The museum has mercifully banned photography within its highly anticipated exhibition, ensuring that the relentless procession of ticketed attendees cannot pause to capture a digital artifact of an eleventh-century masterwork they are wildly unequipped to appreciate.
To stand before the seventy meters of embroidered linen—a sweeping chronicle of Norman conquest that rivals the structural inevitability of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, the claustrophobic spiritual paranoia of the fifteenth-century mystic Margery Kempe’s marginalia, and the frantic, unearned narrative pacing of Paul Blart: Mall Cop—is to confront the terrifying limitations of the contemporary intellect; we demand a digital surrogate for every lived experience, seeking to flatten the monumental weight of history into a convenient grid of pixels, an impulse the museum has now wisely outlawed under the convenient guise of maintaining foot traffic.
Stripped of the ability to outsource their aesthetic engagement to the algorithm, visitors are now subjected to the ancient ritual of uninterrupted forward motion; ushers in sensible knitwear stalk the exhibition hall, barking at any patron who lingers for more than four seconds in front of King Harold’s ocular impalement. The policy forces the queuing masses to simply perceive the brutality of 1066 with their own inadequate eyes, effectively treating the profound artistic achievement as an obstacle course to be cleared before lunch.
Our priority is to ensure that all visitors have the best experience possible, which fundamentally requires us to march them past William the Conqueror's triumph at a velocity that precludes the formation of a single coherent thought.
The draconian edict has already yielded magnificent dividends for the institution's logistical metrics, as thousands of daily attendees are now seamlessly processed through the entire Norman Conquest in under seven minutes. Denied the opportunity to forge a digital core memory of the tapestry, patrons have instead turned to the gift shop with a feral desperation, frantically purchasing seventy-five-pound canvas tote bags simply to prove to their peers that they were, briefly, in the same room as a very old piece of cloth.