Not so close to the master ... with a
record 10,868 advance bookings you
may need a little patience to see this
Michelangelo sketch. Photograph: PA
We were remembering the trauma of Botticelli when we pitched up at the British Museum, clutching carefully prebooked tickets for the Michelangelo drawings exhibition.
That Botticelli show - his illustrations for Dante's Divine Comedy, which in 2001 were reunited for the first time in 500 years at the Royal Academy - was my own blockbuster purgatory, if not hell. The Sackler wing was crammed to the gills. You had to shuffle round on tiny steps, as if on a slow-moving luggage carousel, craning to see the fainter-than-faint but exquisite drawings. I remember it was murderously bad-tempered. It was full of the sort of upper-middle-class Surrey women with sharp elbows you would flee from in a dark alley.
So arriving at the Michelangelo Drawings: Closer to the Master show, my friend J looked sceptical, and said: "This would work so much better as a coffee-table book." I agreed glumly: can you ever do a show of delicate drawings (by any remotely popular artist) and display them so it's possible for the visitor to get anything out of it?
Joy of joys: the Michelangelo was miles better than we'd expected. Perhaps the British Museum has figured out that if you overcrowd the gallery no one goes away satisfied. It helped that the show was clearly and logically displayed.
With a bit of patience and technique, it was easy to spend time looking properly hard at these works, some of them beautiful studies for the Sistine Chapel. Our coffee-table book would never have given the texture of paper, the grain of the chalk, the childish but exciting thought: Michelangelo's hand was here.
So here's the seasoned campaigner's advice on how to survive the blockbuster.
1, in the case of a show with prebooked tickets, take the earliest or latest slot. We were the last in, and it must make a difference not having a constant flow of people behind you. But watch the time: we were herded out of the exhibition by ushers with all the grace of bartenders at closing time. If you're in first, go to the end and have a couple of rooms to yourself before working backwards.
2, adopt a flexible approach. Spot the works that are "available" and home in on them. Come back to ones that are surrounded.
3, work on an attitude of Zen-like calm. There's a technique that habitués of supermarkets on a Saturday afternoon have of blocking out the world and pretending all those other people don't exist. Just dodge 'em gracefully and ignore bad manners in fellow exhibition-goers.
Any other survival tips?
