Oct 6th, 2022, 01:30 PM

Want to Go to the Louvre? No Thanks!

By Melody Gray
Image credit: Unsplash/@borgemaelum
Why You Should Skip Your Visit to the World’s Most-Visited Museum

‘I’ve never been to the Louvre before, actually,’ said the father of the family I babysat for. It took a moment for that to sink in. I couldn’t believe that someone who’d lived in Paris for almost 10 years had never been to the Louvre. It's supposed to be a mecca for the enlightened tourist, a treasure trove of art, a center for global culture. I mean, where else can you travel through Europe, Asia, and then Africa all in one day? 

We often assume that the Louvre has irrefutable value because it is so renowned. Its vast and privileged collections seem to tell stories from all over the world, but this begs the questions: how did these artifacts come to belong to the museum? Why are they in France? David Carrier, philosopher and art and culture critic, critiques support for encyclopedic museums like the Louvre : ‘Thanks to cultural imperialism, we relatively privileged Americans and Western Europeans enjoy the artifacts assembled from other cultures that were too weak to protect their patrimony’. Beneath all the flowery show of beautiful art, then, is the sad reality that these pieces were stolen from other countries. So is the Louvre really worth visiting? I don’t think so. 

It is well-known that museums like the Louvre have been important tools in the creation of national identity. From interviews conducted with 13 French university students in Paris, I found their responses to support this conclusion. When asked about why they chose to visit the Louvre museum, one student even reasoned that it was because it was an “emblematic museum”. Each student confirmed that they would definitely recommend it to someone, even those who hadn’t even been to the museum themselves, mostly for reasons regarding its enriching collections, the diversity of its art, or the ability to experience a new culture there. 

Image Credit: Louvre website/https://collections.louvre.fr/

These are perhaps good reasons, but none seem to acknowledge the negative role that museums like these have played in cultural looting. If you look more closely beneath the flashy surface of museum culture, you’ll start to see that it is not just a problem of the past. It is still alive today in scandals like that of the Louvre Abu Dhabi’s, where Jean-François Charnier, its scientific director, got exposed for buying looted Egyptian artifacts just this past summer.

Unfortunately, the Louvre’s nature as an encyclopedic museum actually diminishes the value of each culture and object to a mere vanity show. Its vast collections are largely reflective of France’s past imperialistic endeavors, not of the France we know today.  In fact, most of the chef d’oeuvres that it promotes are not even French, such as the Mona Lisa and the Venus de Milo. From Napoleon I’s conquests in Egypt and Italy to the imperialistic archeological endeavors at Mosul in Iraq in the 1840s, it  has historically exhibited objects that have been taken from other cultures which serves as a reminder of how France took cultural heritage from other countries in order to enrich its own.

This is coupled with the fact that the museum has historically received most of its revenue from foreign audiences, as pre- pandemic statistics from 2019 show that of the 9.6 million visitors to the museum 75% of them were foreigners. The same report even boasts about how they are the most popular museum on Chinese social media sites. This prominent tourist culture at the Louvre serves to further hide its cultural imperialism by emphasizing economic value over authentic cultural engagement. 

Commenting on this phenomenon, American University of Paris Fine Arts professor Jonathon Shimony says that ‘tourism is stupid. Immersion is brilliant. You go home with a totally new vision. Everyone should read up on what’s here [at the Louvre] before turning up, looking for Beyonce.’ In this sense, we realize that art should not be consumed blindly. It is meant to be engaged with, to be understood within its multiple layers of context, including where it came from and how it got here. To me, that’s what real immersion is. 

Image credit: Unsplash/@mlle_moka

I believe that we here at AUP, as foreign students in France, have a greater responsibility than just tourism. We should be able to fully engage with the culture around us from multiple perspectives and not fall prey to a universalist mindset that drowns the individual voices of culture groups and historical periods. The Louvre should be understood within the context of French history in all of its illusive glory: the good, the bad, and the ugly. 

So please skip the museum visit this weekend. Yes, the art. Yes, the culture. Yes, the seemingly easy access to world history. But if we don’t understand the bigger context of why the Louvre has so much, we will miss out on the subtle implications it has had on cultural promotion or demotion. We do not live in a vacuum and need to do our homework.