Nights at the Museum

After seeing a 20 percent boost in attendance following the release of the first “Night at the Museum” movie in 2006, the American Museum of Natural History in New York began a sleepover program. Inspired by Ben Stiller’s raucous adventures with Easter Island Heads and Attila the Hun, children between the ages of eight and 12 flocked to the AMNH’s sleepovers, which sold out months in advance. It’s unlikely that many kids expected the museum’s objects to come to life, but their curiosities were surely piqued by the film’s central premise: What happens in the museum galleries after the doors are shut?

In its description of the sleepovers, the AMNH says it offers children and their parents the opportunity to “head out with flashlights in search of a variety of adventures.” On these nocturnal escapades, young museumgoers can “meet” their ancestral relatives in the Hall of Human Origins, “encounter” live animals, and “settle down” beneath a 94-foot blue whale. The use of such intimate verbs is noteworthy, as the museum recognizes the importance of the contextual rather than the substantive differences between daytime and nighttime visits. The same displays are open for viewing during regular hours, but the opportunity to get to know an object personally, uninhibited by mob-like crowds and the pressures of time, is unique. In short, experiencing museums in a different context elicits excitement.

Nighttime programs targeted at slightly older audiences have emerged in museums as well, but they often shift the attention from encountering museum collections under new conditions to hosting parties. “Third Thursdays” at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum boast late-night live music and a cash bar, while the Guggenheim in New York ropes off its galleries at the museum’s annual Young Collectors Party, allowing an “increasingly tipsy crowd” of “youthful, glamorous and moneyed New Yorkers” to take center stage, according to a New York Times article. But this is understandable. Fearing declining attendance, museums are continually looking for new attractions to entice young people. Often seen as the domain of weekend family outings, museums rarely wield the necessary sex appeal to claim one’s Friday night. Though New York’s AMNH does hold sleepovers for grown-ups, which offer the same “intimate adventure of discovery” that is afforded to children, lower commitment options exist for those willing to seek them out.

Museum consultant Marilyn Hood proposes six attributes that determine how adults choose to spend their leisure time: social interaction, feeling at ease in one’s surroundings, participating actively, having a challenge of new experiences, having an opportunity to learn, and doing something worthwhile. Traditional museums, she claims, only provide frequent visitors with the latter three. Bacchanals à la Guggenheim seemingly trade the opportunity to learn and to do something worthwhile for social interaction and active participation. However, some museums, like the Museum of Fine Arts and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, offer a middle ground by simply extending the gallery hours until and beyond 9pm on Thursdays and Fridays.

On a recent Thursday night excursion to the MFA’s current exhibition “Class Distinctions: Dutch Painting in the Age of Rembrandt and Vermeer,” I saw in abundance the three attributes of leisure that Hood does not associate with museums. In sharp contrast to the atmosphere of swarming hordes one would expect names like Rembrandt and Vermeer to draw, the MFA’s carpeted exhibition galleries maintained the sparsely populated atmosphere of an offbeat bookstore. With a ratio of about five people to 12 paintings, the central section of the show’s first gallery offered not only the freedom of choice, but also the freedom of time to ensure one’s comfort in one’s surroundings. Uninhibited by iPad selfies and unhurried by shuffling crowds, I could look slowly, developing an intimacy with private portraits of Dutch nobility that they deserve but likely rarely achieve.

Across the room, a group of 11 visitors buried their tour guide in questions next to a museum-going octet engaged in hushed yet intense discussion. Five sketchers, drawing pads in hand, faced a canvas by Gerard ter Borch sandwiched between Vermeer’s “The Astronomer” and “A Lady Writing.” Eagerly sharing his thoughts and illustrations, and certainly participating actively, one sketcher commented on the “almost haunting” atmosphere and pictorial unity of the Vermeers that he felt put ter Borch to shame.

Minutes later, a couple replaced the sketchers in front of “The Astronomer.” He in jeans and she in a white dress, they spent a long moment deeply looking, then privately conferred and walked away smiling, holding hands. Though certainly not the same collective experience as a museum atrium rave, the warm, quiet atmosphere of the MFA at night induced social interaction of a much more personal, meaningful nature.