Art Paper 800 to 1000 words

Karsten Schubert

T urator's The evolution of the museum concept

from the French Revolution to the present day

Ridinghouse

Third Edition: Published in zoo9 by Ridinghouse / Karsten Schubert 5-8 Lower John Street Golden Square London WIF 9DR www.karstenschubert.com

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First published woo, reprinted 2002 by One-Off Press and distributed by Christie's Books

© 2000, 2002 and 2009 Karsten Schubert

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The cover shows: Karl Friedrich Schinkel drawing of the Alte Museum, Berlin 5823 -3o Inset: Benjamin Zix Napoleon and the Empress Marie-Louise visiting the Salle Laocoon ofthe Louvre by night 1810 and Tate Modern, London zoo8

Note to the new edition: The Curator's Egg was first published in English in woo; a second edition was printed in zooz. Since then the book has been translated into Turkish, Japanese and Italian, and a Spanish translation is forthcoming. The text of this new English edition follows that of the original, except for a few minor corrections and the addition of a new epilogue, 'Democracy of Spectacle: The Museum Revisited'. This was originally written as an afterword to the Spanish translation; it has been revised and updated for publication here. The new chapter was copy-edited by James Beechey. The third edition was overseen by Doro Globus and the production was coordinated by Marit Miinzberg.

HON

N410 .S33 2009 Schubert, Karsten The curator's egg : the evolution of the museum concept from the French Revolution to the present day

Foreword 7 Introduction 9

I 1. Beginnings 15

2. Paris and London 1760-187o 17 3. Berlin 1900-1930 29

4. NeWYOrk 1930-1950 39 5. Europe 1945-1970 51 6. Paris 1970-1980 56

II 1. After the Centre Pompidou 65

2. The 'Discovery' of the Audience 67 3. Artists 81 4. Politics 88

5. Architecture 1: Making and' Remaking Museums 99 6. An Experiment: The Global Museum 113 7. Architecture 2: Museum Makeovers 121

a. Modes of Display 134 9. Bouvard and Pecuchet: Epilogue 143

III Democracy of Spectacle: The Museum Revisited 157

Bibliography 181 Index 185

188

Norman Hampson, Sanat-Just (Oxford: Basil Blackwell Ltd, 1991).

189

Margaret Yourcenar, Memoirs OfHadrian andReflections ofthe Composition ofMemoirs ofHadrian (London: Penguin, 1986), p z88.

1. Democracy of Spectacle: The Museum Revisited

The present order is the disorder of the future. Saint-Justin

There is nothing more easily destroyed than the equilibrium of the fairest places. Marguerite Yourcenar169

Since The Curator's Egg was first published nine years ago much has changed in the museum world. While the historical facts remain the same, the current trends and debates that I set out and the conclusions I drew at that time require elaboration, cor- rection and update. As always, when trying to predict the future one can only extrapolate from the present. Yet reality moves in strange and unpredictable ways, as is the case here. The cultural landscape has altered greatly since the turn of the millennium. What then seemed vague trends are now established truths. The public and professional debate about museums, already shrill a decade ago, has since become even more aggressive, partisan and often self-serving and dogmatic. It would be no exaggera- tion to describe it as a battle for the life and soul of the muse- um. The battle lines are drawn between, on the one hand, those who align themselves with the new museums as a great success story, over-run with visitors, the latest entrant in the 'cultural- industry' league, and, on the other, the keepers of the flame, the defenders of an old museum ethos, invoking primarily scholar- ly and educational goals. At one point, it seemed, this conflict could be sketched out by comparing Tate Modern in London on one side of the Atlantic and the Museum of Modern Art in New York on the other. This was a seductive pairing and made for noisy discussion because it allowed each side to denounce the other as destructive and vulgar or elitist and out-of-touch. The ready-made simplicity of this black-and-white argument has

DEMOCRACY OF SPECTACLE: THE MUSEUM REVISITED 157

been irresistible for many authors and critics. Yet, like all simplistic readings, it does not reflect reality and has obscured the complexi- ties of the issues at stake. In the end, this is not a conflict between the keepers of the flame and the new barbarians. It is about what kind of role the visual arts are to play in our culture and, by exten- sion, what role culture is to play in our society. It is nothing less than a debate about one of the fundamentals of democracy.

The notion that museums should somehow pay for them- selves (either by charging visitors or by way of private and cor- porate sponsorship) has long been commonplace in the United States. This was, in part, a logical extension of the concept of private individuals taking responsibility, a characteristic of the North American museum landscape from its inception. The idea is relatively novel as far as European institutions are concerned. It was first propagated in the United Kingdom, without subtlety and to dreadful effect, under the Thatcher government in the 198os. Elsewhere in Europe, though this shift seems increasingly inevitable, it is still met with widespread professional and politi- cal resistance. If, initially, this change seemed to entail no more than a switch of paymaster (from public to private), it has since become obvious that it has had profound effects on the outlook and ethos of museums. It is generally agreed that a historic tip- ping point has been reached,"° though not all would concur with the art critic David Carrier's recent claim that we are seeing 'the end of the modern public art museum'.111

In the past, the concept of the museum arose from the princi- ple of making an elite culture available to all, in order to educate to the highest possible standard and provide the greatest enjoy- ment. This model of the museum emerged from much the same Enlightenment mould as notions of democracy and education. The idea of the museum as egalitarian enabler has never lost its allure; and elitism for all, a notion of glorious and radical ambi- tion, simultaneously naïve and highly potent, steered the museum for the better part of zoo years. By and large, the balance between utopian dream and everyday reality held remarkably well.

Today, it seems that curators have lost faith in the democ- ratising power of the institution and that these revolutionary ideas no longer hold any appeal. Museums have forgotten their revolutionary origins and their extraordinary history. In the new

170

The most spirited recent defence of the museum is contained in a series of lectures given by, among others, Philippe de Montebello, Glenn D. Lowry and Neil MacGregor, reprinted in James Cuno (ed), Whose Muse?Art Museums and Public Trust (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2004)

171

See: David Carrier, Museum Skepticism. A History of the Display ofArt in Public Galleries (Durham and London. Duke University Press, aoci6), pp 585-207.

172

Adorno, Theodor. Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life, (London and New York: Verso, 2006) p 200.

museum, the individual visitor is no longer considered, and no credence is given to the idea of elite culture being offered to all. The new museum has no time for such delicate complexities. In its fixation on numbers (box office or, to use the language of

Tootfall'), together with its fear of either underestimat- ing or overestimating the audience's capacity to understand, the new museum has sidelined its old utopian ideals, which are now deemed to be pitfalls. In the process, art for all has given way to the 'democracy of spectacle': an ambition to be attractive to the greatest number of people at all costs. This has become the new museum's blanket justification and its strongest defence.

If mass appeal is the best defence apologists for the new museum can muster, it is also the crudest. It is crude because it can be used to parry any sort of criticism, above all the dreaded charge of elitism. It deliberately muddles the issues (above all, the distinction between elite culture for all and culture for an elite) and closes off any discourse about the nature of the funda- mental changes that the new museum proposes. As for the mass appeal of the new museum, it is a questionable argument for its validity. As the philosopher Theodor Adorno has observed, 'the culture industry piously claims to be guided by its customers and to supply them what they ask for The culture industry not so much adapts to the reactions of its customers as it counter- feits them?"' Adorno was referring primarily to the film indus- try, but his observation also holds true for the new museum. By turning itself into another branch of the culture industry, the new museum has not just suspended its old guiding principles but has, as we shall see, turned them upside down. It has, in the process, let go of its historical roots and its intellectual purpose. Shifting the emphasis from education to entertainment, it has changed the ground rules - only without, alas, alerting its visi- tors. By this sleight of hand, the old museum's politicised citi- zen and visitor has become the new museum's passive consumer, simultaneously manipulated, disempowered and infantilised.

Rosalind Krauss was the first to observe this new trend in her celebrated essay The Logic of the Late Capitalist Museum' (1.990). She spelled out its consequences presciently: the new museum would 'forgo history in the name of a kind of intensity of experi- ence, an aesthetic that is not so much temporal (historical) as it is

158 THE CURATOR'S EGG DEMOCRACY OF SPECTACLE: THE MUSEUM REVISITED 159

now radically spatial'.173 This goal would be achieved by revers- ing all the guiding and defining principles of the old museum. Quantity would supersede quality. Diffusion would displace concentration. Chronology would be replaced by revival, mem- ory by amnesia, authenticity by copy, order by chaos. Instead of focus there would be distraction and history would be sacrificed for novelty. In lieu of preservation there would be disposal, and sensation and spectacle would take the place of contemplation and experience.

For Krauss, the artistic model for this shift was Minimalism or, more precisely, the 'articulated spatial presence specific to Minimalism'.174 Viewing an exhibition of works from the Panza Collection at the Musee d'Art moderne de la Ville de Paris in 1983, Krauss observed that, more than the art on display,

it is the museum that emerges as [a] powerful presence and yet as properly empty, the museum as a space from which the collection has withdrawn. For indeed the effect of this experience is to render it impossible to look at the paintings hanging in those few galleries still dis- playing the permanent collection. Compared to the scale of Minimalist works, the earlier paintings and sculpture look impossibly tiny and inconsequential, like postcards, and the gallery's take on a fussy, crowded, culturally irrel- evant look, like so many curio shops.'"

The implication of Minimalism here has since become some- thing of a critical cliche and I will discuss the validity and limits of this line of argument later. For Krauss, the new museum had substituted the erstwhile experience of the viewer, contemplative and framed by personal knowledge: 'In place of the older emo- tions there is now an experience that must properly be termed an "intensity" -a free-floating and impersonal feeling dominated by a peculiar euphoria." In other words, the museum offers an experience akin to a visit to a department store. Krauss had no doubts about the ultimate outcome of this gradual shift. In her view, the 'industrialised museum will have much more in com- mon with other industrialised areas of leisure - Disneyland, say - than it will with the older, pre-industrial museum. Thus it will be dealing with mass markets, rather than art markets, and with simulacra experience rather than aesthetic immediacy.' 177

160 THE CURATOR'S EGG

173

Rosalind Krauss, The Logic of the Late Capitalist Museum', in: Claire J Farago and Donald Preziosi (eds), Grasping the World: The Idea of The Museum (Aldershot,

Ashgate, 2004) p 604

174

Krauss, op.cit., p 601

175

Krauss, op.cit., p 6oz

176

Krauss, op.cit., p 610

177

Krauss, op.cit., pp 611-612,.

178

That this should occur at a time, post -1989, when the capitalist free market model became ubiquitous, is no coincidence.

179

Unexpectedly, given its historic policy of disengagement from globalisation, France has emerged in the vanguard ofEuropean countries implementing the `Krens doctrine'. Both the Louvre and the Centre Pompidou are due shortly to open antenneswithin France and both institutions have recently engaged in plans to operate Guggenheim-style franchises abroad. Thus far, the Pompidou's hopes of gaining a foothold in Asia have suffered several setbacks, though negotiations to open a satellite museum in Shanghai are ongoing. In 2003 the Louvre entered a three-year collaboration with the High Museum ofArt, Atlanta, lending the museum (in which the Louvre now occupies its own wing) some of its most prized treasures in return fora fee ofEuro 13 million. And in 2007 the French government signed a contract with the United Arab Emirates whereby, for fees totaling over s billion, the Louvre's name, its curators' expertise and works from its collection and those of other French museums will be loaned to a museum to be built in the oil-rich emirate ofAbu Dhabi, as the centrepiece (alongside, inevitably, a proposed Guggenheim museum) of a major tourist development on Saadiyat Island. The scheme has been attacked by many senior figures in the French museum world; see: Editorial, 'A Desert Folly', The Burlington Magazine, May 2007, p 263.

When Krauss wrote her essay the trends she described were only beginning to emerge and, to many observers at the time, her conclusions seemed unduly alarmist and wildly exaggerated. In fact, reality far surpassed even her darkest predictions. The con- cept of the late capitalist museum has since been implemented step by step, with astonishing rapidity and against little critical resistance, suggesting it was the only outcome historically possi- ble.'" To begin with, this trend was contained largely within the Guggenheim Museum in New York and its various international satellite projects. Thomas Krens, the Guggenheim's director from 1988 to 2008, became the poster boy of the new museum, its most outspoken defender and ardent practitioner. Before long his model gained wide currency. Today, many museums all over the world are run, if not in name at least in spirit, according to what might be termed the `Krens doctrine'.

That the new museum should seek its salvation in commerce highlights an historical paradox, for the idea of the museum as a non-commercial sphere was programmatic from its inception. For the founders of most nineteenth century museums in the English-speaking world, they were the anti-realm of their own commercial activities, a place where money could transmutate into something higher. The museum's unprecedented author- ity in cultural matters was the result of this particular division. In complete reversal of this reality, the `Krens doctrine' is an attempt to square the circle, to turn the museum into a cultural industry without surrendering its authority and to commercial- ise it without jeopardising its special status. Although several of Krens's most ambitious projects have failed to materialise - proposals for Guggenheim franchises in Taiwan, Rio de Janeiro and Mexico have all been shelved - his doctrine has nonethe- less become a powerful dogma, embraced, to varying degrees, by museums the world over."' Like all powerful dogmas, it is rarely questioned and never fully explained. For a whole gen- eration of museum directors and curators, it has become the sole guarantor of institutional survival and legitimacy. While some adherents go so far as to say that museums are nothing but specialist businesses active in the field of high culture, oth- ers talk more delicately about the need to run their institutions in a business-like fashion.

DEMOCRACY OF SPECTACLE: THE MUSEUM REVISITED 161

There is no denying that, for a while, this new approach brought spectacular results: museums were the great cultural success story of the late twentieth century. New ones opened seemingly every month; old ones were expanded or reconfig- ured. Audiences grew, collections were built, and major exhibi- tions circulated to an ever widening range of venues. Museums became the new civic status symbols, much as theatres and opera houses had been in the immediate post-War period.

But this approach has not proved the panacea its promoters imagined. What seemed at first an effective medicine has begun to reveal some troubling side effects. These can best be summa- rised as the creation of moral and ethical ambiguities that had hitherto been absent from the museum sphere. The inherent contradiction at the centre of the Wrens doctrine', the conflict between corporate ambition and cultural status, has not yet been resolved. Increasingly, it seems that it never will be. The major- ity of museum officials (directors, curators, trustees) remain in denial, but the chorus of discontent grows ever louder 180

It is a hallmark of late capitalism that capital and power have been rendered strangely invisible - that is to say, their presence is undeniable, but their source is obscured and their direction- al flow hard to chart. A corporation wields power, yet how it is constituted and from where it emanates is difficult to pinpoint. The same holds true of the museum in its new cultural-industry incarnation. A myriad group of contributors make up the institu- tion's power. From within, there are the director, chief executive, trustees, curators and those responsible for marketing and public relations. From outside, architects, artists, consultants and guest curators are called upon to reinforce the institutional message. From time to time, politicians and sponsors choose to interfere. This no longer amounts to a classic power pyramid; and it would be futile to attempt to describe or analyse the institutional struc- ture as such. How decisions are arrived at and how they are final- ly implemented - the what, why, where and when of this process - have all been rendered opaque and, as a result, the new muse- um, like its corporate model, has become strangely unaccount- able for its actions. Within an institution, contributors to this intricate web of power and influence hide behind one another. Decisions are described as 'collective', even when they are not. see: Cuno (ed), op. pit

180

When things go awry, blame for 'bad' decisions is instinctively placed with others, preferably outside the institution: mimicking corporations, the new museum likes to cite market forces, politi- cal circumstances and changing times (shifting markets, global trends, competition) as the trigger for its actions, in the process giving them an almost Biblical inevitability that is safely beyond review or criticism.

Ultimately, it is irrelevant how decisions are arrived at or who drives and implements them. For the sake of the present argu- ment, it is sufficient to look at the results. What has the late-cap- italist museum, post-Krauss and post-Krens, become? What are its hallmarks? What are its particular qualities and weaknesses? I will focus my analysis on the three areas where almost all muse- um activity is now concentrated: architecture, permanent col- lections and temporary exhibitions and displays. How have the politics and demands of the new museum affected architecture, collecting policies and exhibition-making? How has the desire to attract large audiences impinged on these core areas? How has the escalating need for non-public income (sponsorship and box office) shaped museum agendas? What are the positive and the negative results of the paradigmatic shift set in motion over the last two decades? What bearing have these changes had on the museum's standing in the wider cultural and political context? And how will all this determine our future understanding of and attitude to museums?

Architecture

Architecture and location have always been the visible calling cards of the museum. They are a public statement of its cultural ambition, A prominent geographical location marks the muse- um's exalted civic status, its central place in the fabric of a city in particular and of a nation in general. By locating the national museum in the former royal palace, the French revolutionaries in 1792 set a precedent that has been followed ever since: the choice of place signified both the exceptional status and the central- ity of the new institution in national discourse. If the choice of location remained important, so did the choice of architectural

162 THE CURATOR'S EGG DEMOCRACY OF SPECTACLE: THE MUSEUM REVISITED 163

language. The exterior of the building prepared the visitor for what to expect inside. Architecture left no doubt about what the museum was about, articulating the cultural hierarchy upheld within. Consequently, variations on classical models remained a hallmark of museum architecture well into the twentieth century. Even high-modernist buildings, such as Mies van der Rohe's Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin (1965-1968), were loaded with classical references. This remained the rule, more-or-less, for nearly two centuries.

However, something strange seems to have happened to museum architecture over the last two decades: buildings have become autonomous, by severing the link, first, between exterior and interior and, secondly and even more problem- atically, between interior and content. It is tempting to place Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao (1993-1997) at the beginning of this trajectory; but, with hindsight, the Neue Pinakothek in Munich (1977-1981) and James Stirling's Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart (1981-1984) are the true precursors, their conceptual radicalism masked by nineteenth century ref- erences (to Schinkel's 1825-1828 Alte Museum in Berlin in par- ticular). In this respect, Stirling's well-known quip at the open- ing of the Staatsgalerie that it would have looked better without art, was prescient. Since then, architects have increasingly taken liberties and created buildings that pay less and less attention to the requirements of art and artists. Gradually, museum archi- tecture has emancipated itself from its function. If, in Bilbao, Gehry made at least half-hearted concessions to the needs of the museum and shoe-horned, albeit uncomfortably, relatively conventional galleries into the folds of his baroque exterior, more recent architects seem to be no longer willing to make even such basic allowances. Daniel Liebeskind's Jewish Museum in Berlin (1997-1999) is a building that has been much complimented for its eloquent symbolism, but this held true only as long as the museum remained empty. Once the curators installed their exhibits, the interiors became a claustrophobic, cluttered mess: content and envelope were aggressively at odds."'

The result is not always as disastrous, and in the majority of cases the mismatch is merely irritating. At Tate Modern (1996-2000), Herzog and de Meuron's curious lack of willingness to consider the

164 THE CURATOR'S EGG

181

The same happened more recently in San Francisco at the new De Young Museum (by Herzog and de Meuron, opened 2005)

182

The result will no doubt replicate what happened in Barcelona with Richard Meier's Museum of Contemporary Art, a museum forever in search of an identity and mission.

183

See: Suzabbe Greub and Thierry Greub, Museums in the 21st Century: Concepts, Projects, Buildings [exhibition catalogue] (Munich, Berlin, London and New York: Prestel, 2006) pp 138-139.

184

Greub and Greub (eds), op cit., p 138.

185

Greub and Greub (eds), op cit., p 138.

basic requirements of the museum continues to interfere with the art on display. Their insistence on installing fluorescent lighting has been one of the most frequently discussed faults of the build- ing, as has their insistence (against all professional advice) of lay- ing raw oak flooring that was to acquire a patina through use over time. The result is an interior that looks forever gloomy and grub- by. Another example of this disregard for function is Tadao Ando's Fort Worth Art Museum (1999-2002), a building so severely mod- ernist that works of art within it merely play a supporting role. In the opening displays, a Warhol self-portrait at the top of the main staircase appeared like ornamentation - a detail - the sole pur- pose of which, it seemed, was to throw the architecture into higher relief. More recently, Zaha Hadid's Museum of Contemporary Art in Rome (begun in 2005) is a building that seems to have been commissioned with no other brief in mind than the creation of a landmark, a museum without collection, exhibition programme or declared purpose."' The exterior has finally taken over at the expense of all else. If anything, this trend has accelerated over recent years: a recent traveling exhibition 'Museums in the zist Century: Concepts, Projects, Buildings' documented about two dozen current projects (including Hadid's Rome museum), every one of unprecedented theatricality, as if an entire generation of architects was suddenly inspired solely by German Expressionist cinema."' Centrifugal, exploding, expanding, dynamic, throb- bing, pulsating, pivoting, sculptural, operatic, delirious, high-oc- tane, futuristic, narcissistic - this is only a small catalogue of the adjectives useful in describing the latest crop of museum projects. These are buildings in which art plays a secondary part and, at the most extreme, is done away with altogether. For example, in the Museum of the Hellenic Word in Asia Minor, in Athens (currently under construction), Anamorphosis Architects 'translate the con- text to be depicted - the history of Hellenistic Asia Minor, from beginnings to the present day - into spatial experience, or, as they themselves call it, a three-dimensional monument'. 1" Their 'anti- object concept of exhibitions is, in the first place, a criticism of the collecting and purchasing activities of museums [.. .] Secondly it is a

criticism of architecture that mutates into an advertising medi- um.' 185 A new generation of architects, it seems, has appropriated Krauss's critique and adopted it as their credo.

DEMOCRACY OF SPECTACLE: THE MUSEUM REVISITED 165

By and large, architects' accelerating claims to autonomy as far as the function of museums is concerned have gone unchal- lenged. One reason is, perhaps, that a museum's quest for fund- ing is made much easier by presenting funders (public or private) with an emblematic landmark building. In this equation, con- ventional functionality is of little concern.

As for the dozen or so books on recent museum architecture, they too note the divergence between form and function only in passing. They are, without exception, authored by architectural historians or architecture critics and thus written from the archi- tect's perspective. They comment on the emancipation of muse- um architecture from function but do not take issue with it. It is also noticeable that the majority of illustrations in these publi- cations show buildings empty, devoid of art or visitors. To my knowledge, no museum director or curator has gone on record to criticise this disturbing development in museum architecture, recalling the fraught relationship between architect and client satirised by Tom Wolfe in From Bauhaus to our House."6 Instead, curators muddle through at great cost and effort with buildings barely suitable for the function they were supposedly designed to accommodate.

The choice of architectural language, or the disconnection of form and function, is not the only problem; it is also the scale of many museums that brings buildings into conflict with the art on display. The most notorious example is the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, a space that, as a matter of course, dwarfs any work of art shown within it, presenting artists with a challenge that they have rarely met successfully. The same holds true for the huge central atrium and the enormous gallery devoted to con- temporary art in Yoshio Taniguchi's new Museum of Modern Art in New York (1995-2003) or the oversize special exhibition hall at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. 187 The gigantic museum not only makes the art on display look unimportant, as Krauss observed, but it also leaves the visitor dissatisfied, lost in a labyrinth and unable to take it all in. (It is no coincidence that small, intimate museums remain so loved by the public).

As yet, no lessons have been learned from all of this. Tate Modern's proposed glass ziggurat South Tower (also by Herzog and de Meuron) seems to combine the worst of these twin

166 THE CURATOR'S EGG

186

London: Jonathan Cape, 1982.

187

This was a battle in which the Guggenheim's curators finally conceded defeat The hall is now filled with a large group of sculptures by Richard Serra, on display for an initial term of twenty-five years.

188

Since writing the plans have been heavily revised, the building is now brick clad.

trends, excessive theatricality and gargantuan scale.'" It is yet another stark example of the architectural narcissism now preva- lent, another massive site-specific sculpture that will dominate and interfere with the scale of an existing building and dwarf both art and visitor.

It may appear some form of poetic justice that this new type of museum architecture as spectacle rises and falls by the same principle - the rule of its own inflationary aesthetic: one Guggenheim Bilbao may be exhilarating, a succession of clones is boring. As hyper-expressionist buildings have become the norm, they no longer register as exceptional landmarks but merely as predictable signifiers of a museum. Their originality has quickly turned banal. Their dysfunctional theatricality has become a debased currency, no longer able to sustain interest for long. The architecture is literally consumed by the onlooker, to be discarded as casually as last season's fashion accessory or the latest must-have technological gizmo. That, a mere six years after opening, Tate Modern felt it necessary to commission a land- mark addition, gives a measure of this acceleration.

Financial circumstances permitting, it is easy to conceive of a future where museum buildings might be erected as temporary pavilions, ongoing displays of avant-garde architecture, raised up and torn down without much ado, with all institutional ener- gy and care forever focused on the skin. That many of the new buildings seem to be conservation time-bombs may only rein- force such a trend: so technologically advanced and complex has contemporary architecture become, that long-term maintenance may no longer be a feasible option.

Exhibiting

If the democracy of spectacle favours an architecture that is theatrical and that turns the museum into a locus per se, a venue that is visited and experienced for its own sake, the way in which works are exhibited and the choice of what is displayed follows a similar logic.

Up until the late 1970s, while the permanent collection retained centre stage, temporary exhibitions were a comparatively

DEMOCRACY OF SPECTACLE: THE MUSEUM REVISITED 167

rare occurrence in museums. This hierarchy has not only been gradually reversed, but has almost entirely dissolved: while tem- porary exhibitions have become the lifeblood of museums, per- manent displays have become temporary, endlessly changing and evolving. It should follow that a much wider range of exhib- its is shown, a broader canon is explored and a greater propor- tion of the museum's holdings is put on display, even if only in rotation. Yet oddly, this temporalisation of the museum has cre- ated the opposite effect: although the number of museums (and other exhibition venues) has grown exponentially, the canon of what is on view (both in temporary exhibitions or semi-perma- nent displays) has stagnated, if not actually shrunk. The need for box-office success has ensured this. It has made museums, as far as their display and exhibition policies are concerned, entire- ly risk-averse. Not only are curators no longer willing to take chances in their displays and exhibition programmes, they can no longer afford to do so. In their new expansionist and success- driven incarnation, like their counterparts in the film and pub- lishing industries, museums have come to rely on the tried and tested. To do otherwise would be to commit commercial suicide. Just as the film industry counts on sequels to guarantee a box- office hit, and publishing conglomerates focus on bestsellers at the expense of more challenging literature, the risk-averse new museum, now a self-declared part of the cultural industry, focus- es relentlessly on the iconic, the already famous, the perennial favourites: Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, the great artists of the twentieth century. Playing to the gallery, it favours an art that is literal (anything figurative), emotional (emotion is easier to appeal to than the intellect), issue-driven (yet never radically political). It champions whenever possible an art where autobiog- raphy and work are inextricably linked (Caravaggio, Van Gogh, Modigliani, Frida Kahlo, Diane Arbus, Tracey Emin). The new museum's media of choice are film, video and photography, easy to comprehend, easy to install and in many cases requiring only the most superficial engagement from the viewer. Video and film can turn entire enfilades of galleries into virtual multiplexes. The new museum prefers installations to single works, because it likes its visitor engulfed, caught up in the theatrics on offer, enraptured and overcome by spectacle.

189

Anglornania', Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (May 3 to September 4, 2006).

190

`Fashion Show: Paris Collections 2006', Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (November t2, 2006, to March 18, 2007).

191

`Nan Kempner: American Chic', Metropolitan Museum ofArt, New York (December r2., 2006, to March 4, 2007)

For obvious reasons, exhibitions dedicated to fashion have become more frequent. If fashion signals the ultimate in con- sumer disengagement - its rationale no more than theatre and entertainment - its arrival in the new museum makes perfect sense: fashion's agenda of recasting content as style, re-invent- ing art object as ornamental back-drop and reducing history to a mere source for periodical revivals, meshes neatly with the new museum's own anti-historical inclinations and its goal to re- position art as entertainment. Conceptually and intellectually, the new breed of fashion exhibition takes the museum closer to Hello! than, say, October magazine. In place of critical dis- tance - analysis of how fashion works, how it is arrived at and how it is disseminated - the new museum is content merely to capture or replicate fashion's theatricality. It suspends curato- rial judgment and offers in its place something approximating to the spectacle and immediacy of an actual fashion moment. In this respect, fashion exhibitions have become hard-core. In zoo5, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York staged the exhibition Anglomanid, a meaningless romp through zoo years of British fashion.'" Set in the museum's English period rooms against the backdrop of one of the world's greatest collections of English furniture, each room offered a different tableaux (the gentlemen's club', 'the English garden', `upstairs/downstairs'), mixing historic and contemporary clothing. The effect was one of de-historicisation, an intentional blurring of the line between original and copy, where the past was reduced to an open-ended resource for style choices and where questions of authenticity no longer mattered - Orwellian curating. A year later, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston mounted 'Fashion Show'.19° Focusing on the clothes from the current couture collections of nine Parisian fashion houses, the display consisted of mannequins dressed by each of the nine designers accompanied by the respective house's most recent promotional video. Nowhere near approaching the glamorous pitch of Anglomania', the exhibition was deeply disappointing to view, and turned out to be a box-office flop. Concurrent with this, the Metropolitan Museum opened 'Nan Kempner: American Chic' to show off the late socialite's stupen- dous couture wardrobe.'" On the other side of the Atlantic, the Victoria &Albert Museum followed suit with `Kylie Minogue:

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The Exhibition' 192 Defending the show, a museum spokesperson half-heartedly declared that 'We hope this exhibition will attract students of fashion and stage costume design', while the aca- demic Lisa Jardine (a trustee of the V&A), in a let-them-eat-cake moment, affirmed that 'It is certainly not our job to be elitist'.193

To accommodate the new museum's need for undemanding aesthetic spectacle, art history has had to be selectively re-written. In the case of Picasso, for example, the critical discourse of the last twenty years or so has largely focused on the biography-work dichotomy, as if his stylistic evolution were entirely prompted by changing personal circumstances, in place of a more formalist analysis of his wuvre- a bias reflected in numerous recent museum exhibitions dedicated to the artist. Meanwhile, Krauss's implica- tion of Minimalism in the formation and politics of the new muse- um has been taken up by Hal Foster in his alarmingly entitled essay 'Dan Flavin and the Catastrophe of Minimalism'.194 Foster appears to blame Flavin for a subsequent misinterpretation of Minimalism, which is about as reasonable as holding Mies van der Rohe responsible for every glass box erected since the open- ing of the Seagram Building. But both Krauss and Foster con- cede that it is in the rewriting of the history of Minimalism that the problem lies: an intentional misreading of the historic record by shifting the focus from the centre of the movement to the margins, where an art whose nature fits better with the require- ments of the new museum is sited.

This shift may be illustrated by comparing the work of Flavin and James Turrell. Flavin's is an art of controlled rationality. The effect of his work (however beautiful or theatrical it may be) is counterbalanced by the open display of its source (the 'specific object'). Flavin's aim is to set up a dialectic between the spe- cific object and the theatrical potential that is invoked, revoked and invoked again, ad infinitum. The theatrical potential upon which he touches is at its extreme a directionless emotional blur- ring, surpassing the realm of beauty and quickly entering, with- out warning, a zone of emotion evoked for its own sake; in short - kitsch -a faux spirituality, religiosity without religion, affect without object. Flavin is effectively playing with fire, but he does so consciously and, above all, he makes the viewer not only aware of his intention but participatory in the dialectic he has

192

Wylie Minogue: The Exhibition', Victoria and Albert Museum, London, (February 8 to June to, 2007).

193

Quoted in: Vanessa Thorpe, 'V &A Under Fire Over Kylie Show', The Observer, February 4, 2.007, p r8.

194

In: Jeffrey Weiss (ed), Dan Flavin: New Light [exhibition catalogue] (New Haven, London and Washington Dc: Yale University Press and National Gallery of Art, 2006), pp 133-151

set up. This 'reality check' does not occur in the work of Turrell. What this artist offers is the opposite: his is an art of old-fash- ioned illusionism. It is an art of effect that is entirely focused on the theatrical potential, its source rendered invisible. In lieu of Flavin's modernist rationality, Turrell presents the open-ended illusion of a synthetic spirituality and ersatz mysticism, a profu- sion without profundity, the illusion of emotion in place of true feeling and engagement. His elevated place in the pantheon of the new museum may be entirely at odds with his actual historic contribution, but it is commensurate with the important role he plays within the institution: he provides a fail-safe ride for the new museum theme park, easy on the mind and easy on the eye, visually compelling, all-engulfing and theatrical.

Another artist who has come to prominence in the new muse- um is Bill Viola. Liberally quoting Old Master references, Viola empties his religious subject matter of all meaning and recasts it as objet de luxe, the ultimate consumer object. His theatre of emotion finds its match in a hysterical viewer: when spectators cry on viewing his work, as they often do, they really only weep at their own tears. Conceived on a grand scale to the highest pro- duction standards, Viola's art is the video version of high-Victo- rian painting. If Turrell provides the new-age ride to the muse- um, Viola contributes its spiritual equivalent, a hollow emotion that is in the end undemanding, empty and disengaged.

The greatest difference between Flavin, on one hand, and Turrell and Viola, on the other, is where they leave their view- ers. Flavin empowers his, makes them active participants in the constitution of the work. His audience is in charge and fully con- scious, whereas Turrell's and Viola's viewers are disempowered, overwhelmed and emotionally manipulated. Running between active participant and passive consumer, this is exactly the same fault line that divides the old and the new museum.

Collecting

In the old museum, the collection was the main focus of cura- torial attention, a permanent fixture towards which scholarship, research and acquisition policies were directed. The collection's

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content and particular shape, its eccentricities, strengths and weaknesses, set the terms of reference for all the museum's other activities. Conceptually, permanent displays and the collection were perceived as one and the same. This is not the case in the new museum. Displays have gone from static to forever chang- ing, to such a degree that they increasingly resemble tempo- rary exhibitions. This obviously affects the way in which cura- tors view the collections in their charge. For a new generation of curators, collections need to be constantly refreshed and are perceived merely as a resource, a pool from which temporary displays can endlessly be drawn and loans to other institutions granted, but no longer as an entity that adds up to more than the sum of its parts. This conceptual dematerialisation of the col- lection has become one of the hallmarks of the new museum. Since the collection is no longer thought of as an entity, it can no longer help set the points of reference for acquisition decisions. As a result, purchases have inevitably become random, either dictated almost exclusively by personal taste and inclination or, at the other extreme, fashion- and market-driven. As time goes by, the collection as a resource becomes a self-fulfilling proph- ecy: the long-term outcome is not a collection but a heterogene- ous assemblage of objects.

When a museum's collection is no longer seen as an organic entity with a particular character and a history of its own, de-ac- cessioning is the next logical step. Adopting euphemistic manage- ment speak (indicating at least a trace of shame about what it is proposing), the new museum justifies its actions by claiming that it is only 're-focusing its activities', 'rationalising its collecting activities', 'diversifying', 'maximising its assets' or 'strengthening its core mission'. (`Core mission' is a favourite buzz-word in new- museum speak.) The benefit to the long-term interest of the insti- tution is always invoked. The deceptive simplicity and rationale of this language barely manages to hide the fact that, under its cover, acts of cultural vandalism are being performed against both the fabric and history of institutions. Not only do objects disappear, but institutional memory is erased into the bargain.

In recent years, de-accessioning has become more prevalent. In Europe, where the subject used to be taboo, it is now openly discussed by curators and politicians. In America, the practice

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195

See, for instance: Torn L. Freudenheim, 'Shuffled Off in Buffalo', Wall Street journal, November 15, zoo6; and Christopher Knight, 'Cashing in or Selling Out ?', Los Angeles Times, January 54, 2.007.

196

Sotheby's press release, November so, 2.006. Artemis and the Stagsold the following June for $z5:5 million, the highest price ever paid at auction for a sculpture.

is no longer restricted to minor examples or duplicates from the print room, but is extended to major works ofwhich any museum might be envious. In 2003, for example, the Museum of Modern Art sold three highly important paintings by Modigliani, Picasso and Pollock, in the process raising over $5o million. More recent- ly, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery's decision to divest itself of a group of major works from its small historic collection in order to establish a contemporary art endowment fund, drew particu- larly harsh criticism.'" It was not only the quality of the works consigned for sale that caused disquiet. Sotheby's (appointed to handle the sales) described the de-accessioned Granite Figure of Shiva as Brahma (tenth-eleventh century) as 'without ques- tion the greatest Indian sculpture ever to appear on the market', and the Roman bronze Artemis and the Stag (first century BC/ AD) as 'among the very finest large classical bronze sculptures in America'.196 The idea that a museum was providing the market with such gems and that these works would inevitably end up in private hands - that de facto the privatisation of public cultural assets was taking place - struck many observers as deeply trou- bling. That this was done in order to purchase contemporary art did not help matters: was the museum not in fact entering an already overcrowded niche market with too little cash, too late? Significant works by the most coveted contemporary artists are rarely available, fiercely fought over and often very expensive.

If the de-accessioning trend continues, it will have major repercussions for the future of museum collections. Ultimately, it will debase the concept of perpetual public ownership - the main justification for generous tax concessions in the United States and public and charitable grants in Europe. These concessions will obviously become vulnerable to scrutiny. If de-accessioning evolves into an acceptable practice, it will lay museums open to politically motivated raids of their collections, as happened for the first time in the UK in 2006 when Bury Metropolitan Council sold at auction for £m million a painting by L.s. Lowry from the collection of Bury Art Gallery and Museum in order to balance the council budget. Such actions will inevitably deter donors from giving their works to museums since the future fate of their gifts is no longer guaranteed, however exceptional their quality. It will also make museums susceptible to many more

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restitution claims by nation states, since the present defence of perpetual public ownership for the public good could no longer reasonably be invoked.197

Ambivalence about the museum on the part of curators, visitors, artists and politicians is not a new phenomenon. The history of museums demonstrates that each constituent group has, at various times, raised different objections and expressed all kinds of dissatisfaction and doubts about the systems in place. The difference now is that the disquiet the new museum is causing is almost universal. What is worrying is that, in the end, every participant in the new museum feels short-changed, frustrated or disappointed. By the measure of its own standards and declared intentions, the new museum has not lived up to its promise. Having recast the visitor as a consumer, it has elic- ited the response of a consumer: never satisfied and always on the lookout for more. However much visitors may be attracted to the spectacle of the new museum and however much they may be conditioned by it, they still expect the museum to deliver all the qualities of the old museum as well. They continue to believe in the institutional superiority, impartiality and the guarantee of the highest quality. In the visitor's mind the museum is still syn- onymous with an educational mission of high culture. Visitors still have absolute trust in the museum's integrity and its abil- ity to deliver. And their disappointment is twofold: they are dis- satisfied that the spectacle on offer - exhibitions, architecture, services - is not bigger, more theatrical, more spectacular; and they are disillusioned that their trust in the institution has been betrayed - they are beset by the nagging suspicion that they have been offered sub-standard fare.

Curators are also unhappy with their role. Their curatorial independence has gradually been eroded. They are no longer the specialist scholar-curators of the past, who stood at the centre of the institution. In the new museum, they find themselves at the nexus of an exhibition industry in which their role is reduced to administrator and where exhibitions do not benefit from their scholarship but are staged from purely financial motives. The curator's mandate is now to provide, above all, commercially viable entertainment. As for choices of exhibitions and displays, these are no longer exclusively the curator's, but are dictated by

197

Private restitution claims have already become much more frequent, actively supported by specialist lawyers and supply-starved auction houses.

198

The relationship between these two branches of art history is explored in: Charles W. Haxthausen (ed), The Two Art Histories: The Museum and the University (London and New Haven: Yale University Press, zooz).

commercial imperatives and institutional politics. There is no room any more for the curious, the neglected, the adventurous, the eccentric; no place for the untried or untested. Most wor- ryingly, there is no room for scholarship. There is no call for it either, because scholarship, by the logic of the new museum, does not serve an identifiable purpose - it does not contribute to the financial bottom line. As a result, art history has retreated from the museum to the university. For the first time, the vast majority of new art-historical research is now taking place out- side museums. 19 8

Artists' attitudes towards the museum have also grown more ambivalent. In the past, artists could rely on a life-long support stream, with input from various interested parties at different points in their career - support from adventurous young deal- ers and collectors at the outset, followed by exhibition invita- tions from small museums and Kunsthalles, then interest from blue-chip collectors, big museums, secondary-market deal- ers and auction houses, and finally the offer of a retrospective in a major institution. This trajectory gave artists the time and means to develop their ideas. Today, all interest groups fish in the same pond simultaneously, creating instant market bubbles and hysteria wherever the attention turns. After 2002, for exam- ple, photography became ubiquitous for two or three seasons, to be abruptly replaced, first by New German painting, then by contemporary Chinese art. The pressure on artists to seize the moment and serve these demands has never been greater.

When an artist's work is put on display in the new museum, it is subsumed by the general theatre of the venue, interpreted, branded and homogenised. Artwork is no longer considered on its own merit, but becomes a variable in the overall equation of the democracy of spectacle. It is not read in isolation but as part of a chain of stimuli selected and calibrated to keep the client-vis- itor amused: the artist's autonomy is sacrificed to the institution's overreaching corporate ambition. In this scenario, the museum has lost the privileged place it held for artists as an intellectual sanctuary, where their rights were protected and their wishes respected above all else. The new museum no longer constitutes a special, safe realm but is part of an encroaching and all-consum- ing malaise: on one hand the market place, where artists' work is

174 THE CURATOR'S EGG DEMOCRACY OF SPECTACLE: THE MUSEUM REVISITED 175

literally consumed, on the other hand, the museum, where the consumption is metaphorical, where their art is offered as diver- sion and entertainment. Carsten Holler seemed to have been commenting ironically on this development in his Turbine Hall commission at Tate Modern in zoo6, when he filled the space with a series of slides. An irresistible attraction for tens of thou- sands of screaming children, the slides promptly swept Tate Modern to the top of that year's Inc museum attendance table. Yet, in the end, Holler merely highlighted a dilemma without suggesting a solution to it, and one suspects that his installation may have been less critique than resigned collaboration. In the new museum, the artist finds himself reduced to mere content provider, a handmaiden to corporate dreams. The artist's role, previously at the centre of the museum, has become, like every- one else's, marginal.

Over time, the new museum has manoeuvred itself into a pre- carious position. It has adopted the circular, inescapable logic of the corporate market place with its overreaching fixation on expansion, competition and growth, a logic that has quickly come to over-rule every other institutional consideration. It has bred a generation of visitors who are, as far as their entertainment expectations are concerned, endlessly demanding. New build- ings, major exhibitions, forever expanding services, all pander to these expectations at an ever-escalating cost. Yet, however much the museum likes to see itself as a corporate entity, in reality it is not. Unlike big business, museums cannot tap into the capital markets to finance their capital projects and they cannot borrow to deal with temporary shortfalls or unforeseen reversals. Most cannot even run a deficit legally. There is no mechanism for the deferment of financial pressures by means of taking out over- drafts or issuing bonds. Unlike corporations, museums do not run reserves; they are zero-sum businesses - that is to say, income is immediately spent (this is why museums can sincerely claim to be perennially under-funded, irrespective of how successful they are). There is no room for error, and thus the pressure to attract huge crowds (if not paying then at least spending) is so relent- less that it over-rides all other considerations. The precariousness

176 THE CURATOR'S EGG

199

The Guggenheim Museum found itself in particularly dire straits, but many other American and European museums (including the British Museum and Tate Modern) were likewise affected.

209

Karina Robinson, 'Banking Matters: Banks Getting Deeper into the ArtWorld', InternittionalHeralcl Tribune, Januarys, 2007.

of the situation became clear a few months after the terrorist attacks on September it, zoo', when museums on both sides of the Atlantic faced major financial difficulties following a steep drop in tourism."' Fortunately, the downturn did not last long, but it was an unwelcome reminder of how vulnerable most insti- tutions have become.

The reliance on large attendance figures, combined with an expansive mindset, has created its own irrefutable logic: in order to survive, the new museum has to keep expanding. This self- justifying logic is flawless and is the reason why politicians are so weary of museums' incessant demands for funding: they are by nature open-ended and limitless.

To meet these financial demands, the new museum acts more and more like a business and less and less like a museum. Fundraising activities become increasingly aggressive, no com- mercial opportunity is left unturned, no ruse to earn money passed up. In the process, museums are moving further and further away from the ideals of their past. A blind eye is turned to the agenda of those signing the cheques. Ann Drew, Head of Sponsorship at uss for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, recently explained the bank's involvement in art sponsorship as follows: 'We have a number of different deliverables around our sponsorship investments: to create brand awareness, favour- able opportunities for client entertaining and networking and, of course, bringing our employees with us and, where appropri- ate, our community partners.' 200 Never mind the language (I particularly like the cryptic 'where appropriate, our community partners', by which I imagine is meant the museum's general audience), it is quite clear that this is no longer sponsorship but a business transaction that returns to sponsors the exact benefit equivalent of their cash contributions, an exercise in mutual, bank-museum brand enhancement. This is not sponsorship; it is renting out a museum as a glamorous networking venue.

All of the new museum's activities are first considered from a financial perspective. The museum's public-interest mandate is interpreted in ever narrower ways, ultimately only to serve the institution's self-interest. Other museums are no longer viewed as colleagues but as cash cows from which origination fees for exhibitions and, increasingly, fees for loans of works of art can

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be milked. Whenever there is a conflict between the financial demands of the new museum and the old museum ethos, finan- cial demands inevitably take precedence, because financial con- cerns have to be addressed immediately while questions of ethos can be debated forever, compromised, obfuscated or ignored.

The great danger in behaving like a business is that ultimately one will be treated like one. It is conceivable that, over time, the entire special status of the museum may be lost: state-funding, tax concessions, public trust - everything that made museumspossible - might one day be denied by a politician who could jus- tifiably claim that no difference exists between a museum and any other commercial enterprise. In a crisis, having traded the hard currency of public trust for corporate dreams, the museum may no longer be offered help but will be taken at its own word and allowed to fail - just like any other business that doesn't live up to market expectation. At this point, it will be too late toinvoke the special pact between museum and public. Everybody will have forgotten.

Do so many problems, so much discontent, so much unease, not point to a more fundamental flaw at the heart of the new museum and the democracy of spectacle it espouses? I believe thatthe democracy of spectacle is, in fact, a contradiction in terms, an oxymoron. Born out of radical revolutionary politics, the public museum is vested with extraordinary powers and weighty responsibilities: to establish and uphold the cultural framework that provides the backdrop of all social and political discourse. To exercise these powers responsibly, ethically and for public ben- efit is the museum's central aim. It needs to encourage informed, empowered, independent-minded

participant-visitors, who in turn are willing to be informed further, to have their knowledge expanded, their horizons opened and their curiosity affirmed. This is the pact between the museum and its visitors and, by extension, between the museum and society. To discharge itsduties and retain the public trust should be the museum's main goal, the single consideration that over-rules all others.

There should be no limit on the intellectual ambition the museum has for its audience. Spectacle, however, relies on a pas-sive consumer who is offered ever-escalating stimuli, yet none- theless remains disengaged, bored and dissatisfied. Spectacle, in

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201

See: Tony Blair's speech on the arts, given at Tate Modern, London, on March 6, 2,007, as reported in: Charlotte Higgins, `Blair Reminisces about Labour's "Golden Age" of the Arts', The Guardian, March 6, zirmy, p 18.

the final analysis, is anti-democratic (and it is no coincidence that it plays such an important role in totalitarian society: it trains passivity and propagates ignorance). This is where the democ- racy of spectacle in the museum collapses. It perverts the muse- um's original idea by placing the institutional interest above the visitor's. It eschews public responsibility and holds itself account- able to no one. It is an abdication of the museum's historic duty and it will ultimately lead to its downfall. But it is not yet too late. Public trust is frayed but has not been completely eroded. In order to stop the rot, directors must set aside their corporate fantasies, abdicate their dreams of eternal growth and limit- less expansion, renounce their big-business swagger. It is time for architects to put works of art first and architecture second; time for trustees to reign in their CEO directors and call them to account; time for politicians to stop insisting that museums serve social or political purposes (be they economic or regenera- tive) instead of supporting institutions for their own sake.'" It is time for curators to follow their scholarly instincts and to reclaim their power (vested in them by the public). It is time for museums to return to their true business: preserving what lies in their care, and furthering knowledge. It is time for museums to empower, challenge, thrill and uplift their visitors, without compromise or shortcuts, always remaining aware of their duty and mindful of their privileged status in society. Lisa Jardine is wrong when she says: 'It is certainly not our job to be elitist'. It is the museum's raison d'être: to be elitist for everybody.

September 2008

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