The gallery afternoon fails, when it fails, from greed: three museums, forty rooms, a headache by four o’clock and nothing remembered. The connoisseur’s version is almost insolently modest — one exhibition, ninety minutes, and the rest of the afternoon spent on what it started.
One show, not one museum
Choose an exhibition, not an institution. The blockbuster at the Royal Academy, a single wing of the National, a commercial opening in Mayfair’s back streets where the art is for sale and the crowd is watching each other. The commercial galleries — Cork Street and around — are free, brave and blissfully empty on a weekday afternoon.
The pace
Walk the whole show once quickly, commit to the three rooms that pulled, and ignore the rest without guilt. Nobody remembers an exhibition; they remember four pictures and one argument. Read the wall text after looking, not before — the label is a spoiler written by a committee.
The argument afterwards
The show is the first half. The second is the table afterwards — tea or a glass within ten minutes’ walk — where the disagreements happen. What held, what was fashionable nonsense, which single work either of you would take home. Art is one of the last subjects strangers can argue about warmly, which makes it one of the best.
The season
Openings cluster in spring and October; summer belongs to the Academy’s Summer Exhibition, wonderful and preposterous at once. But the habit matters more than the calendar. One show a month, properly seen, outweighs a year of dutiful museum miles.
Galleries are better with a dissenting opinion. I supply my own.