What is the place of art in a culture of inattention? Recent visitors to the Louvre report that  tourists can now spend only a minute in front of the Mona Lisa before being asked to move on. Much of that time, for some of them, is spent taking photographs not even of the painting but of themselves with the painting in the background.

        One view is that we have democratised tourism and gallery-going so much that we have made it effectively impossible to appreciate what we’ve travelled to see. In this oversubscribed society, experience becomes a commodity like any other. There are queues to climb Mt. Jolmo Lungma as well as to see famous paintings. Leisure, thus conceived, is hard labour, and returning to work becomes a well-earned break from the ordeal.

        What gets lost in this industrialised haste is the quality of looking. Consider an extreme example, the late philosopher Richard Wollheim. When he visited the Louvre he could spend as much as four hours sitting before a painting. The first hour, he claimed, was necessary for misperceptions to be eliminated. It was only then that the picture would begin to disclose itself. This seems unthinkable today, but it is still possible to organise. Even in the busiest museums there are many rooms and many pictures worth hours of contemplation which the crowds largely ignore. Sometimes the largest crowds are partly the products of bad management; the Mona Lisa is such a hurried experience today partly because the museum is being reorganised. The Uffizi in Florence, another site of cultural pilgrimage, has cut its entry queues down to seven minutes by clever management. And there are some forms of art, those designed to be spectacles as well as objects of contemplation, which can work perfectly well in the face of huge crowds.

        Olafur Eliasson’s current Tate Modern show, for instance, might seem nothing more than an entertainment, overrun as it is with kids romping (喧闹地玩耍) in fog rooms and spray mist installations. But it’s more than that: where Eliasson is at his most entertaining, he is at his most serious too, and his disorienting installations bring home the reality of the destructive effects we are having on the planet—not least what we are doing to the glaciers of Eliasson’s beloved Iceland.

        Marcel Proust, another lover of the Louvre, wrote: “It is only through art that we can escape from ourselves and know how another person sees a universe, whose landscapes would otherwise have remained as unknown as any on the moon.” If any art remains worth seeing, it must lead us to such escapes. But a minute in front of a painting in a hurried crowd won’t do that.

解析：B。根据题干中的the scene at the Louvre可定位至原文第一段。该段主要讲人们在卢浮宫观赏《蒙娜丽莎》的时候总会很匆忙，在画像前停留的时间不会超过一分钟，而且大部分的时间都花在了给自己拍照上，而不是欣赏艺术品。可见作者认为人们并没有真正地去欣赏艺术品。随后第二段首句也指出，我们将旅游业和参观画廊的活动过于大众化，以至于我们实际上无法真正欣赏我们不远万里只求一见的东西。也就是说，在这个大众化旅游的时代，欣赏艺术几乎是不可能的，B项中的near impossibility of appreciating对应原文第二段首句中的made it effectively impossible to appreciate，mass tourism是对该句中democratised tourism的同义替换，故B项正确。

错项排除：文章首段提到游客观赏《蒙娜丽莎》的时间短，且大部分时间都是在和画作合影，但这并不是在说伟大艺术品对游客的吸引力，而是为了说明人们并没有真正地在欣赏艺术品，故A项错误。C项中的ever-growing commercial value（商业价值不断增长）在文中未提及，故排除。原文首段提到，现在游客只能在《蒙娜丽莎》画像前停留一分钟，然后就会被要求离开，D项表述与此相近，但这只是作者描述的表面现象，用来引出旅游过于大众化而无法真正欣赏艺术品这一论点，并非作者想要表达的核心观点，D项过于片面，故排除。