Museum guards can't have a very difficult job, I don't suppose. They stand around the entrances and exits to the galleries, keeping a sharp lookout for the more audacious museum-goers who, in order to 'rilly' appreciate a work of art, must get all touchy-feely around it, whether it be a painting or a sculpture or, horror of horrors, one of those modern works which their creators refer to as arrangements, usually titled 'Untitled', but which may resemble a spilled container of old excelsior, or the entrails of a ritually slaughtered animal.
Guards in European museums, I find, are often haughty and supercilious when compared to those in this country. That may be because the art one is likely to come across in European museums may be older and more priceless (how about that for an oxymoron) than what we have in the U.S. Or it may be that the European guards know their unions are so powerful there's no chance they'll ever be fired for being overzealous in the performance of their duties.
"Silenzio!" yells the guard in the Sistine Chapel at the Vatican. "No photos. Photos verboten," croaks the blue-uniformed fellow in the Prince-bishop's palace in Wurzburg, Germany. At the Peterhof Palace outside St.Petersburg, Russia, the guards make sure you put on special overshoes with carpet soles when on the marquetry floor; thus the visitors can help polish the floor as they trundle through the palace. While at the Hermitage, svelte female guards in high heels pay scant attention to the throngs of tourists; they are too busy filing their fingernails.
I'd say that the guards in our museums have better manners than their European counterparts. It has been many years since I visited the Louvre, so I am really not in a position to comment on guard etiquette there.
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