande Jatte in front of the pointillist masterpiece.
“If you were expecting to stroke your chin and consider the brush strokes of the great masters,” she said, stroking her chin, and breaking out into laughter, “this is not that tour.”
This tour, like a spate of others that are newly redefining museum-going, aims to reinvigorate a tourism staple: the must-see museum. Museum Hack’s approach is to use humor, pop culture references and games to make the trip more fun and less dutiful.
“We’re obsessed with attracting a whole new audience,” said Nick Gray, who founded Museum Hack in 2013.
“Museums aren’t competing with other museums,” he added. “They’re competing with Netflix, Facebook and iPhones.”
It’s not that museums haven’t been innovative on their own in efforts to engage in the age of distraction.
But third-party tour companies, especially those working in fine art museums, bring more external filters, from the comedic to the academic. Their tours range from special themes, like feminism or gay culture, to museum highlights designed for time-pressed or attention-deficit travelers.
“You take a tour like ours to break down what might otherwise be a million-piece collection like at the Louvre or the Met,” said Stephen Oddo, a founder of Take Walks, a walking tour company that operates in New York and San Francisco as well as eight European cities, including London and Rome. “You could go with a guidebook or an article, but that’s very passive. With historic places, it’s always better to get context and richness delivered in person by someone who specializes in it.”
Oddo and his co-founder, Jason Spiehler, met while working in Rome. Spiehler was guiding tours at the Vatican. Together they founded Walks in Italy in 2010; in other countries the company now goes by Take Walks. The company offers tours like the Louvre in Paris at closing time, when traffic around the Mona Lisa dies down, and a full-day trip to three sites by architect Antoni Gaudí, two of them museums, in Barcelona, Spain. (Most museum itineraries run two to four hours and are $42 to $107; register at takewalks.com.)
Covering more salacious ground, Shady Ladies Tours, which originated at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2016, focuses on the courtesans, mistresses and beauties commonly depicted in art ($59 at shadyladiestours.com).
“It’s a less leaden way of looking at art,” said Andrew Lear, the founder of Shady Ladies, an art historian and classicist who has taught at New York University. He also runs the gay travel company Oscar Wilde Tours.
“We are taught to look at art in an almost disorienting and intimidating way, that art is about distinct styles and theoretical concerns,” he said. “I don’t think that’s a great place to start. People like to know context, and, of course, this is a fun side of context.”