MUSEUM STUDIES NOW

ANDREW McCLELLAN

The publication between 2004 and 2006 of three hefty anthologies Donald Preziosi and Claire Faragos Grasping the World: The Idea of the Museum, Bettina Messias Carbonnells Museum Studies: An Anthology of Contexts, and Sharon Macdonalds A Companion to Museum Studies marked a coming of age of museum studies.1 A total of 128 articles and close to 2,000 pages, with remarkably little overlap among the volumes, points to a richness of scholarship across various disciplines art history, history, sociology, anthropology. Museum Studies has emerged as a model of interdisciplinarity and intellectual vitality. Taken together, the books raise a number of questions about the eld today. First, the contributors are mostly university-based academics in the United Kingdom and North America (a smattering of Continental European authors are included to lend intellectual heft and diversity), raising the question of whether museology is alive and well in, say, Poland, Japan, or Brazil, and if not, why not. Does the predominance of English-speaking authors reect both growth in the museum sector and a greater openness of university curricula and museum career structures in the AngloAmerican world? Second, the collections are almost exclusively theoretical and historical in focus; readers looking for practical, how to guidance will be disappointed. Third, fewer than twenty (less than 15 per cent) of the articles are written by museum professionals. So, who is the audience for the growing literature in museum studies? Curators may not contribute much to the discourse, but are they consumers of it? Does the literature merely feed an expanding academic market, or is there some relation between museum history and theory and museum practice? That museology has become a self-sustaining branch of academic study with strong debts to the leading lights of critical theory (Michel Foucault, Walter Benjamin, Jean Baudrillard, Pierre Bourdieu, Edward Said, etc.) should not obscure the extent to which it has been motivated by a desire to bring about change in real-world museums. If we briey historicize museum criticism, an early phase propelled by the intellectual and social ferment of the 1960s attacked museums as instruments of state authority and elite inuence, and sought to open their doors to previously marginalized groups, including women. A subsequent phase of the 1980s and 1990s, building on the rst, pioneered case studies of prominent institutions and postmodern artists whose work deliberately resisted the museums aesthetic and taxonomic norms. Critics exposed museum practices and narratives as culturally constructed and questioned the representation (or absence) of non-Western traditions in Western museums. 566
ART HISTORY . ISSN 0141-6790 . VOL 30 NO 4 . SEPTEMBER 2007 pp 566-570 & Association of Art Historians 2007. Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

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During the 1990s critics, joined by the mainstream press, also responded to two rising problems that further complicated museum governance and public relations, namely commercialism and cultural property. Escalating costs and decreasing government subsidies (at rst in the USA, and more recently in Europe) forced many museums to increase admission fees and develop new commercial strategies blockbuster exhibitions, shops, restaurants, singles evenings and so on to balance their budgets. According to critics on both the right and the left, such revenue-driven initiatives turned art museums into corporate billboards and costly amusement parks, diminishing access to the poor as well as the integrity of art. Fundraising and donor cultivation succeeded connoisseurship as the primary criteria for new museum directors. The decade of the blockbuster also witnessed the rst restorms over restitution, provoked by renewed attention to Nazi-era looting during the 193945 war and increased pressure from former colonies looking to reclaim their cultural patrimony from Western museums. Overnight, doubts were raised about the legitimacy of collections familiar to generations of museum-goers. What effect has museum criticism had, and what lies ahead for museums and museum studies? Initially caught off guard by the assault on their values, museum professionals from the 1990s slowly began to absorb the lessons of criticism, adopting more reexive practices (hanging, labelling) and promoting greater access. The range of temporary exhibitions became broader and more inclusive, helping to compensate for the glacial pace of change in permanent collections. Collections grow slowly, limited by cost and availability as well as curatorial taste, and no amount of revisionist desire can make up for the historical absence of once (still?) marginalized groups. At the same time mainstream museums have been reluctant to expand their denition of art to include genres that were open to women and minorities. But if traditional museums are subject to forces that limit change, new museums have sprung up to accommodate overlooked cultures and art forms. The broad museological landscape is much more diverse today than it was thirty years ago. Predictions of the museums demise under pressure from postmodernism have proven to be greatly exaggerated. Though some artists who challenge the museums conventions face an uncertain destiny (can artists become famous without museums?), others for example, Robert Smithson, Christo and Jean Claude, or Gordon Matta-Clark have had their work enter the museum through the back door via drawings and photographs. Still others, such as Fred Wilson, have been welcomed into the fold even though their work directly criticizes the museum. There is logic to the mutual dependency, since if not for museums the work would lack bearing and by assimilating the work (in the palatably brief form of passing installations) museums demonstrate their open-mindedness and resilience. Thanks also to the increasingly institutionalized culture of the biennale, art forms once alien to the museum video, installation, performance become more collector- and museum-friendly with each passing year. The museum is (and perhaps ever was) little more than a rhetorical enemy of the avant garde.2 One fruitful area for further study would be the productive tension between institutional resistance and collaboration within the avant-garde tradition. Commercialism in museums is here to stay. While those on the left bemoan the corporate take-over of our institutions, traditionalists complain of dumbing& ASSOCIATION OF ART HISTORIANS 2007

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down of cultural standards in pursuit of money. Fear of corporate meddling, acute at the height of the culture wars of the late 1980s and 1990s, has given way to the equally pernicious reality of self-censorship, as museums in need of operating funds favour programming that attracts both sponsors and large fee-paying crowds. Hence the steady exhibition diet of impressionists, mummies and anything with gold in the title. But those who grumble should ask if the alternatives are any less constraining. Government funds come with strings attached, as do the benefactions of wealthy, and would-be, trustees. In any case, critics who complain that art museums have become billboards and funhouses overlook the fact that commerce has been kept separate from permanent collections. For those who care about high art and seek quiet contemplation, much of the old museum still remains. Commercialism is the cost of the peace and beauty that still reigns in the galleries far removed from the shops and restaurants. Critics of commerce also dislike the bold structures often built to house new amenities and special exhibition spaces. They argue that dramatic architecture contributes to the spectacularization of the museum and diminishes the art on view. To be sure, behind every showpiece museum is an economic impact study that anticipates the nancial benets that ow from the development of new cultural infrastructure. Following the great success of the Pompidou Centre in Paris (opened in 1977), striking museums by celebrity architects Frank Gehry, Daniel Libeskind, Zaha Hadid, Santiago Calatrava, among others have demonstrated an ability to revitalize urban areas and draw donors, travelling exhibitions and new visitors. Build and they will come, but also build and they will give and lend. Well-endowed institutions in need of new space have shown a preference for the classical restraint of Renzo Piano or Tadeo Ando, whose understated buildings have become as much of an architectural cliche as the billowing curves and sharp angles of Gehry and Libeskind. Whatever the style, the building boom shows little sign of slowing down. Proponents of new buildings and popular exhibitions justify innovative content and containers in terms of increased access and demographic diversity. While attendance gures have certainly increased in recent decades, diversity is harder to gauge. Have art museums audiences in fact become more diverse with regard to race and class? Programming no doubt makes a short-term difference in who comes, but lasting change will surely require structural modication of permanent collections and stafng at the decision-making level in the museum hierarchy. Collections do not develop overnight, and those who push for change need also to recognize that museums are socially conservative environments that depend on the privileged realm of donors, corporate heads and the market for their survival. Going back hundreds of years, curators have always been courtiers of a sort and the worlds of art and power have closely overlapped. Furthermore, so long as art is neglected in our primary and secondary schools, interest in art will continue to be strongest among social elites who cultivate it in the habitus of the home and family, as Pierre Bourdieu pointed out decades ago.3 Emphasis on access, attendance gures and gate receipts overlooks a set of important questions that merit further study: What do people get from their visit to an art museum? What is the quality of their experience? Why does it matter if people go, or dont go, to art museums? What value do art museums (or art itself) provide to society? What justies their expense and prime location in the worlds 568
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great cities? Most in the art world avoid these questions; they rarely, if ever, show up on visitor surveys conducted by museums. Historically, museums were viewed as a powerful means of inculcating national pride and civil order in the masses, but those rationales would scarcely be put forward today. Lately, the great universal museums in the West have argued that they play a vital role in facilitating cross-cultural dialogue and exchange at a time of heightened global tension. Following the 9/11 attack on New York, the desire to foster better relations between the West and the Middle East has been especially strong. To give one example, in 2005 a Saudi prince donated $20 million to create a new Islamic wing at the Louvre in the belief that after 9/11, an increased appreciation of Islamic art can help bridge a cultural divide. Welcoming the gift, the French culture minister described the Louvre as
an essential instrument for the dialogue of cultures and the preservation of their diversities. In a world where violence expresses itself individually and collectively, where hate erupts and imposes its expression of terror, you dare to afrm the conviction that is yours that is ours that the dialogue of peoples and cultures, the richness of patrimonies, the values of sharing are the responses of intelligence to the bitter experience of conicts.4

Can museums truly contribute to global understanding and world peace, or is this mere rhetoric t for ceremonial occasions? It has been suggested that Western museums trumpet the value of cross-cultural dialogue to deect mounting pressure to return cultural property. The Declaration on the Importance and Value of Universal Museums (2002), signed by the directors of nineteen of the most powerful art museums in Europe and the United States, aims to counter the parochial interests that motivate repatriation claims by insisting museums serve not just the citizens of one nation but the people of every nation.5 Those who are beyond the Euro-American orbit, however, suspect that what motivated the document was a fear of losing hold of their fabulous collections. For example, George Abungu, former director of the National Museums of Kenya, says that issuing the declaration is a way of refusing to engage in dialogue around the issue of repatriation.6 Whether, and if so how, to engage Abungu and others over disputed ownership of cultural property is among the most difcult issues facing art museums looking forward. For established European museums, repatriation problems mostly concern demands from former colonies that now want to control their cultural patrimony; for the newer American museums, troubles stem from postwar efforts to build collections quickly, which have led them into temptation to acquire undocumented objects that may have been looted and/or illicitly exported from their country of origin. Recent settlements involving Holocaust claims and between Italy, Greece and selected US museums have given new prominence to questions of provenance, but whether they put an end to the trafcking of artefacts from archaeologically rich, cash-poor parts of the world remains to be seen. Most developing nations lack the resources (legal, nancial, media) to pressure museums and public opinion in the West. The emergence of repatriation, access, commercialism and denitions of the canon as issues of public concern and museum governance in the past few decades shows that museums are hardly immune to the shifting world beyond
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their walls. Museum studies will follow, and help to dene, whatever new issues arise in the years to come. Analysis and critique are vital to museums as to any social institution and should be viewed as the legitimate prerogative of all who care about their future. A healthy development would be a more vigorous contribution to the literature from museum professionals, especially curators. Overworked and dedicated to the objects in their care, they have neither the time nor the inclination to engage in theoretical self-scrutiny, yet a failure to engage in debate with their critics leaves the eld one-sided and risks allowing the crucial work museums do to go unappreciated. Meanwhile, the historical study of museums and exhibitions will surely continue; though a number of major European and North American museums have now been researched, precious little is known about many provincial institutions and museums in Latin America, Asia, Africa and the Middle East. Every museum has an interesting story to tell. What may inhibit further study is the conservative, object-based penchant of academic art history, which, like museums themselves, still largely revolves around major artists and movements. Within the job market, postgraduate students who wander too far from art objects in their choice of dissertation topic arouse suspicion. One nal development to ponder is the recent explosion of museum studies courses on both sides of the Atlantic. As the ranks of art history majors/concentrators rise, spurred on by the success of museums and the popular media (Sister Wendy Beckett, The Da Vinci Code, etc), so has the number of graduates wondering what to do with an art history degree. Museum work is an obvious and attractive option, and museum studies programmes have grown as a conduit to the profession. But how many programmes can the market support? Are programmes multiplying in response to the museums need for qualied graduates or the universitys need for income-generating postgraduate programmes?

Notes
1 Donald Preziosi and Claire Farago, eds, Grasping the World: The Idea of the Museum, Aldershot, 2004; Bettina Messias Carbonnell, ed., Museum Studies: An Anthology of Contexts, Oxford, 2004; and Sharon Macdonald, ed., A Companion to Museum Studies, Oxford, 2006. A fourth anthology, Gail Anderson, ed., Reinventing the Museum: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on the Paradigm Shift, Lanham, MD, 2004, offers an alternative selection of thirtyfour articles (400 pages), mostly by museum professionals, in which references to Foucault, Bourdieu, etc. are conspicuously absent. 2 See Andreas Huyssen, Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia, New York and London, 1995, 1335. 3 See Pierre Bourdieu and Alain Darbel, The Love of Art, trans. Caroline Beatty and Nick Merriman, Stanford, 1990 (rst published in French in 1969). 4 Quoted in John Tagliabue, Louvre Gets $20 Million for New Islamic Wing, New York Times, 28 July 2005, E1. Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Bin Abdulaziz AlSaud also hopes that the new Islamic wing will assist in the true understanding of the true meaning of Islam, a religion of humanity, forgiveness and acceptance of other cultures. New York Times, 3 August 2005, A13. In 2006 a new Islamic wing, funded by another Saudi, Mohammed Jameel, opened at Londons Victoria and Albert Museum. Alan Ridings review of it concluded: The Prophet [Muhammad] himself is quoted as saying: God is beautiful, and he loves beauty. In these ugly times, this too may be worth remembering. New York Times, 9 August 2006, E3. 5 For the Declaration, see http://icom.museum/ universal.html. 6 For other responses to the declaration, see ICOM News, 57:1, 2004; http://icom.museum/universal. html.

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