Ban Kids
Last week in the local newspaper of record there was a lifestyle opinion piece complaining about children in art galleries. That they’re noisy, disruptive, but lets face it they don’t really want to be there and you’d only take them anyway because you’re pretentious. Or words to that effect.
Rubbish like this in The Age, and newspapers wonder why some of us think they’re on the way out? I like informed opinion but have a very low threshold but dumb opinion masquerading as something else. Now, I don’t even want to buy in to the value of art, or that my kids like the gallery, or even point out that most of the works originally were in places where people lived, that kids were sort of common and part of the household, and it’s only when art gets reified through the rise of the public gallery that all of a sudden we have to be hushed and shooshed.
No, what pisses me off deeply is just the assumptions that something like this has to make, has to accept (and that the paper then accepts as reasonable enough as able to be published) about children. A Victorian seen but not heard which comes from a deep lack of respect of and for the child as a person, a human subject. With rights. If in Australia (and many other western nations) we recognised that children were not the chattel of their parents (or the state), but were people with legitimate rights on a par with others then this article would never even be written. To make this very plain, substitute “child” and “children” in the article and replace with any descriptor of your choice: women, muslims, blacks, Aboriginals, the disabled. Immediately you see it for what it is. How come we can talk about children like this and while we might debate the merits or not of children in art galleries, no one can even see the issue for what it is?
Imagine, for a moment, that we recognised children as having rights in this everyday manner. As beings with legitimate needs, concerns and so on. As soon as we do that the conversation is no longer about keeping kids out, it becomes how to cater for them. Just like we do for the disabled (“need a wheelchair?, sorry, can’t come in”, “Can’t see, sorry, no signage for you, and don’t touch the bronze!”), or the elderly, or even (OMG lactating mothers). Our institutions then become porous to children (and ipso facto, families) so that kids being there is just part of the fabric. This is not the same thing as being child centred if you think that means kids decide what to do, it is about respecting the child which means also that there is a mutual obligation towards each other, including children towards others, which is the opposite spectrum of the 3 year old screaming in the cafe because to teach them it is a social place would be to unnecessarily constrain them.
So you’d have signs for them, a place to hang out, ways for them to navigate or use the stairs, loud and quiet spaces. It would be more like Ikea than the NGV (note in Ikea that there is cheap food, things you can play with, a play room where the kids can play if you and they want, low bannisters on all the stairs, it is not that kids get the run of the place, but it recognises that kids are part of a parcel of the world and that they have legitimate needs and rights and so need to be designed and catered to). It really isn’t a big deal, it requires our approach to children to change, and our institutions too, but in 2012 how do we get off even claiming that one entire category of people should not be allowed in somewhere and no one actually stops to wonder how that statement is even legitimate in the first place. And an art gallery? A public institution?
