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Musings on museums
Art in America, Oct, 2004 by Lee Rosenbaum
Visitors to the Met might be shocked to learn that the mellifluous voice emanating from their headphones could be heard during the roundtable deploring those "horrid" audio devices. Even more horrifying to the dean of directors, though, is the complexity of the Met's own administration: "The burden of maintaining this enormous machine is crushing," he asserted. After 26 years, he now finds himself turning "all sorts of wheels I never had to turn before." That the wheels have always turned so smoothly is evidence of the triumph of his consummate administrative savoir-faire over his ambivalence about his role.
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With all this lamentation, one begins to pity these beset directors, whose thorny administrative duties have so distanced them from their early 'affinity for scholarly research and hands-on curatorship. They might gain useful perspective on their professional trajectory by rereading their own words in Whose Muse?, pondering the evident gaps between their goals and achievements, while also reflecting upon what's strangely missing from their discussion altogether: the need to involve a younger and more diverse public in all types of art, not just works of a particular time or place; the need for more widespread, systematic collection sharing to get major museums' works out of storage and onto the walls of smaller museums, which own fewer works of distinction.
Recent news developments suggest a need for Whose Muse? II: the Museum of Modern Art's sale last May of important works from its collection; the Boston Museum of Fine Art's loan of 21 Monets to an exhibition this year at a commercially run gallery in the Bellagio casino hotel in Las Vegas; the Senate finance committee hearings last June regarding possible managerial abuses at nonprofits. Meanwhile, the current Whose Muse? will perform an important service if it inspires art museum directors not only to analyze the problems they've helped to create, but also to use their considerable powers to begin to solve them.
Lee Rosenbaum is a cultural journalist who writes frequently for the "Leisure & Arts" page of the Wall Street Journal.
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