While meandering down the Champs-Elysee a few weeks back, my friend turned to me and remarked, "Yeah, Paris has a lot of museums. But seriously, I'm over the art thing - how many more masterpieces are there to see?"
Before the politically correct side of you gasps in indignation, take a moment and try to see it from the perspective of the poor American student, stuck in Europe for a semester trying to see every major European destination in thirteen weeks. Escorted across the Old World by night trains and REI trail packs, we tramp from city to city, oohing and aahing over every last amazing building, street, and park while we read out of our guidebooks precisely why these places are important.
The risk for becoming dazed and confused runs high. This past weekend, traversing the Forum ruins in Rome, I remarked that the pine trees reminded me of home in San Diego. Fifteen feet in front of me, fellow student Jessica called out happily, "I've stopped looking at trees! They're all the same everywhere anyways!" She then proceeded to trip on a rock - or, rather, an ancient Roman stone. "Ooof!" she remarked. "These people should really consider smoothing out the ground."
Now, mind you, Jessica is an intelligent girl, and I like to think I'm no numbskull either. The astounding artistic and historic sights of Europe should be nourishment for earnest students like us, affording us a true-life brush with centuries of some of the world's most important contributions to human life and culture.
But as with all good things, everybody - even this dedicated art and culture lover - reaches a saturation point. In Paris especially, the famed city of art, the endless street portrait artists and white marble colonnades admittedly wore thin. I bypassed endless kiosks along the Seine, selling old French books and black-and-white photographs. It was just so Parisian! So French! and I had had enough.
Several weeks later, sitting in the State Opera House in Prague (yes, my life reads like a fairy tale), I was reading the company's season book and it suddenly struck me why I was so off-balance about art in Europe. The director's opening remarks read, in part, "...we strive to meet the demand of those opera-goers who are keen to listen to beautiful melodies of the international repertoire's best known operas..."
Seated in the far back row of the beautiful hall, halfway through a lovely rendition of "Rigoletto," a muted alarm bell went off in my head. An opera company - an artistic endeavor - devoted to replaying over and over every tourist's favorite opera? Indeed, the hall was filled with different languages, few of them Czech, and most everybody was wearing comfortable sneakers and daypacks.
And here began my latest European conundrum, brought on by the repertoire list of the Czech State Opera. European art, from the average tourist's perspective, is all about the old, the famous and the amazing. We slog from museum to museum, glancing at aging paintings under gilt frames just long enough to snap a (forbidden) photograph and shuffle across the marble floors to the next great masterpiece. They're beautiful, and everybody knows it. I won't deny that I love the Louvre and that the Sistine Chapel was truly stunning.
My quandary thus develops into my usual interplay between Old World and New World. Tourism is one of Europe's biggest industries, and they sell their art and their history with great skill. But what is new and happening with art in Europe?
I admit I am a Classicist when it comes to music; J. S. Bach perfected it back in the 1700s and that's that. But when an entire opera company devotes itself to good old-fashioned favorites, where is the future of art? Is Europe selling a dead beast, an art world that reached its peak with Michelangelo and Mozart and has since been skating on their powerful coattails?
After thirteen weeks of clinging to my Eurail, I'm struck by my experience as an American in Europe. The sights, the sounds, and the cultures are beautiful - and perhaps a bit brain-numbing. I still can't decide if the European art world is moving forward or cashing in on the past.
But for this young student of art, in the end, it's all good. Fifteen weeks into my study abroad experience, I was nearly brought to tears at the sight of "La Pieta" in St. Peter's Basilica. Yes, it's an old stone, it's protected by a Plexiglas wall - and it is part of the riches of an entire continent's phenomenal artistic tradition.
Julie Schindall is a junior majoring in music. She can be reached at Julie.Schindall@tufts.edu.
