I should like to make a plea to all the press departments of all the museums and galleries. Please give up using the phrase “once in a lifetime”.

The V&A’s new show Surreal Things is “a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity”. The First Emperor: China’s Terracotta Army ( pictured right), coming to the British Museum, in September is also “a once-in-a-lifetime exhibition”.

It may be true for most of the visitors that they will never get a chance to see these things again, but the phrase “once in a lifetime” represents a trend in the world of exhibitions that disturbs me. As a loyal member of the art-loving intelligentsia I feel pressurised by the phrase to visit the show or my life will in some way be wasted. It suggests that in the catalogue raisonné of my life project there will have a screaming gap if I don’t go. My nonattendance at the Holbein show will nag like a missing Pokémon card.

The phrase encapsulates the idea that a certain sort of life will be complete only when all the requisite boxes are ticked. The press is always coming up with lists of 10, 20, 100 things to see before you die. If I did work my way through them and saw the Mona Lisa, the Sistine chapel, GaudÍ’s church and Rembrandt’s The Night Watch, would I be happier? I might be if I had an autistic attachment to lists.

I understand that museums want to attract a lot of visitors to recoup the enormous costs of these shows through sales of tickets or fridge magnets, but I find the increasingly heated hyperbole around shows is overshadowing the art. Later this year the daddy of all blockbusters is returning to these shores (so much for “once in a lifetime”). The cursed treasures of Tutankhamun ( pictured right) are coming to the cursed Dome. My wife attended the original 1972 show at the British Museum and remembers the queue more clearly than the exhibition, which reflects the media coverage at the time.

There seems to be a schism opening up between the idea of attending an event and the actual experience. People appear to care more about gaining evidence of their presence at a cultural landmark than drinking in its pleasures.

They want a photograph of themselves in front of the museum or even the star exhibit; they want the souvenir mousemat; in short they want its autograph.

The erratic organic memory of looking at beauty seems to have been downgraded to a supporting role.

The crowds that attend these shows mean that the experience of actually looking at the art is not one that encourages life-enhancing contemplation. A friend said that he spent his entire visit to the Hogarth exhibition at Tate Britain queuing up before each work then bobbing and weaving between heads to get a decent view of the modest-sized paintings. The museums feed off this frenzy, encouraging visitors to book tickets in advance before they sell out (and before the disappointing reviews). All the hype can feed my imagination until I expect an experience on a par with hang-gliding over the Grand Canyon – and I am inevitably disappointed. Visiting blockbuster shows can be like waiting among jostling fans beside a red carpet to see your favourite film star in the flesh, only to find out that he or she is short and plain.

We are in the age of the celebrity artefact. I find that when an artwork’s fame reaches household-name status it is very hard to look at it as art any more. In his book How Proust Can Change Your Life Alain de Botton describes the tourist industry around Illiers-Combray, where Proust tasted those madeleines, and writes “a genuine homage to Proust would be to look at our world through his eyes rather than his world through our eyes”. Looking at art is not train-spotting; we need to allow the artist to change how we look at our own lives.

Artists themselves seem to be drawn to the idea of the blockbuster. Gilbert and George have made much of the size and scope of their present show at Tate Modern, even calling it Major Exhibition. Yet I found the very size of the show counter-productive. I loved the first half, then exhaustion set in and I found the latter half a trek through endless design permutations. I came away thinking there must be a Gilbert and George button on Photoshop.

Blockbusters seem to be pandering to what I call the bungee-jump culture. People are becoming desensitised to the wonder and the sublime in their daily existence. The only way they can feel is by puncturing their ennui with some kind of extreme experience. I once saw a documentary about the extremest of extreme sports, base jumping, in which a man said that he felt alive only just before he was about to jump with a parachute off a high building. This struck me as sad. He was numb to the beauty and thrill of the everyday. So it is with art that needs to be “once in a lifetime” or incredibly famous before people feel it is worth seeing. Our museums are crammed with special things the equal of any in these celebrity art blockbusters that we can see any day free, without the crowds or the hype.

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