
Museums Can Change – Will They? - phreeza
http://www.democracyjournal.org/36/museums-can-change-will-they.php?page=all
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matt_morgan
He's right that museums could see more of their deep collection as an asset.
What he's missing is what the Museum sees as its mission. Curation is the main
part of it, as opposed to the Library, for example, where access is primary.

Museums collect artworks erratically. Often--and this was worse in the past,
but there's fallout today--in order to get the best works, they take many
additional works from a donor. They never really wanted those other works, and
simply to display them (or to offer them to other institutions/locations for
display), without curatorial moderation, would shirk their most important
responsibility, that of interpretation.

"Curation" is a word we started to use for lots of activities that are nowhere
near the level of effort a professional art curator applies to the task. To
ask a museum to display all those works without intense curatorial effort is a
significantly bigger change than I think this author understands.

He should keep up the pressure, however. Lots of museums have, or are, putting
their entire collections online, with pictures when they have them. Even that
was hard for them--to present simply the data without the interpretation--and
continues to be. But it's cheap, compared to professionally sharing the actual
artworks, so if that took 12 years (I'm looking at 1999-2011) it's going to be
a while, and require a lot of demand, before he gets what he's asking for.

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goatforce5
If we're going to change museums can we put a museum in a museum so we can
remember what museums used to be like?

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stephengillie
Yo dawg, let's make an Oculus Rift tour of the Smithsonian, to preserve our
preservation of the past for future generations. We could even digitally add
new exhibits just to simulate the way curators care for the past.

Even better, let's make Museum Simulator. Tie in Bitcoin integration, and we
could have people digitally tip others for curating the in-game exhibits.

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mhink
I'm still in the middle of reading, but I couldn't help but smile when I read
this line:

"Through the rooms people (mostly women) come and go, talking occasionally in
hushed tones of Michelangelo, and texting."

Which is a cleverly-paraphrased reference to a line from "The Love Song of J.
Alfred Prufrock" by T.S. Eliot.

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greggman
I expect I'll be educated in the replies...

I like going to art museums but .... sometimes I wonder if the museums that
display old-ish art are outdated in concept. People spend more money on art
today than ever in history. They spend it on art in movies, art in TV, art in
games, art in comics. They are exposed to tons of art in ads, in packaging, in
magazines, on some? websites.

Compare that to when most? old museums were made. Back when TV and movies
didn't exist. When people didn't buy magazine or have internet. etc. In that
context the only place for them to see a large amount of art was the museum.
Now though most people are exposed to more art in a day than people 150 years
ago were exposed in a lifetime. (Yes I made up that stat)

So, on the one hand I know that seeing a painting or sculpture in person is
very different than seeing a photo of it. On the other hand I actually can see
photos of pretty much every famous painting ever just by googling it. What I'd
much rather see at a museum is stuff I can't see at home.

Stuff like this

[http://www.team-lab.net/en](http://www.team-lab.net/en)

or this

[https://www.google.co.jp/search?q=yayoi+kusama+dots+obssions...](https://www.google.co.jp/search?q=yayoi+kusama+dots+obssions&tbm=isch)

Of course maybe that's just a personal preference. I probably went to just
under one art museum a week last year mostly displaying old art and while a
few pieces were truly special up close most I felt like the photo was enough.
It might even be more enough in the new future with VR. So ... give me an
experience I can't get at home.

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VLM
The local art museum is heavy on physical art, lighter on image art. I don't
solely mean sculpture. Highly detailed items where the experience can't be
handled by a smartphone pix. There's an outdoor sculpture museum in central
Wisconsin thats pretty cool to experience. Near the river, in Wausau? Not all
art is low res, or low res paintings. I liked your link to the dots, that
would be interesting to see.

My limited maker faire experience is its VERY art heavy, for certain specific
styles of art. Partnering with a stodgy old fashioned museum sounds like a
winner. Put some tents up on that unused temple-like grass lawn, get some
people looking at all kinds of art, not just old or new stuff.

I am as mystified as op that the gift shop usually has nothing on topic. I can
buy a tour book of italy or a kids coloring book, but not a poster of my
favorite painting. Why not? Thats an epic fail. It would be like going to a
food store that sells everything but food.

I feel most people don't like art itself and only go to be seen as a patron.
Back in my dating days I took dates to several museums. Its a cool date idea.
More interactive and interesting than a movie. Lets be honest, I was paying
more attention to my date than the art, that was kind of the point of taking a
date to the museum. I've been kicked out of museums early because a
corporation rented the whole building for a christmas party or whatever, money
talks, and I hope at least some of the employees looked at the art vs just
eating at the buffet and getting drunk. But this kind of social activity sets
a very low bar for the "art experience". Its just an extremely nicely
decorated social hall.

One failure in the article is $0 admission, in the "urban" areas, means
homeless people living / sleeping in the museum, parents treating the facility
like a free day care... It'll be just like the libraries problem. More money
and more guards can kind of fix this problem, but still...

The six second anecdote reminds me of the zoo or flea markets. People will
glance to be polite, but they don't really care. I spent a lot of money to
drive a long way to see a traveling dutch masters painting exhibition maybe 20
years ago. I think it was time and money well spent. I admit I almost "ran"
thru the rest of the museum, taking those six second glances, to get to what I
wanted to see, and it was pretty cool. So its not like "six seconders" don't
care about any art, they just don't care about six second art. What I wonder
about is people who run the entire zoo, or entire museum, all at the six
second pace. Did they ever see anything they liked? I run into people like
this at parks and on trails too, if you're not going to stop and look at
anything, get out of the way and stay home and look at google street view.

The article has another failure, it fails to acknowledge that art can be
leased. The megacorp at work is in a semi-questionable urban area, so it has a
24x7 security guard, which is better than all but the best art museums can
provide for their best pieces, so rent us a "nice" painting for our reception
area please, maybe not the nicest most expensive, but ... Technically our
reception desk area is public and someone in the general public could walk up,
look at our art, and walk out without the guard detaining or harassing them.
Better on our wall behind our guard on a long term lease in public than locked
in a vault in private. For enough money a service company could maintain a
plastic box containing the art and its lighting every month, or week, or
whatever. For a very large amount of money they could provide a guard. Maybe a
startup idea here?

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mlinksva
Recent interview with the author of this piece
[http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2015/05/michael_ohare_o.htm...](http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2015/05/michael_ohare_o.html)

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benkuykendall
Wow. This article addresses a lot of interesting points that I had not
considered. It's amazing how different museums could become with relatively
small changes.

However, the deaccessioning arguments made me nervous. I agreed with the point
that selling puts the art in no physical harm as a private buyer has just as
much incentive to preserve his or her art as a museum does, but there are
other problems with his model. For instance, I would not object if art was
sold to set up a fund to make admission free, but I worry that a museum would
sell art whenever capital was needed. Take for example the Delaware Art Museum
which sold significant pieces to pay for a likely unneeded expansion [1]. If
it became easy and commonplace for museums to sell art to fund other ventures,
we would see conflicts of interest: perhaps the museum believes expanding its
building is more important than showing an influential piece. Even if we relax
the limitations on selling art, we would still need some sort of ethics code
detailing when it is and is not appropriate to sell artwork and this code
would have to balance the conflicting priorities of museums, donors, and the
public.

The author also briefly touches on the issue of digitizing collections.
Although at first glance digitizing a collection seems like an easy shortcut
to infinity accessible art, there is certainly a difference between seeing a
reproduction of art and seeing the art in person, what Walter Benjamin would
call the “aura” of the piece [2]. His 1936 essay “The Work of Art in the Age
of Mechanical Reproduction” is certainly worth a read – I have not seen a
better analysis of the role of reproduction in art and society.

However, the issues I have brought up are just details that I think a
concerted effort by a group of influential museums could overcome. I think the
article overlooks one fundamental issue: the role of the art museum is not
just to make art accessible to the public. For instance, the MET charges
itself not only to “present significant works of art” to the public, but also
to collect, study, and conserve art [3]. These last three goals may conflict
with O'Hare's idea of an ideal museum structured toward maximum engagement.

[1]. [http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/10/arts/design/censured-
delaw...](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/10/arts/design/censured-delaware-art-
museum-plans-to-divest-more-works.html)

[2].
[https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/...](https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/benjamin.htm)

[3]. [http://www.metmuseum.org/about-the-museum/mission-
statement](http://www.metmuseum.org/about-the-museum/mission-statement)

