This article from NYTimes.com has been sent to you by [log in to unmask] I'd be interested in your thoughts on this one from today's NY Times. /-------------------- advertisement -----------------------\ Let NYTimes.com Come to You Sign up for one of our weekly e-mails and the news will come directly to you. YOUR MONEY brings you a wealth of analysis and information about personal investing. CIRCUITS plugs you into the latest on personal technology. TRAVEL DISPATCH offers you a jump on special travel deals and news. http://email.nytimes.com/email/email.jsp?eta5 \----------------------------------------------------------/ 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 /-----------------------------------------------------------------\ Visit NYTimes.com for complete access to the most authoritative news coverage on the Web, updated throughout the day. Become a member today! 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