I was hoping to stay out of this one and just read this thread but there are
a few points here which I think should be made.

First, I agree with Hank Burchard and others that exhibitions should be
structured with an audience in mind, though I wouldn't go quite so far as
using the word "showbiz".

Exhibitions, by their nature are representational much as a theatrical
presentation is in terms of the use of setting, place, time, story, etc.
 Whenever evaluating representational arts I always find myself returning to
that famous passage in Shakespeare's Hamlet when he is giving instructions to
the theatre troupe about the purpose of Theatre,  " To hold a mirror up to
Nature, as 'twere...to show the form and pressure of the Age."

That mirror is held by the creators / interpreters  of culture and it can
reflect the past, the present, and even the future. That mirror tells us as
much about the history of ourselves as it does it's subject matter.

The one thing that I find troubling in this argument are the exhibitions
which were held up as examples. The Enola Gay at the Smithsonian, the Freud
and the Slave exhibitions at the Library of Congress, never got to an
audience.  They were killed off by both external and internal politics before
the general public could visit them and make up their own minds.

In the Marketplace-of-Ideas this version of political correctness and
censorship is poisonous.  An exhibition,  whether good or bad, should stand
on its own legs before the public and be assessed as such.  To expect
exhibitions to pass such unwritten "tests" ensures an athmosphere of
mediocrity and conventionalism.  It also means that public exhibitions, as
well as the arts, are going to be increasingly under the mannipulations of
the very politicians whom the American public despises these days!

I guess that I believe in The Big-Tent concept.  If someone wants to take on
"Freud" and it's attendant controversies, fine!  If someone wants to exhibit
photographs on slave and freed slave life, then fine!  The public can only be
served and enlightened by the attention to the subject and the public
discourse upon it.

I think that curators, adminstrators, and other staff should be persistent
and stay with their controversial exhibitions.  The public can soon sort it
out whether they are seeing some highbrow debate or something which has
relevance to their own lives.

In a television piece a couple of weeks ago on the Vermeer exhibit the
commentator stated amazement that such a highbrow subject would turn into an
incredibly popular attraction, a "blockbuster" one at that!  Might the answer
lie in the fact that sometimes objects  (as well as plays) can transcend the
conceptual frameworks of their representations?

Remember, many people through the ages have been perfectly satisfied with
Hamlet as a ghost story with a knife fight at the end...

Dave

David Harvey
Conservator of Metals & Arms
Colonial Williamsburg Foundation
P.O. Box 1776
Williamsburg, VA  23187-1776   USA
voice:     804-220-7039
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