Musings on museums

Lee Rosenbaum

Whose Muse? Art Museums and the Public Trust, edited by James Cuno, with essays by James Curio, Philippe de Montebello, Glenn D. Lowry, Nell MacGregor, John Walsh and James N. Wood, Princeton and Cambridge, Princeton University Press and Harvard University Art Museums, 2004; 208 pages, $29.95 hardcover.

"How much did we contradict each other? I felt an almost suspicious consensus," James Wood of the Art Institute of Chicago said to his colleagues a month after the last of six Harvard lectures by prominent museum directors on the subject of "Art Museums and the Public Trust."

Wood posed his question at a roundtable discus stun among the participants, who gathered two years ago at the office of Philippe de Montebello of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. James Cuno, who had organized the lecture series as then director of the Harvard University Art Museums, assured Wood that the group's solidarity was no accident: "I thought other voices had already been heard, in newspapers and magazines, and in the almost hagiographic elevation of a couple of our colleagues. So I thought this is a chance to offer another point of view."

The consensus in Whose Muse? Art Museums and the Public Trust is squarely on the side of sober stewardship, as distinguished from the venturous, sometimes dicey exploits of the two repeatedly disparaged colleagues, Arnold Lehman of the Brooklyn Museum and Thomas Krens of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. While hardly subjects of "idealizing or idolizing biography," as hagiography is defined, those two have had unusually high profiles as risk-takers and rule-breakers. The traditional directors chosen by Curio clearly relished the chance to discredit the renegades, while also repeatedly decrying the commercialization, overcrowding and dumbing down of art museums everywhere.

This revealing compilation, which permits us to eavesdrop on the lectures and roundtable, might have been more tellingly titled Six Directors Kvetching. The faultfinders also included Glenn Lowry of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Nell MacGregor of the British Museum, London; and John Walsh, director emeritus of the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. (Anne d'Harnoncourt of the Philadelphia Museum of Art took part in the roundtable but not the lecture series.) Though customarily discreet and controversy-averse, the directors express themselves in these pages with refreshing candor. They fret over characterizations of museums by art critics and commentators as arrogant, greedy and superficially entertaining, while taking pride in the way their institutions boost art's capacity to provide "consolation," "deep experiences" and "extraordinary moments."

But the most surprising revelation in these museological musings is not the high level of agreement they disclose but the inner conflicts that the speakers unwittingly display--the disconnect between what each of them claims museums should be and what they have managed to achieve at their own institutions. Instead of asking how much his colleagues contradicted each other, Wood might better have asked, "How much did we contradict ourselves?"

That said, there was one crucial area of disparity among the participants--their perceptions of the subject at hand. Cuno, who just took over Wood's Chicago job in September, apparently left the definition of "public trust" up to each participant, resulting ill widely different interpretations: public confidence in museums' authority; moral accountability to the public; holding objects in trust for the public; trusting in, rather than pandering to, the public; giving people from all backgrounds access to public collections. This conceptual confusion makes the book an exercise in free association, rather than a forum for focused discourse.

Because the assignment was so amorphous, the directors' responses became an inadvertent Rorschach test, more revealing of their distinct characters than of "the public's regard for and trust in art museums"--Cuno's own sense of the topic, as expressed in his preface to the book.

MacGregor and Walsh emerge as the two most sympathetic characters in this disjointed volume, having held fast to the quality that got them into this business in the first place--a passion for art. Their essays suggest that they kept their eyes on that prize, even while attending to the dullest administrative chores. Their ability to retain this verve and vision might be owed, in large measure, to their relative freedom from financial worries--MacGregor as then director of London's government-subsidized National Gallery, Walsh as former director of the abundantly endowed Getty.

For MacGregor, the public trust involves allowing people from all walks of life to "use their pictures" for the purpose most meaningful to each. He movingly described Winston Churchill's telegram forbidding the planned shipment of the National Gallery's paintings to Canada for safekeeping during World War II. "Bury them in caves or in cellars," he commanded then director Kenneth Clark, "but not a picture shall leave these islands." The museum then decided to display one old-master work a month. "The picture that the public wanted most of all was Titian's 'Noli Me Tangere,'" MacGregor recounts, describing it as "surely the deepest investigation in Western painting of a love that survives death.... It is an incomparable meditation on love continuing without physical contact."

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.

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."

But even the most respected museums, including their own (with the possible exception of the wealthy Getty), have occasionally compromised their missions for money--mounting glitzy shows with more popular appeal than serious purpose; using their collections, held in public trust, as cash cows by charging exorbitant fees for loans of art to sister institutions or even by renting works to commercial entities; accepting exhibition support from businesses with direct financial interests in the content of the shows they subsidize; positioning bauble-hawking gift shops at the exits to major exhibitions, thus abruptly dispelling art's aura with arrays of trinkets and the clatter of cash registers.

D'Harnoncourt of Philadelphia offers a glimmer of hope in her observation that board members have become "much more muted in their sense that a museum is in fact like a profit-making corporation. Those voices were more voluble and more naive ten years ago than they are today." Similarly, MOMA's Lowry notes that corporate funders have grown more enlightened, spreading their support "over a much broader range of possible exhibitions. And I think the reality is that ... if we put together a program that is strong, clear, and articulate, it galvanizes support, whether it's from the public at large, an individual donor, or a corporation."

When it comes to overcrowding, though, museum directors are in a real bind. To a large degree, their oval performance is judged--by colleagues, the media and museum trustees--in terms of attendance. "The real measure of our success ought to be the quality of the museum experience," Lowry commented plaintively during the roundtable. "You cannot possibly have the kind of deep engagement with a work of art that John [Walsh] was talking about in a room with 500 people jostling each other, and yet we can't get off that attendance train." Astonishingly for a director about to open an enormous new facility, Lowry went on to assert that "we all show far too many works of art.... I think if you took the truly extraordinary works of art in each of our collections, the ones that are absolutely astounding, you wouldn't have a very big museum."

If Lowry can't get off the "attendance train," de Montebello of the Met is trapped on the exhibition train. He repeats his usual refrain from public-speaking engagements: "Museums have become so hyperactive that banners furled and unfurled on museum facades do not indicate, I'm afraid, the glow of health but rather the flush of fever." Here, too, attendance imperatives are fueling the fire: "the continuing pressure to keep the public coming in ever greater numbers translates in pressure to mount yet more exhibitions ... of a popular nature." Reducing such activity "would result in substantial deficits."

Although de Montebello expresses strong faith in the public's appetite for "programs born of serious ness of purpose and true educational motivation," a certain aristocratic condescension creeps into his comments about "strident and misguided archdemocratic voices," the danger of giving "too much ... information to the public" about conservators' work, his sense that "maybe we should pull back a little bit on the visibility issue" in responding to press queries, and his incomprehension as to why people have focused so tenaciously on questions surrounding restitution of Nazi loot and cultural patrimony. On the last, Lowry unperturbedly observed, "It was because it was an explosive issue and museums happened to be part of the tinder in the fire. What I think speaks well for museums is that in fact we were able to demonstrate to the media, and then through the media to the public, that we were in fact acting responsibly."

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.

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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