Come on, I thought overconfidently, it’s time to buy some tickets for Vermeer online. I understood that it would be a long time before I could visit the exhibition, but there was no need to hurry.
At times I had even wondered if I wanted to see this exhibition at all. After all, I already saw the Vermeer exhibition in the Mauritshuis in The Hague in 1996; in Amsterdam there would be ‘only’ six more paintings on display. Moreover, I had already seen three of them in The Frick Collection in New York. What remained net: three paintings, one of which, Girl with the fluteis probably not a real Vermeer – if it is his at all, it is one of his lesser paintings.
Did I have to go to a packed museum for those few Vermeers? Yes, I had to do that, I thought on reflection, because you can’t see such unforgettable painting often enough. Moreover, something strange happens to you when you notice that everyone is going somewhere – and you are likely to be left alone. They talk about it, you are speechless. Somewhere in your mind, an infectious mixture of snobbery, curiosity and herd spirit arises – also heavily fueled by the Rijksmuseum’s PR machine running at full speed.
Vermeer had become something he had never heard of in his time: a hype.
That also happened at that exhibition in 1996, which attracted 460,000 visitors. So it is not that surprising that 450,000 people have now registered to see the exhibition in Amsterdam. Yet the Rijksmuseum seems to have been overwhelmed by it.
I noticed it when I wanted to buy those tickets last Friday. All sorts of difficulties arose as I tried to make progress on the site. At first I – and no doubt thousands of others at the same time – were denied access, but in time I was able to get through to a page that stated: “1. Tickets. 2. Additional options. 3. Personal Data. 4. Overview and payment.”
Sometimes you could fill in the number of tickets and even your personal details, but if you had done that after a lot of fiddling, you couldn’t continue to ‘Overview and payment’. I have spoken to people who have spent hours wandering in this digital maze. They keep coming up against a ‘Continue’ that actually meant: ‘Get the hell out’.
In such situations I quickly think that it is my own clumsiness – and I give up. Nowhere on the website that weekend was it mentioned that the system had completely “broken down” and that there was no point in trying. We only heard that last Sunday from director Taco Dibbits, who put it in Buitenhof with a proud smile and then made a vague promise of some extra evenings if we behaved properly.
At that moment, according to bystanders, I seem angry: “fuck Vermeer!” called to the screen. There are media that only want to print the infamous verb with asterisks, but in this case I still attach great importance to the whole word, even though I have nothing against the painter himself. Because what were they doing that weekend in the public relations department of the Rijksmuseum? Were they on the lap of it Girl with a pearl earring crawled?
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of February 15, 2023