Is the blockbuster exhibition dead?
To curb 'gallery rage', the National Gallery has limited admissions to its forthcoming Leonardo show. Is this the end for timed tickets, high prices and jostling crowds?



Tate Modern's recent Gauguin exhibition seems to have been a watershed. It did record business for the museum – but also caused record heartache because the galleries were so thronged with people that it was almost impossible to see the pictures. I went on a weekday morning, and it was packed. If there were less than a dozen people clustered round a single picture, you were doing well.

The National Gallery has taken note of the bad publicity Tate Modern got over Gauguin, and announced that its forthcoming Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan exhibition will reduce the number of admissions from the 230 per half-hour slot it is allowed under health and safety rules to 180.

Hurrah!, you might be tempted to say. Until you remember that Leonardo produced very few completed pictures – no more than 15 have been fully authenticated. The National Gallery is bringing together seven of them as the centrepiece of its exhibition. My experience is that people budget a couple of hours in a gallery – that seems a human attention span when it comes to art. Think films, plays and operas (before an interval), and indeed sport – the length of a football match or cricket session is no accident. So if my calculations are correct and the National Gallery sell all their tickets, you will still have 720 punters in the gallery at any given time fighting to see seven masterpieces.

Of course there will be lots of supporting exhibits. The press material for the show mentions "drawings by Leonardo and his followers" and "a near-contemporary, full-scale copy of Leonardo's famous Last Supper seen alongside all the surviving preparatory drawings made by Leonardo for the Last Supper". So it won't just be 700 people fighting over seven paintings, but inevitably those seven superstars are going to be mobbed.

The National Gallery say it wants to combat "gallery rage". Personally, I don't recognise that term. Art lovers on the whole are terribly polite. I didn't witness any rage at Gauguin, just a weary shuffling around, and a good deal of apologising to people you'd just trodden on or accidentally barged out of the way. The real rage is prompted by people whose mobiles go off and who insist on talking on the damn things despite all appeals not to. The crowds are just put down to gallery greed and accepted with a kind of weary "we're all in this together" shrug.

The problem lies with the whole notion of the "blockbuster", which is just a desperately hoped-for money-spinner for cash-strapped galleries. Colin Tweedy, chief executive of Arts & Business, argued recently that the era of blockbuster shows was coming to an end. And he welcomed their phasing out. "The blockbuster model is killing art," he said. "It is not the right way to see great artists. In the next five years, museums will stop doing these exhibitions because they are too much trouble. The blockbuster is an old model. The creators of culture have to think in a different way."

Art shows are like any other aspect of the cultural business. Galleries put together a show, try to create a buzz, hope the exhibition will come to be seen as an "event". The hucksterism is pretty disgusting when you think about it. They've introduced timed tickets to try to even out the peaks and troughs in attendance, but timed tickets are pretty disgusting too. They assume that a two-hour stint is the norm and won't let you back in if you fancy having lunch and then taking another look.

This is, as Tweedy says, no way to see art. It is a branch of commerce devised for the benefit of the gallery, and playing on the exhibition-goer's fantasy that by spending two hours in the company of Gauguin or Leonardo he or she can get a meaningful take on the artist. Far better to go and look at a couple of Gauguins in a gallery and live with them for a while, or go regularly to see the couple of Leonardos in the National Gallery's permanent exhibition.

Galleries which stage blockbuster shows are peddling a myth, and they know it. Like Tweedy, we should welcome the fact that the age of the blockbuster is ending. We need to study more carefully paintings that are readily to hand. I spent an enjoyable afternoon recently at Apsley House in London's Knightsbridge where I had the excellent collection (including four major paintings by Velázquez) more or less to myself. Similarly, at the Wallace Collection near Marble Arch you can enjoy a magnificent collection in a lovely setting without crowds.

Seek the art out; concentrate on single paintings or groups of paintings; look at aspects of an artist's career and let a sense of the whole career accrete; and don't play the galleries' game by falling for the idea that these big shows are "must-sees". For a start, you can barely see them.