Two floors below the meticulously reconstructed Tibetan meditation room, down the glass and steel department-store staircase, past the gift-shop stocked with candles, cushions, and notebooks, DJ Shakey is spinning vinyl. Thirty-somethings crush around a bar ordering Tanqueray. They are not dancing, despite Shakey’s efforts—but then, this is a museum.
The Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art, now in its tenth year, bills itself as a “dynamic environment” where visitors can “contemplate ideas that extend across history and span human cultures.” This baked manifesto is probably more easily furthered by having a few cocktails than by studying the museum’s exquisite, meaning-laden, context-dependent central Asian artifacts, which is perhaps why there are more people in the lobby than the gallery.
“CAN EVERYONE HEAR ME?” the guide asks a tour group I have joined on this Friday night. Blank stares. “LET’S GO UP ONE FLOOR BEFORE WE DO THE INTRODUCTION, THEN.” We can still hear the music coming up from below (the Jay-Z song is on) but, like a VIP lounge, the gallery space is quieter and better decorated. We stop before a silver Buddha.
“What do you all make of it? Tell me your impressions.”
“He’s leaning back.”
“He has long ears.”
“Good observations! Excellent. Tell me—anyone—how does it make you feel?”
My only feeling is one of slight confusion, not so much about Himalayan art as about a person I am beginning to remember. She had just come from the Himalayas (her parents were missionaries) when I met her, and she had the textiles, notebooks, and adopted Nepalese nationalism to prove it. One day by my locker she said that Jesus had told her to dump me. Years later, I would see on Facebook a picture of her holding a sign that read, “George Tiller is an American hero.” Both claims I doubted.
None of these recollections were enhancing my understanding of Himalayan art, as it happens. But the guide did ask—and for good reason. How else to draw out from the casual museumgoer the ideas that “span human cultures”? How else to make sure that cantilevered meaning extends “across history” and down to us from snowy peaks? Instruction in the symbols, rites, and methods of another culture might help us understand it in its integrity, but will not necessarily help us see its ideas as our own. For that, something more “dynamic” is needed, something like a kindergarten call and response.
As DJ Shakey brings a new record into the mix, I wander into a side room. An array of cabinets, stools, wall hangings, candles, censers, cushions, and rugs are set up to replicate a prayer room as it might have appeared in the house of a wealthy Tibetan. Its wild order is unlike anything I had ever seen, except, perhaps, the altars of some of the most ornate Gothic churches. Like them, it is a space of silence.
I wonder if I might more readily grasp the intricate meanings of the room’s ritual schema were I more steeped in, say, Christian rites than I am in those of Manhattan ca. 2015. St. Paul, with his “powers and principalities,” was closer to the Eastern cosmology than he is to mine, and the ornate formality of the Latin mass better resembles Buddhist worship than any experience one might have on a night out.
The Rubin is not prepared to help bridge this gap. Art, once allied with religion, now prefers entertainment. The change in partners has its deep reasons, but it is not necessary to trace them in order to acknowledge that the farther we get from our own tradition, the harder it becomes to access any other.
So long as we’re here, though, who wants a drink?
Matthew Schmitz is deputy editor of First Things.
