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Museums in a Quandary: Where Are the Ideals?

By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN



NOT long ago, a genial, soft-spoken museum curator, who will remain
anonymous for obvious reasons, was talking over lunch about the
National Museum in Nairobi. Corrupt officials in Kenya, he said,
had used the museum to seize private property, asserting that the
lands held archaeological remains that belonged in the museum; then
the officials or their cronies built houses for themselves or used
the property for commercial development.

 Ramon Lerma was listening to this and described his situation
working as an assistant curator at a small museum of modern
Filipino art in Quezon City, the Ateneo Art Gallery, the first
museum of modern art in the Philippines. His problem is raising
money in a country where, he said, 70 percent of the population
barely scrape together one meal a day. He wondered, What is the
argument for raising money for art as opposed to food?

 The occasion was a meeting in Austria of about 70 people, mostly
curators and museum directors, from nearly 35 countries. The topic:
museums in the 21st century. The organization: a think tank called
the Salzburg Seminar, founded by Harvardians during the cold war,
no doubt with help from the C.I.A., but now run independently,
mostly for political and economic conferences but occasionally for
cultural discussions. It is housed at the paradisiacal Schloss
Leopoldskron, the estate owned by Max Reinhardt, the Austrian
theater director and founder of the Salzburg Festival. More
famously, the schloss is where "The Sound of Music" was filmed.

 Museums, it was presumed by everybody there, have never been more
important, and in a way that is true. They haven't. But they are
also suffering an identity crisis, and not just because "museum,"
like "school" or "corporation," now encompasses a universe of
places so different in size, budget and orientation that it's hard
to say what links them. The usual phrase today is secular
cathedral: they have become cathedrals for a secular culture,
storehouses of collective values and diverse histories, places
where increasingly we seem to want to spend our free time and
thrash out big issues (the religious debate over "Sensation" in
Brooklyn, the atomic bomb argument at the Smithsonian,
multiculturalism, taxes and public morality). We put our faith in
few traditional institutions these days, but the museum is still
one of them.

 Its purview extends beyond objects to ideas. The Tenement Museum
in New York, the Robben Island Museum in South Africa, the
Holocaust Museum in Washington, the Jewish Museum in Berlin: it
hardly matters what they contain, if anything. They are our new
theaters of conscience, memorials to suffering, choreographed
places of ritual genuflection, where we go to contemplate our
fallibility and maybe even weep a little while admiring the
architecture. They offer packaged units of morality, unimpeachable
and guiltlessly entertaining. They presume to bring us together,
physically and spiritually.

 Togetherness is a fresh concept in the museum world. Museums were
conceived in the 19th century as places to improve public taste, to
educate the middle classes. Self- improvement and commerce went
hand in hand in the early history of museums, especially in the
United States and Britain. According to the liberal Victorian
social ideal, museums cultivated good citizens who would then share
in the general prosperity of a properly functioning democracy.
Enlightened citizens became acquisitive participants in a flush
economy. Museums served the public good, in other words, which
meant they were good for society and, in the process, good for
business.

 But they were never places of consensus. When the Smithsonian got
itself in hot water a few years ago over an exhibition about the
Enola Gay, it faced a new situation: a public divided over the
atomic bomb, with the museum expected to mediate the debate. The
old top-down view of museums, whereby curators and scholars
dictated to a passive audience through tendentious displays, had
somehow given way to the notion of a democratized museum. What the
Smithsonian presented in its exhibitions was now supposed to
represent a consensus view, an absurdity but a widespread
presumption.

 When people talk today about democratized museums, they don't just
mean more popular shows and more access to the collections. They
mean that museums are expected to practice collective bargaining
over civic priorities — or else they must face the consequences.
Brooklyn, having failed to do so with "Sensation," suffered, if not
at the box office then in terms of public relations, first for
offending some Roman Catholics, then for seeming to pander to a
rich collector who owned the works. Never mind that other museums
pander all the time. Marc Pachter, director of the National
Portrait Gallery in Washington, pointed out at the seminar how
people complain about "Sensation" and about history at the
Smithsonian but, being quixotic, not about natural history museums,
where biodiversity, natural selection and the greenhouse effect are
taken for granted. Still, the expectation of public accountability
prevails.

 Democratization is what the political left long argued for at
museums: down with elitism, question authority. Cultural theorists
like Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault, starting in the 1960's,
supported this argument, casting doubts on the benevolence of a
range of institutions previously viewed as benign and progressive:
hospitals, universities and libraries as well as museums. These
institutions came to be viewed as disciplinary enforcers in class
and race wars.

 This was an especially big switch for museums. As Neil Harris, an
American historian of museums, put it in an article in the journal
Daedalus not long ago: "The exaggerated tirades of an earlier day,
created by those who persistently labeled museums morgues,
mausoleums and charnel houses, institutions dead to the world
around them," gave way to "assignments of responsibility for
sustaining the class structure, spreading racism and protecting the
canonized narratives of Western civilization."

 Sensitive to these new, almost flattering attacks, museums felt
compelled to deconstruct some of their authority by acknowledging
the fallibility of their own curatorial decisions — that should
have been obvious to everyone anyway — and gradually authority
became equivocal.

 Is it any wonder, by the way, that museums therefore came to view
architecture as a solution to their problems? Architects naturally
wanted to build the new cathedrals, but museums wanted architects
too, partly because just about the only aspect of the museum over
which institutional authority had not yet totally eroded was the
outside of the building. The popularity of the Tate Modern last
year proved that the impact of spectacular architecture can pretty
much drown out even the most substantial complaints about
exhibitions and collections. Bilbao has become the ultimate dream
of museum entrepreneurs. You don't even need a collection. You can
borrow one. The goals are now civic luster and economic improvement
— decent goals but, aside from the aesthetics of the building
itself, not artistic ones. The hollow shell has become an operative
metaphor for newly skewed priorities.

 In the way that politics frequently works, left and right have met
around these issues of populism and spectacle. As usual, both sides
claimed to speak for the people, while condescending to them.
Conservatives argued that museums ought to support themselves and
not beg from taxpayers, unless museums could be more demonstrably
responsive, and responsible, to the broadest public. It was de
facto populism, not leftist populism, with the left's stress on
diversity, and it resulted in the equivalent of Grandma Moses
exhibitions to cater to so-called popular taste and American
values. If it didn't mean more of those shows, it meant
market-driven initiatives: more anodyne Impressionism
extravaganzas, displays about Jacqueline Onassis at the
Metropolitan, and Steve Wynn's profitable art gallery in the lobby
of his Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas, a marketing coup, which set the
stage for the Guggenheim and Hermitage's opening a joint museum
across the strip at the Venetian Hotel in October.

 And now the National Museum of American History, which is part of
the Smithsonian, has accepted $38 million for a program to honor
notable Americans, paid by a businesswoman named Catherine
Reynolds, who says she fancies herself the new Brooke Astor and is
connected to an organization called the American Academy of
Achievement. The plan is that a committee — mostly chosen by Mrs.
Reynolds and including George Lucas, Mike Wallace and herself, she
suggested — will vet recommendations for honorees, with the museum
director having the final decision. Mrs. Reynolds mentioned Oprah
Winfrey, Martha Stewart and Dorothy Hamill as well as the Rev. Dr.
Martin Luther King Jr. among the people she pictured honoring,
causing Smithsonian curators to write to the Smithsonian's board:
"Will the Smithsonian Institution actually allow private funders to
rent space in a public museum for the expression of private
interests and personal views?"

 But what else would you expect? As Mr. Harris put it: "Museum
directors could legitimately claim bewilderment at being told,
simultaneously, to avoid the public trough and stand on their own
two feet, but not to resemble too closely the commercial world
that, after all, had to show a profit."

 The new populism has increased the mythology of attendance. How do
museums prove their worthiness to corporate and government sponsors
today? By drawing more people through the turnstiles, and more
kinds of people. Those with the purse strings demand it. Peter
Weibl, the director of a museum in Graz, Austria, specializing in
electronic art, talked at the seminar about the illogic of this
concept. Attendance is considered a measure of public service by
funders, government funders especially, who, without thinking the
issue through, simply figure that the more people who visit
museums, the more public-minded the museums must be, never mind
that attendance has nothing necessarily to do with enlightenment.
Museums, having therefore been instructed that success is to be
measured by attendance numbers, then organize Monet and van Gogh
shows, which guarantee big box-office returns, so they can declare
themselves successful. The tautology is absurd.

 The question should not be how many people visit museums but how
valuable are their visits. Attendance at a museum is different from
attendance at a ballpark or a movie. Partly the difference is that
baseball and Hollywood are for-profit businesses while museums are
educational institutions, although the more people the merrier at
museums; to borrow a useful turn of phrase, museums are
equal-opportunity elitists. But museums have not yet learned how to
measure precisely the quality of the experience they offer — what
their visitors are getting out of their visits aside from gifts in
the gift shop and sandwiches in the cafeteria. The Getty Trust
sponsored some expensive interviews in the 1990's, asking what
visitors liked about museums, which displays they found
instructive, what kinds of promotion worked better than others. But
those were preliminary studies. Time and again in Salzburg,
whenever curators and directors talked about the need to boost
attendance, which was almost all the time, the question that hung
in the air was, money aside, to what end?

 It was chastening to be reminded that not everyone has the luxury
to fret about Giorgio Armani's gowns at the Guggenheim or an
attention-craving Briton adorning the Virgin Mary with elephant
dung or a $38 million gift for a hall of fame or the downside of
five million people visiting the Tate. Money and civic
responsibility, like everything else in life, are matters of
perspective. Mr. Lerma's Philippine museum barely scrapes by.
Dollar-starved museums in Eastern Europe, the Middle East and
elsewhere today quietly try to charge big money to Western museums
who want to borrow art, breaking the old gentlemen's agreement that
museums share collections for the betterment of scholarship and the
public good. From their perspective it is about maximizing assets
(and who can blame them?). To Western museums, it's extortion.
Either way, it's a slippery slope. Fewer serious exhibitions, which
can't hope to recoup their costs. More exhibitions based on the
bottom line.

 AND depending on where you come from, government money for museums
is a public virtue or a burden. If you are from certain countries
in South America, where new governments coming into power toss out
the people who worked in museums under the previous administration,
insuring perpetual chaos, private money holds out the promise of
independence and stability. If you are Lam Yui Tong, the principal
assistant secretary of culture in Hong Kong, you went to the
seminar to consult about your plan to cut back on your own local
government's support for your own museums, because you are
searching for means of leverage over curators who don't even spend
all the money you give them, and you hope that a strategy of denial
may compel more streamlined and forward-looking operations. It was
revealing that at the seminar, tutorials in management and finance
were packed while almost nobody signed up for a session about
ethics, which had to be canceled.

 So what defines a museum now? Museums are at a crossroads and need
to decide which way they are going. They don't know whether they
are more like universities or Disneyland, and lurch from one to the
other.

 Their priorities need restating. They are neither universities nor
Disneyland. Are museums places to show things people didn't know
they wanted or may not think they want to see? Yes, but they are
also entertainment palaces. This is fine. Culture is entertainment,
partly, and museums betray the public and their purpose if they
aren't seriously amusing.

 The museum is a safe place, too, a virtue that shouldn't be
underestimated. Museums are havens and gathering spots in an
increasingly diffuse urban culture, heirs to the old arcades of
Paris, which were spectacles of iron, marble and glass in a society
of flâneurs and voracious desire, places to browse, flirt and kill
time. Critics who lament the proliferating cafes and shops in
museums today are right only up to a point because they fail to
recognize the social beauty of what the essayist Walter Benjamin,
recalling the arcades, called "dream houses of the collective."
Basic to flânerie, he added, was "the idea that the fruits of
idleness are more precious than the fruits of labor." Go to the Met
today and you'll see what he meant.

 But beyond leisure and entertainment, our perception of a museum,
and its moral value, still has to do with our desire for sacred
space, even if we are reluctant to put it that way. Museums exist
to offer us something that we can't find anywhere else: an
encounter, whether with an object or idea (or even with something
on the Internet if we consider virtual museums) — an encounter we
deem true and authentic in a place respectful of this private
transaction. Otherwise, museums are just fancy storage facilities
and gift shops.

 This sounds obvious but evidently isn't. It entails less
equivocation, less democracy, less blurring of the line between
commerce and content, and a reassertion of authority on the part of
museums, which must restate their convictions about esoteric
beauty, the ethical import of aesthetics and the special, if
intangible, power of the things they possess. The goal is not for
every museum to become another Frick. It is to use the excellent
new tools available — technological, didactic — to become more
effective and more affecting places. Between the university and
Disneyland is not a morass of compromise but a realm of rational
entertainment, a concept harking back to the Enlightenment.
Rational entertainment requires a standard of quality on the part
of museums. Quality has become a dirty word, an antidemocratic
concept, according to museum critics, but quality, and the ability
to explain it eloquently, are still what separate museums from
shopping malls. Museums need to reclaim the idea of quality because
it is what people want when they go to museums: to be told what
they should value, so that they can then decide for themselves
whether or not to agree — which is how a free democracy really
works. Standards change, values evolve, but without them at any
given moment, we are lost.

 Benjamin, a genius, was wrong about one thing: the age of
reproduction has not diminished the aura of the original object as
he predicted. The aura has increased. More people than ever are
going to museums to find the singular object or experience in a
cookie-cutter civilization.

 Call it wonderment. Museums grew out of the old wonder cabinets.
The roots are still deep. This has nothing to do with populism or
consensus-building or taxes or corporate- style branding of
cultural conglomerates and everything to do with curiosity, which
is what makes us human. It is a curiosity that serves the pleasures
of the spirit. The deepest curiosity. We go to museums to remind
ourselves who we are.


http://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/26/arts/design/26KIMM.html?ex=999848447&ei=1&en=3222c27d7e7d596c

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