Galleries move from art to heart

Tate Modern's all-nighter last Saturday wasn't only a hit for those desperate for a final view of the blockbusting Matisse-Picasso show before it closed.

After a steamy day in the sunshine, there were, among the cool crowd, those who looked more dressed for clubbing than culture - they weren't just there to debate the relative merits of the two modern masters. Surely, the observer would have to conclude, this was the new singles scene.

This exhibition has been oversubscribed throughout its run; elsewhere visitor numbers are up 65 per cent in museums this year. What are all these people hoping to find? Could galleries be the new supermarket delicatessen counters, which were the new launderettes, which were in their time the new discotheques? As the club scene nosedives after 10 years of lust at 150 beats per minute, is it a case of if you want to get a date, get into galleries?

In fact, they have long been pick-up joints. There's a story that Lytton Strachey, the Bloomsbury essayist, once cruised a handsome young man in the National Gallery, only to discover as he was about to attempt a George Michael that his quarry was actually the Prince of Wales. The literary world seems to have doubted that romance could blossom in any other surroundings. Every EM Forster or Henry James novel seems to have a seduction scene in a museum, or a Tuscan church full of Renaissance masters.

Yet, not long ago, I was all but convinced that galleries had lost their pulling power. I put the blame on Brian De Palma's 1980 film, Dressed to Kill. In one of the great sequences of movie-making, Angie Dickinson's character plays cat and mouse with a handsome visitor in New York's Metropolitan Museum. The chase lasts 15 minutes without a single word spoken. Dickinson ends up misbehaving with the stranger in a taxi that's waiting for her at the museum steps. So far so good - but her subsequent demise is so unpleasant it put me off talking to anyone in a gallery for years.

Six years, in fact, until another film - Ferris Bueller's Day Off - -restored the vision of a museological arcadia. By charming deception, Ferris has wangled a day off school for himself, his girlfriend and his best pal. Given all the freedoms on offer in 1986 Chicago for a group of hormone-pumped teenagers, it's telling that they head straight for the Art Institute before all the other mischief of the day.

They smooch by the Chagall windows, they posture like Rodin's sculpture of Balzac, and they angle themselves quizzically in front of three cubist Picassos. And there is a terrific moment of art historical insight as their eyes glaze over while staring at Seurat's pointillist masterpiece, Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. The camera zooms right into the dots, and we understand exactly how the painting was composed. (Who says teen movies aren't good for you?) The museum encounter is an off-the-peg device for many a screenwriter with a block in his plot - from Steve Martin roller-skating through the museum in LA Story to every other episode in Sex and the City.

IT'S no accident that the American sitcom's Charlotte was a director of a trendy gallery, and the forthcoming series opens with Carrie deciding to celebrate her single status with a trip to the Guggenheim. In this episode the museum was closed and she still managed to meet a hunk by the entrance while sheltering from the rain.

Galleries are sexy again. In recent years art has been dubbed the new rock 'n' roll, and the capital's galleries are full of wannabes, sniffing out London's new glamour hotspots. But how do you go about snaring a soulmate among the Surrealists?

Private views are, despite the name, far too public for a conquest. Although the talent might be out in abundance, this isn't the time to test your skills. You see the same faces every time, and it's harder to sound clever with your sensitive-artisticsoul opening line when everyone else in the room has the same one.