SEARCHING FOR A 21st C MODEL

An Exemplary Classic Museum

It is a given that museums’ and art galleries’ purpose for being is imagined, in one way or another, as being to do with making sense of the world. There is a follow on from that imagining. Firstly, we might expect these institutions to stimulate the development of new understandings and possibly even lead to the generation of new knowledge. The institutions come with a burden of expectations, desires and responsibilities and were once reliably assumed to ‘speak with authority’ – keepers of the official worldview. All this in the 21st C is up for discussion.

If a museum or art gallery is operated as a cost centre, the chance to satisfy any of the hope to glean new knowledge and/or new understandings – to some extent at least – is bound to be thwarted by the fiscal constraints in play. 

If on the other hand museums and art galleries are to be not-for-profit and entrepreneurial, one can be assured that there will be some risk taking going on albeit contained in some way by prudent fiscal constraints. Even so, the institution would be looking to be more dynamic (multidimensional?), to grow and to expand its operation and programs. That is, do so rather than restrict its efforts to explore new horizons within its funding limitations. Here money constraints are more likely to be a second order issue. Similarly, facilitating the knowledge economy is more likely to be a first order concern.

The comparisons that are there to be made between the static exhibit cost centre and multifaceted entrepreneurial modes of operation are stark. Even in a 21st context in public institutions it remains so. State museums, and other public museums generally, are typically imagined as steady-as-you-go, static exhibit, status quo institutions. They are characteristically committed to delivering safe politically reflective and reactive exhibits and publications rather than overtly challenging or speculative programming. There is limited tolerance for risqué audacity in most such cost centres.

In contrast, entrepreneurial institutions are more likely to embrace interrogative and incisive research plus audacious programming backed up by proactive and speculative income generation. Entrepreneurial programming is more likely to be audacious, interesting and to ’pull a crowd’.

Exhibitions and exhibits, filled as they are with idea laden imagery and objects, tpresent stories and messages, cultural and sometimes political imaginings, aimed at reaching wide and varied museum audiences. These ‘pictures’ simultaneously allow even the barely literate and ‘cultural outsiders’ to fall under the influence of propaganda’s tactics. For instance, those who for whatever reason are unable to ‘read’ about an atrocity, can easily imagine the details of say a massacre from a single image of it. If there is a political subtext it is quite likely to reach its intended audience unimpeded by illiteracy or perhaps cultural dislocation.

NAZI Anti-Jewish Propaganda

In totalitarian political and cultural settings the temptation to slant ‘musing messages’ is a powerful pull. Arguably, in some cases this may be of the essence. Even in democratic societies political activists are likely to yield to the pull to persuade. In cost centre institutions, there is sometimes detectable acquiesce to political or some other funding imperative. It is a survival technique and even in relatively egalitarian societies it is likely be so to some extent as 'survival' is a compelling urge.

State museums exist to authorise, to express, and to promulgate the values espoused by the State’s ruling elite. They are assembled in order to focus upon that which is assumed to be the cultural consensus, the content of which the elite determine on behalf of their subordinates and constituencies – often with some social purpose in mind. Typically, museum directors claim to advocate universal, inspirational values but they are all too often cast in the role of the hapless by-stander as they watch their institutions being enlisted to pursue much more partisan, national or politically sanctioned agendas. 

Archetypical museums sometimes assume a role somewhat like that of secular shrines dedicated to hedonistic values or some kind of implied iconic aestheticism – some assumed 'good' well beyond the reach of criticism and critique. In parallel to this, these institutions are often imagined as a kind of ceremonial monuments to power where the elite can smooth over their histories, enact rituals and sanitise their ‘tribal’ excesses.

In a European cum colonial context, London’s British Museum and The Victoria and Albert Museum, plus Paris’ Musée du Louvre, that was for a while renamed the Musée Napoléon, are all in their own ways 19th C classical models emulated by ‘modern’ museums.

However, the USA’s Smithsonian Institute with its 19 museums, nine research centres and a zoo is the model of a 20th C national institution – a network of musing places. Purposed as it was in 1846 "for the increase and diffusion of knowledge" its an exemplar for modern museology at work. While it is funded by ‘the nation’ here the concept of ‘nation’ operates in expansive and eclectic ways – the centre of an international cultural hegemony.

The Smithsonian’s scale eclipses all other institutions of its kind and in so many ways it mirrors the often mythologised American dream – conceivably the institution itself is the very model of it.

Australian State and public museums and art galleries simultaneously emulate their British, European and American antecedents albeit with an antipodean twist. Each in their own way have a ‘placedness’ that collectively informs a kind of Australian postcolonial set of sensibilities. These perceptions are largely defined by 20th C histories and antipodean colonial legacies.

Nonetheless, each of these institutions individually draw upon the ‘national story’, and that, from a sense of placedness in context with a regional cum geopolitical perspective of the island's history and heritage.

Interestingly, in Tasmania this is played out against the background of the island’s contentious histories and its British colonisation. The island's two major museums and art galleries essentially pay something more than homage to their ‘colonial motherland models’. The premier State institution, the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery (TMAG), overtly celebrated Tasmania’s colonial histories, albeit sometimes uneasily, for the greater part of the 20th C.

TMAG Colonial Gallery

Tasmanian Aboriginal histories within Tasmania are arguably more smoothed over than like histories anywhere else in Australia. This is so even if in the refurbished TMAG where somewhat  more reconciliatory  and sweeping unhappy and unwelcome critiques out of sight is perhaps an understandable reaction albeit a counterproductive one.

Overall, in the two Tasmanian institutions – TMAG and the QVMAG – by-and-large privilege colonial settler perspectives. In essence, Tasmania is a historic landscape and a kind of monocultural Anglo Saxon colonial outpost. If its museums can be seen as being a part of "indigenous Australians [being] counselled to forget the past and not to dwell on the great tragedy that had befallen their people" [link] its a kind of self-serving proposition spiked with dark histories.

More inclusive histories of Tasmania lend substance to the notion of the island's 'Great Forgetting'. As reconciliatory efforts have been made to lay its ghosts of 20th C recalcitrance to rest in so many ways the forgetfulness lingers. Old habits die hard.

In ‘The Conversation’ Adele Chynoweth –Visitor, School of History at Australian National University – wrote (6 March 2013) under the heading “The history wars are over, now it’s time to get politics back in our museum. In 1996, at the Sir Robert Menzies lecture, then prime minister John Howard famously condemned a “black arm band” view of history. When the National Museum of Australia opened in 2001, Howard denounced, as part of an array of gripes, the postmodern architecture of the museum and what he deemed the “privileging” of the narratives of First Australians. He then stacked the Museum Council with his mates who shared his ideological views.“ all of which speaks volumes about the thin veneer of ‘world wellness’ and the cultural contests that rage below the surface when museum stray from their sanctioned ‘truths’.

Overheard at a conference, an anthropologist was heard to say “museums are full of misleading and fallacious information (lies?!) and then there are the lies about these lies and even lies about the lying”. In context here what is being put up for discussion is the paucity of knowledge that finds its way to being attached to ‘otherwise storyless objects’ in the museum circumstance as they wait for someone with energy and intellect to reinvest them with cultural substance in order for them to be of interest.

Lenin, Goebbles & Picasso

Picasso, disenchanted with museums at the time, is quoted as saying “museums are just a lot of lies, and the people who make art their business are mostly impostors ... We have infected the pictures in our museums with all our stupidities, all our mistakes, all our poverty of spirit. We have turned them into petty and ridiculous things”. [link]

Somewhat like it is with the use of political slogans, modern politics contains many exemplars of proof by assertion – truths like “you can trust us” and product X is "special". This practice may also be observed more than occasionally in museums. In museums and art galleries, collections of ‘ideas’ are presented as narratives in order to provide easily digested take away messages. It is a technique quite often found in advertising.

The leader of the Russian Revolution, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, said "a Lie told often enough becomes the truth." Supposedly, Joseph Goebbels, the notorious Nazi propagandist, embroided that idea somewhat when he is quoted as saying: “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.” [link] .

Indeed 17th C Wunderkammers – wonder rooms ... the precursors of today’s museums and art galleries – are famously reported as having within their collections ‘faked’ natural history exhibits. Against this background, even now, musing in museums and art galleries sometimes call upon our willingness to ‘Suspend Disbelief’ given the context of the evidence before us. Interestingly, cinema seems to have filled at least a part of that place in our collective imagination that was once satisfied and sustained by museums and art galleries.

Nonetheless, musing in the 21st C is ever likely to be co-informed by our digital gleanings from an ever expanding larder of sources online. Museums are more like ‘digital portals’ with rhizomic interfacing at work in contrast to the institutions with deemed hierarchical authority – albeit with fading dependability and veracity. Their standalone destination status exuding the credibility they ounce claimed for themselves in the last two centuries is shrinking exponentially. However, when museums and art galleries become rhizomically interlinked their power and influence becomes a great deal more convincing.

The ‘at arm’s length’ public patronage enjoyed by major institutions for very long periods of time the world over is currently being challenged in ways inconceivable just decades ago. While economic rationalism is one methodology, for instance, government patronage is being measured against a myriad of competitive priorities and imperatives – economic, social and cultural.

Arguably, the static exhibit cost centre model for public museums an art galleries is under review and possibly the threat of either extinction or diminishing value. As a consequence, if these institutions are to survive, and maintain their community credibility, it seems that the community cultural enterprise model in various and evolving manifestations may rise to fill the space in communities’ cultural imagination. The status quo is unlikely to be either sustainable or sustained except as a reflective, and recreated, museum exhibit of what once was.

The Barnes Foundation is an American educational art and horticultural institution located in Philadelphia. In 1922 Albert C. Barnes, a pharmacist and art collector put together a substantial collection which now holds 2,500 objects, including 800 paintings, estimated to be worth about $25 billion. The collection has significant holdings of Impressionist and Modernist masters and many other works by leading European and American artists plus works from antiquity and other cultures. 

In the 1990s, the now famous Barnes Collection faced financial difficulties. The collection's administrators initiated various entrepreneurial and controversial moves aimed at protecting the collection's future. This included sending the collection on world tours and  moving the collection to downtown Philadelphia.  Both initiatives became controversial as they were judged as being against the terms of Barnes' endowment.

In 2009 a documentary, The Art of the Steal, argued that the foundation had been taken over by other non-profit institutions. After all the court challenges, the new Barnes building opened in May 2012 and the collection has a new entrepreneurial future other than the one envisaged its founder. The rights and wrongs here are bound to be debated for quite a long time. Nonetheless, its an exemplar of the folly of attempting to control the world from the grave and the changing visions of the nature of musing and musing places. Even in how they are administered, museums and art galleries mirror both change and the cultural realities they are imagined within in the context of time. Meaning is always invested in its context.