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Musings on museums
Art in America, Oct, 2004 by Lee Rosenbaum
It remains to be seen how well MacGregor's eloquently expressed preoccupation with "beautiful pictures" and their "poetic truth" will stand up to the demands of rescuing the more financially precarious British Museum, which had to slash staff and programs after its $160-million Great Court addition failed to attract the projected number of visitors and income. MacGregor is also beset by controversies over cultural patrimony. Already ins "Whose Muse" views are contradicted by his later pronouncements. In the book, he laments the impossibility of reconstructing a Sassetta altarpiece, parts of which hang in the National Gallery, other parts of which are not allowed to travel from France. This unfortunate circumstance, he says, raises "the very big question" of whether owners' wishes should stand in the way of reuniting works intended to be seen as a whole. Yet, in his new post, MacGregor has repeatedly dismissed proposals to reunite the Parthenon marbles, divided between the Acropolis Museum in Athens and the British Museum, on the grounds that they are best seen in London, in the context of world art.
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If MacGregor's lecture was the most elevated, Walsh's was the most engagingly mundane. Having campaigned vigorously and, for the most part, successfully for visitor-friendly and art-enhancing galleries at the Getty's sprawling new campus in Los Angeles, he focuses here on the need to design museums that give "inducements to deep looking" and that "remove obstacles to it." A passionate champion of sympathetic lighting (probably the greatest achievement of the Getty's galleries), he deplores anything that detracts or distracts from art: noisy galleries (the new Tate Modern in London being a "spectacularly uncomfortable example," in his view); "deafening restaurants" (one of which I recently encountered directly opposite what should have been serenely meditative Asian galleries at the Kimbell Museum, Fort Worth); too much interpretive material in special exhibitions (whereby the "story line" takes precedence over individual works); too few places to sit and contemplate (because lingering too long slows the traffic flow and seats "spoil the look of an installation"). Alone among the book's contributors, he provides lists of practical, specific suggestions on how the public can enhance its own visits and how museums can help.
The two biggest bugaboos bedeviling these preeminent directors are commercialization and overcrowding. The form of promotion most vexing to them is the growing tendency to regard museums as purveyors of "entertainment," setting up false competition with rap concerts and theme parks. "We cannot win playing by the rules of the commercial world, no matter how much we debase our mission," observes Wood in an essay that cogently identifies the problems of museum leadership without offering concrete solutions. Abdication to market forces, Wood warns, would redirect museums' focus "from nourishment to gratification, from teaching and expertise to entertainment and celebrity, from memory to manipulation, ... from architecture to spectacle."
