The New York Times - USA (2020-06-29)

C2 N THE NEW YORK TIMES, MONDAY, JUNE 29, 2020

LONDON — Last month, the Uffizi Gallery in
Florence — long a bastion of tradition —
posted a video to its TikTok account featur-
ing Botticelli’s “Spring.” The painting de-
picts Venus and other mythological figures,
and has been gawked at by tourists and
studied by academics for centuries.
On TikTok, users were treated to a new
perspective on this masterpiece of the Ital-
ian Renaissance: Set to Todrick Hall’s ex-
pletive-filled club track “Nails, Hair, Hips,
Heels,” each time a body part is mentioned
— “thin waist, thick thighs” — the video
jumps to a corresponding part of the paint-
ing. “Purse full, big bills,” Hall sings, and the
TikTok zooms in on the flowers held by
Flora, the goddess of spring.
As the song ramps up, the video is edited
so the 15th-century figures dance along in
time.
The irreverent clip is one of several on the
Uffizi’s TikTok account poking fun at its col-
lection of masterpieces, as the museum
tries to transform its image from a dusty
home of Renaissance art to a place Italy’s
teenagers want to explore.
“Maybe it looks a little stupid,” said Ilde
Forgione, 35, who runs the account, in a
telephone interview, “but sometimes you
have to give people a different point of view,
something that says, ‘Art is not boring. Art
is not something you just learn at school. It’s
something you can discover for yourself.’ ”
There are now 11 museums on TikTok, ac-
cording to the booming social media plat-
form, where (mostly young) people make

and share short videos. Amsterdam’s Rijks-

museum joined in April, and the Prado Mu-

seum in Madrid joined earlier this month

(the Metropolitan Museum of Art used the

platform last year for a couple of projects,

but its account is now dormant). The Uffizi

is an especially unlikely member of this se-

lect group, given that until a couple of years

ago, it acted like the internet didn’t exist.

The museum only got a website in 2015

(ticket scalpers used to take advantage of

its absence by running their own “official”

websites) and it didn’t set up a Facebook

page until March when the museum closed

because of the coronavirus, as part of an ef-

fort to reach people stuck at home during

Italy’s lockdown.

“We were pretty much in the Stone Age,”

said Eike Schmidt, the museum’s director,

in a telephone interview, saying the Uffizi

had gone from being a laggard to at the

“avant-garde” of museum social media in a

few months.

He decided to give TikTok a try, he said,

because the platform reaches younger us-

ers than Twitter, Facebook or even Insta-

gram. He asked Ms. Forgione, an adminis-

trative assistant, to lead a team producing

material for the account after learning she

loved funny social media posts, he said.

Ms. Forgione’s videos have certainly

been funny, and, at times, surreal. In one

post, a cartoon coronavirus dances through

the Uffizi and stops at Caravaggio’s paint-

ing of “Medusa,” the mythical being that

turned those who dared gaze at her into

stone. The virus turns into a rock and drops

to the floor, smashing in half. Then the

painting is wearing a face mask. All this

happens to a soundtrack of Cardi B shout-

ing “coronavirus.”

In another video, Bronzino’s 1552 paint-

ing of the dwarf Morgante escaped from its

frame and went hunting, naked, through the

Uffizi’s gardens to The Weeknd’s song

“Blinding Lights.” The real Morgante, a

jester for the court of the Medicis in the 16th

century, had gone hunting in those gardens,

Ms. Forgione said, insisting many of her

posts were based on historical fact.

The account, set up on Apr. 28, has 22,000

followers. Ms. Forgione said she was

pleased with that number, considering that

on Twitter the museum has built up 42,000

followers over the last four years. On June

12, Martina Socrate, an Italian TikTok star,

did a livestream from the museum’s ac-

count, during which she pointed out paint-

ings she liked and accidentally set off the

museum’s emergency alarm. It got 60,000

views.

TikTok helped arrange that livestream as

part of its “Week of Museums,” providing a

list of “creators” for the museum to choose

from. The Uffizi chose Ms. Socrate because

her TikTok video had the same values of be-

ing “funny with intelligent things,” Ms. For-

gione said.

TikTok is trying to increase the presence

of museums and educational figures on its

platform. In April, it announced a $50 mil-

lion fund to give grants to such groups to

make content, and in May it announced

partnerships with Bill Nye and Neil de-

Grasse Tyson to develop educational posts.

Ms. Forgione said the hardest thing about

running the account was getting the right

tone for TikTok’s young audience. “I’m 35,”

she said, “and the others in the team are old-

er.” She has run ideas past two cousins, who

are 20 and 22, she said (they have also

helped at times with Photoshop). Col-

leagues have also consulted their teenage

children about clips, she added.

The Uffizi’s approach to TikTok — filled

with manic humor and often featuring

songs that are trending in Italy — is not

typical of museums on the platform. Since

January, the Carnegie Museum of Natural

History in Pittsburgh has been posting a

stream of gentle, educational videos to its

account, often featuring employees stuck at

home in lockdown. Recent posts have in-

cluded a museum educator showing a

bunny nest in her yard and a scientist ex-

plaining what biodiversity means with the

help of her pet cat.

Sloan MacRae, the museum’s marketing

director, said in a telephone interview that

the museum had never considered wacky

clips or dance videos. “That’s just not us,” he

said. But its “slightly goofy” educational ap-

proach has helped it gain 160,000 followers,

he said, with many commenting that they

want to visit the museum once it reopens. In

June, the museum received a grant from

TikTok under the Creative Learning Fund,

he added.

“It can be accused of being lowbrow,” Mr.

MacRae said of TikTok, “but we do intellec-

tual and we do gravity all the time and we

thought if this worked out, it could be a gate-

way drug to learning.”

Ms. Forgione said she would continue

making her more irreverent TikTok posts.

Last Friday, her team posted a new video,

which used two paintings from the muse-

um’s collection to present a guide to “bad

ways to flirt.” It quickly racked up 2,500

likes.

The museum reopened on June 2 after It-

aly eased its lockdown, and Ms. Forgione

said she hopes fans of the TikTok account

will pay a visit. “It’d be great if they made

their own TikToks here and tagged us,” she

added. Serious, or silly, she said, she’s open

to all.

Put a Mask on Medusa: Museums Get on TikTok

The Uffizi in Italy and others

are posting irreverent videos to

promote a livelier image.

By ALEX MARSHALL

IMAGES BY UFFIZI GALLERIES

UFFIZI GALLERIES

Screen grabs

from the Uffizi

Gallery’s TikTok

account use

details from

paintings in its

collection,

clockwise from

left, such as

Bronzino, Titian,

Botticelli and

Caravaggio.

‘We were pretty much

in the Stone Age.’

EIKE SCHMIDT

DIRECTOR OF THE UFFIZI

MUSEUM

balcony as Foy and Smith collapse decades
of love and angst into 90 minutes of stage
time. Like most theaters in England, the
202-year-old Old Vic has been dark since
the pandemic lockdown began in March.
This production of “Lungs,” staged by the
Old Vic’s artistic director, Matthew
Warchus, is the maiden offering of the Old
Vic: In Camera series of live performances,
which try to approximate the feelings of be-
ing in that theater, in the audience, in the
present tense.
This means that the show is preceded by
the murmuring sound associated with
packed houses before curtain time, a noise
contradicted by the image of an achingly
empty expanse of seats. And since new in-
come is essential to the survival of the Old
Vic, theatergoers are asked to pay West End
ticket prices to watch, from 20 to 65 pounds.
(That’s approximately $25 to $80.) The
show streams through Saturday, though
most performances — which are booked to
reflect the theater’s normal capacity — are
sold out.
For the record, I paid for my ticket, and I
won’t be expensing it, and yes, I believe it
was good value. This is partly for nostalgic
reasons. I love the Old Vic — the birthplace
of the last show I saw on Broadway, “Girl
From the North Country” — and dearly
hope it survives this crisis. And I was to
have seen this production of “Lungs,” which
had been staged at the Old Vic last fall, at
the Brooklyn Academy of Music this spring.
But as reconceived by Warchus and his
accomplished technical team, “Lungs” also
turns out to be a natural for the Zoom for-
mat and the restrictions of the pandemic
age. This might not be immediately appar-
ent. Macmillan’s script, which premiered in
2011 at the Studio Theater in Washington,
D.C., feels almost annoyingly slight and

conventional when it begins.

A couple, shopping at Ikea, have begun

what one identifies as an argument and the

other as a conversation about whether they

should have a baby. However it’s defined, it

is a discussion I have been asked to listen to

too many times — in sitcoms, movies and

novels.

What’s more, this particular pair is very

white, very good-looking and comfortably

middle class, with arty-slash-intellectual

accents. (He’s a musician, she’s a doctoral

candidate.) Is this convulsive chapter in

world history really the time for a drawn-

out dialogue by such a pair on the exist-

ential and moral implications of childbirth?

Yet Macmillan (“People, Places &

Things”) is a probing sentimentalist with a

gift for lending cosmic context and psycho-

logical texture to ostensibly slick banalities.

He, and the characters in “Lungs,” know

that we might find them easy to dismiss.

“We’re good people, right?” they keep

asking each other anxiously. Maybe not;

they’re aware of classist and even racist

tendencies that sporadically seep into their

conversation. Besides, what is good?

What’s evil? (She points out that most peo-

ple believe that they are good, even Hitler

and Simon Cowell.)

They are both products of an age of para-

lyzing self-consciousness, in which every

life choice must be examined through a mi-

croscope. They can’t turn on a water tap

without worrying about its effects on an en-

vironmentally beleaguered world. As for

the impact of having a baby, that’s stagger-

ing, and she has even done the math to cal-

culate the carbon footprint it would leave.

As you may have gathered, she is the

more loquacious and analytical. He is con-

fused, annoyed and enraptured by her.

There’s no denying that there’s a warming

chemistry in their differences. They are a

good fit.

Except that they’re never allowed to fit

together entirely, not even when they’re

making love. Macmillan’s script is written

as a series of fragments in time (spoiler: a

relationship’s lifetime), without traditional

segues. It’s human existence as a mix tape

of moments on fast forward.

While their closeness is palpable, com-

plete and total connection is impossible. “I

feel like you’re standing behind a wall, just

this sheet of glass, and I can’t reach you,” he

says. It’s a fear that’s echoed in the ever-

shifting but unbridgeable physical distance

between them, which we see in the long

shots. When they pass each other onstage,

it’s as if they were two planets, skirting peri-

gee, on different trajectories.

In Zoom close-up, in which they’re con-

fined to separate frames, they seem espe-

cially alone because Foy’s and Smith’s faces

are such legible maps to the contrasting

ways their characters think. Though they

talk a lot — her, especially — it’s their si-

lence that keeps resonating, with the desire

to know, to truly knowanother person.

Many of us have never been more aware

of that longing, with its insistent pain and

hope, than during these months of pan-

demic. That there’s a touch of divinity in this

noble, futile aspiration is confirmed by the

play’s final image. See it and weep.

BEN BRANTLEY THEATER REVIEW

A Contradictory Couple, Chasing Love in the Dark

CONTINUED FROM PAGE C1

Claire Foy and Matt

Smith, who played Queen

Elizabeth II and Prince

Philip in “The Crown” on

Netflix, star as a couple

paralyzed by

self-consciousness in

“Lungs,” at London’s Old

Vic Theater.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY MANUEL HARLAN

Lungs

Streaming through Saturday from the

Old Vic Theater. oldvictheatre.com