Todays Museum: Innovation, Change, and Challenge

Steven Lubar Museums at the Crossroads

Mathers Museum, Indiana University

May 2015

1 Pleasure to be here Thanks to the team at the Mather Museum for the invitation. Thanks for the introduction.

About the title: its scary. Im not sure who came up with it but its a challenge.

Todays Museum: Innovation, Change, and Challenge

2 Lets take a look at it. For one thing, why is challenge at the end? Shouldnt the challenge come first? Is innovation the challenge? Or change? And is the change from yesterday to today, or today to tomorrow? I started to play with it

Todays Museum: Challenge, Innovation, and Change

3 What if challenge came first? That way, we could see what museums have a hard time with - what challenges them - and think about the innovations necessary, and what change that might lead to.

And then theres the question of todays museum - I believe that todays museums need to innovate and change because of where theyve come from. And we can only understand that, I think, with a longer view. So we could add a historical element

Museums Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow: Challenge, Innovation, and Change

4 This provides us a nice historical perspective. I am increasing fascinated by museum history, both for its own sake, and as a way of thinking through future possibilities. Museum history is remarkably rich, almost to the point where there seems very little that museums havent already tried. There are new technologies, new possibilities, and new demands; but they build on both a long culture of museum thinking, and also a culture of change.

Challenge, Innovation, and Change

5 I want to suggest, in this talk, that museums struggle with change in part because they have adopted a set of rules, a set of ideas about how things are supposed to be done. They have internalized these rules so that they dont even think about them. In this talk, I want to ask: what are those rules? Where do they come from? How do they keep us from doing what we ought to be doing? How do they keep us from innovating and changing?

We need to know where weve come from to understand what keeps us from changing to be what we want to be, to go where we want to go. SO the first question is

What are the rules?

6 What are the rules? What are the unwritten rules of museums? What rules have museum people internalized? Before you can break the rules, or change the rules, you must know what they are a quick set - not definitive, but to get you thinking

and mostly these are good! Need to know when to break them.

Ive exaggerated a bit here, for educational purposes!

Metropolitan Museum of Art, Directors Agreement with Curators, June 10, 1886

7 First, though, some actual curator rules. This Directors Agreement with Curators, from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is the earliest list of rules for curators that I know of.

Curators have entire charge of their respective Departments and are independent of each other. Thats still pretty much the case today at the Met.

Metropolitan Museum of Art, Directors Agreement with Curators, June 10, 1886

8 Curators are responsible for the safekeeping and preservation of all art objects.

Metropolitan Museum of Art, Directors Agreement with Curators, June 10, 1886

9 Curators keep a property book. Theyre registrars, not just curators. And again, by department, not across the museum.

Metropolitan Museum of Art, Directors Agreement with Curators, June 10, 1886

10 They report once a month to the director about what theyve done. This is when the director finds out whats been collected.

Metropolitan Museum of Art, Directors Agreement with Curators, June 10, 1886

11 There are some practice things here, as well. No more than one curator at a time shall be absent a whole day from the Museum. Worth noting that there were only two curators at the time!

Professor William H. Goodyear, first curator of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Portrait by Wilford S. Conrow 1916. Brooklyn Museum.

12 This, by the way, is one of the two men these rules applied to: William H. Goodyear, first curator at the Met.

Rules and Regulations of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1889

13 A few years later, the Met published an entire book of rules.

Rules and Regulations of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1889

14 In these new rules, the director has a bit more say. It seems the curators decide what to put on display, the director arranges it, and the curators label it. Must have made for interesting management problems!

THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART

Circular Letter to Curators

I ATTACH a copy of regulations to be followed in recording the location and condition of objects of art in all departments except the Library and the Department of Prints, which have their own specialized forms of records. I wish you would, as promptly as possible, take the steps necessary to put them into effect. The following notes are for your guidance in so doing:

z. LOCATION RECORDS Cards for use under Rule B are to be obtained from the Storekeeper,

who will have a supply of special guide cards on which to enter case numbers. Ordinary guide cards should be filled in with the number of the gallery, number of storeroom, name of shop, etc., to cover the objects grouped under these heads.

2. INSPECTIONS The special guide cards referred to above constitute forms on which

to enter the records of the opening of cases. The records of the annual checking of each gallery and each storeroom should be entered on the face of the guide cards for these rooms.

While most of the checking of the contents of rooms and cases will probably have to be done by each department during the summer season, the checking of some of the cases will be spread over the year, since a case checked in the course of rearrangement, or opening for some other reason, during the calendar year need not be checked again that year.

3. OBJECTS OF INTRINSIC VALUE Particular attention is directed to these rules. Rules B and C under

this heading are in immediate effect. Therefore, no object of intrinsic

value can be moved out of a department until an extra set of photo- graphs is available. Rule D is not only in effect immediately, but is retroactive; as soon as possible full sets of photographs and descriptions

of objects of intrinsic value now in possession of the Registrar are to be made and turned over to him. The photographing necessary to carry out Rule A is now under way. You will note that one com-

Metropolitan Museum of Art, Circular Letter to Curators, 1935

15 Later rule books at the Met are mostly about keeping good records: recording object moves, photography, conservation, using new forms.

My talk isnt really about this kind of rules, though. But it seemed right to mention the set of rules that guides many curators in the US - the Oce of Personnel Managements curator rules.

Position Classification Standard for Museum Curator Series, GS-1015, Office of Personnel Management, 1962

16 Only in Washington the Oce of Personnel Management position description for curators. These are the 1962 rules, still in use. Museum curators collect, design exhibits, undertake education programs, and do research. and so on, for 16 pages. *

These are the ocial rules they give you an overview of curatorial work in several categories - exhibitions, collecting, objects Big question, of course: what are the real rules?

Exhibition rulesYou know youre in a traditional

exhibition when

17 Start with exhibitions What are the assumptions that go into designing exhibits?

* Another way to think about this: You know youre in a traditional exhibition when

Orderly

18 An exhibition is orderly It takes objects and puts them in an order, to tell a story. Early cabinets of curiosity were not orderly - they were about exceptions, the exotic, the odd, the wonderful. But museums take on their modern form when they are orderly. So compare this.

Musei Wormiani, 1655

19 Worms cabinet of curiosities - a premodern museum -Modern museums display the typical, in an order that tries to make sense of the world; wunderkammer display the strange and wonderful

East India Marine Hall between 1825 and 1867, by James H. Emmerton

20 A symmetrical vision of the world, at the East India Marine Society.

United States National Museum, Smithsonian Institution, 1880

21 At the Smithsonian: a place for everything, and everything in its place. A tidy vision of the world.

Wagner Free Institute of Science, Philadelphia

22 The Wagner Free Institute of Science isnt tidy, but from a distance it suggests an orderliness to the world that is quite endearing. Museums present a view of the world that suggests that orderliness is possible, and preferable.

Fusuns cigarettes, Museum of Innocence, Istanbul

23 Even when displaying the most un-museum like artifacts possible - orderliness suggest its a museum. Cigarettes, on exhibit at the Museum of Innocence by Orhan Pamuk in Istanbul

Alphabetic

Geographic

Chronological

Hierarchical

By category

In order

24 Orderliness has another meaning - things are arranged in a particular order arranged so that they tell a story. According to designer Richard Saul Wurman, only 5 kinds of order.

*****

Timelines

25 Chronology is the easiest kind of order for museums. Its also one that can easily oversimplify, over-order. A history museum focused too narrowly on timelines suggest that history had to happen the way it did, that it follows a pre-ordained path.

Synoptic Series of Invention: Knife, saw, borer, scraper Smithsonian, about 1890

26 Timelines can get complicated in interesting ways. At the turn of the 20th century, the Smithsonians anthropology and technology curators loved to organize things in synoptic series. This was a more complex chronology - not about time, but about progress. Order carries with it ideologies, meanings.

Atwater-Kent Museum, Philadelphia

27 A map filled the lobby of the Atwater Kent Museum, providing a geographic order to Philadelphia history.

But theres more than just orderliness, or putting things in order. Museums suggest, more profoundly that the world is ordered.

disciplined like objects together

makes sense of the world "Those beautiful structures that are so orderly, intelligible and transparent to analysis." Michel Foucault

Ordered

28 By ordered, I mean, they instill a sense of order - * of discipline - that they make an argument about how artifacts relate to each other, and how we relate to artifacts - * how the world works. * Foucault argued that we should understand the world by examining the structures of knowledge. Museums are a good place to do that

Nicolas de Pigage and Christian von Mechel, La galerie lectorale du Dusseldorff; ou, Catalogue raisonn et figur de ses tableaux (Basel, 1778), pl. 19-21

29 This focus on order is clear in the first modern art museums. Lambert Krahe introduced a completely new and modern system of organizing paintings at the Dusseldorf palace in 1770s. His aim was to create a pedagogical display that educated viewers in the art-historical principles of the dierent schools of art. The art museum, from this point on, was not about individual works, but about art history.

A picture collection not arranged by school and artist is as ridiculous as a natural history cabinet arranged without regard to genus, class, or family.

Jean-Baptiste-Pierre Lebrun, art historian,

1793

30 Not just art museums, of course - in fact, art museums were modeled on natural history museums. A picture collection not arranged by school and artist is as ridiculous as a natural history cabinet arranged without regard to genus, class, or family.

Charles Wilson Peale, Portrait of the Artist in his Museum, 1822

31 You can see this in history museums, too. As Gary Kulik has pointed out, Peales pedagogy and taxonomy were better suited to birds and mastodons than to history and human culture. His gallery of heroes made the Revolution tamer, more respectable, and more orderly than it ever could have been. Peales museum oers a combination of orderly display, an ordered display, and a suggestion that the world is orderly.

Charles Wilson Peale and Titian Peale, The Long Room, Interior of Front Room in Peale's Museum, 1822. Detroit Institute of Art

32 Ever wonder what was behind the curtain? This picture gives a better sense of the order of the Peale museum.

The peoples museum should be much more than a house full of specimens in glass cases. It should be a house full of ideas, arranged with the strictest attention to system.

George Brown Goode, Museum-History and Museums of History, 1888

33 There was disagreement about how best to organize exhibits, but there was complete agreement that there had it be organization. Goode, the museum philosopher of the 19th-century Smithsonian, put it thus: museums should be arranged with the strictest attention to system.

Prehistoric Archaeology exhibit in Upper Main Hall, Smithsonian Institution, c. 1879-1903

34 Archaeology and anthropology exhibitions also found order in the world. At the Smithsonian, George Brown Goode urged that anthropology exhibits be classified in a double system: by race, and by the evolution of culture and civilization, across race. (Museums of the Future, p. 259.) - he even suggested putting cases on wheels so that they could be reorganized easily.

Malvina Hoffman, Hall of Races, Field Museum, 1929

35 Orderliness didnt mean correct - Malvina Homans exhibition of the 120 races of the world shows the seductiveness of order -

*

a comic book version of race, perhaps. order makes things too easy.

So what happens when we undermine orderliness? When we subvert categories?

Barnes Foundation, Merion, Pennsylvania. Renoir and chest room 18, 1942. Library of Congress

36 Note start of red triangles exhibitions that break the rules! when you see these - ask whats dierent about these

Dr. Albert Barnes upset the museum world by breaking the rules put furniture and wrought iron on display with his Renoirs - he saw these as aesthetic similarities, not as art-historical evidence.

James McNeil Whistler, Peacock Room, 1876-77, revised 1908, Freer Gallery of Art

37 Whistler Peacock Room was also about personal aesthetic categories originally designed to display Leylands collection of Chinese blue and white porcelain, then used by Freer to present ancient biblical manuscripts he had acquired in Egypt and to organize and display more than 250 ceramics he had collected from throughout Asia.

Martha Glowacki, Rooms of Wonder, Chipstone Foundation / Milwaukee Art Museum, 2008

38 Chipstone installation at Milwaukee Art Museum fine American furniture embedded back into nature harking back to a pre-museum world of wonder cabinets - not about order, but about exception, oddities, even dreams and nightmares.

Fred Wilson, Mining the Museum, Maryland Historical Society, 1991

39 Part of the power of Fred Wilsons work is the way he plays with categories. The label says: metalwork, which is a category that seems appropriate for a museum. But somehow fine silver and slave shackles dont seem to rest easily in our categories.

The Lost Museum, Brown University, 2014

40 This from a long case of artifacts that survive from the Jenks Museum of Natural History - arranged, in a new installation by Mark Dion at Brown University, by degree of decay not the usual way of thinking about museum artifacts, but an appropriate for an exhibition on a museum thats disappeared. Note the orderliness, even an exhibition about disorder.

Haitian vodou altar by Mambo Maude, Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology, 2012

41 Mambo Maude, a voudou priestess, mined the collections of the Haenreer Museum for artifacts that spoke to her of the water goddess La Sirena - many cultures pulled together because of what she saw as a spiritual similarity.

Some of the most interesting museum exhibitions of recent years are those that break the rules, bend the categories, move beyond system. These are exhibits that call attention to the orders and systems that we can too easily take for granted.

Cooper Hewitt Design Museum website, 2015

42 Digital allows many ways into the collection. Seb Chan at the Cooper Hewitt argues that we need to consider the users wants and abilities in designing interfaces to online collections. Tagging was fashionable a decade ago as a way of allowing non-museum categories and terms. Chan suggests that faceted searches across a wide range of categories - color, location, donor, etc., serves users better - it lets users play with the categories. * heres what you get Note - color turns out to be the most popular way of browsing collections.

Designed for looking

43 The next set of rules: exhibits are designed for looking. Ill come back to the fellow peering at museum exhibits with a skiascope in a moment.

Karin Jurick, from the Museum Patrons series, 2010s

44 Exhibits are designed for looking. Artist Karin Jurick captures the essence of museums in her series on Museum Patrons: people looking.

Frank Waller, Interior View of the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Fourteenth Street, 1881

45 Theres a long history of paintings and photographs of people in museums, looking.

Adolphe Vasseur, Palace of Fine Arts, Lille France. 1883

46 Looking closely.

Alcio de Andrade, Louvre Museum, 1993

47 Looking very closely.

This fascination with close looking reaches its ultimate state in Google Cultural Project: a system designed to turn art into brushstrokes

Visitors viewing Brontosaurus skeleton, American Museum of Natural History, 1937

48 Looking and pointing.

Epcot, Disney World, 2003

49 Looking and pointing, virtually

Henri Cartier-Bresson, Leningrad, 1973

50 Staring.

Thomas Hoepker, Picasso's Les Demoiselles dAvignon, The Museum of Modern Art, 2005.

51 Theres a good literature on the particular kind of looking that museums encourage. Here, a fine illustration of the male gaze.

Sherlock Holmes, Museum of the City of London, 2014

52 Even when art and artifacts are replaced by screens, its about looking. Maybe even more so. We know so well how to look at screens.

Saturday Morning Class in the Print Room, Art Gallery of Toronto, circa 1931

53 How might we encourage visitors to move beyond just looking. Here, first close looking, and then drawing. Museum educators are doing wonderful work in this area.

Return to the Sea, National Museum of Natural History, 1964

54 Occasionally, museums are designed for other senses, but not very often. or very well. Hearing - but only as an adjunct to looking. Almost never touching.

American Enterprise, National Museum of American History, opening soon!

55 There are new possibilities for moving beyond looking with new kinds of screen. A new kind of attentiveness, of interaction, is possible.

Strike a Pose, Gallery One, Cleveland Museum of Art, 2014

56 There are new possibilities for moving beyond looking with new kinds of screen. A new kind of attentiveness, of interaction, is possible.

Next: another category of rules how museums put objects in context.

Contextual?

57 The past century has seen a tug of war over what kind of context to provide objects. Just a few examples.

The ideal gallery subtracts from the artwork all cues that interfere with the fact that it is art. The work is isolated from everything that would detract from its own evaluation of itself.

Brian ODoherty, Inside the White Cube, 1976

58 Many art museums have gone almost entirely to art without context. Brian ODoherty explains this in his famous Inside the White Cube. How we look at art how we look in museums changes over time, from many things to look at, to intensive looking at one thing.

Benjamin Ives Gilmans skiascope, from Museum Ideals of Purpose and Method, 1918

59 The best expression of this framing is Benjamin Ives Gilmans skiascope - outlined in his Museum Ideals of Purpose and Method (1918). He presents the skiascope as a device to limit glare, but metaphorically, it does much more than that: it isolates each piece of art.

Art Institute Of Chicago, 1990 Photographer: Thomas Struth.

60 And so we have the white walls of the gallery, each painting given its space, framed in many ways: its literal frame, but also by the edges of the wall, the rope in front, the lighting, the circulation of visitors.

Classical Room, Museum of the Rhode Island Museum of Art, 1939

61 Not everyone bought into this - Alexander Dorner at the RISD Museum tried a range of techniques in his atmospheric rooms: colors, environmental sounds, close listening - about creating an historically resonant emotional context for the art. And theres been a revival, in big art museums, of contextual shows that reconnect the art and decorative arts of a period.

Infinite Variety: Three Centuries of Red and White Quilts, presented by the American Folk Art Museum at the Park Avenue Armory, 2011. Photo by Gavin Ashworth.

62 A remarkable show that broke museum rules by hanging the quilts high in the air - not to be looked at closely, but to be appreciated as a collection, as a set of patterns and colors - as a quilt of quilts!

National Museum, about 1890

63 Anthropology have a dierent way of thinking about context. - here, all pots toghether.

Installation of the Ward Collection in Paris, about 1911

64 Ethnographic artifacts as pure form.

Zulu diorama, Smithsonian, about 1915

65 Ethnography as diorama, an attempt at spatial context - Boass influence here.

Political Authority in Cultures of Africa exhibition, NMNH, about 1969

66 Objects as devices for expert to explain with. Context here is scholarlyknowledge.

African Voices, NMNH, about 1999

67 Finally, opening up to many voices, many stories, personal contexts; not just the expert providing the storyline, but letting the subject speak.

Synoptic series of knives and saws, National Museum, about 1890

68 Technology museums have played with context in a similarly wide-ranging way. From all tools for a similar purpose lined up

Shoe shop, Henry Ford Museum, about 1990

69 to period rooms: one place, one moment in time.

Enough about exhibits lets move on to objects

Object Rules

70 Ill talk about three kinds of object rules - collecting rules, rules about treating objects, and the notion that museums keep objects forever

Collecting Rules

71

Clara Lieu, The Art Prof blog, 2013

72 First, what to collect: What is museum quality? Prof. Lieu, the Art Prof, says: museum quality work is work that talks about contemporary issues, yet is timeless.

While I dont like the notion of museum quality - museums collect should collect work defined in many ways - this combination is not bad: meaningful today, and meaningful in the future, maybe in dierent ways.

Relics, curiosities, personal memorabilia, glorification of specific individuals or specific familiesdo not belong in a public museum. No two-headed calves. No bricks from the old school house or mementos of prominent families.

G. Ellis Burcaw, Introduction to Museum Work, 1975

73 Theres a long history of rules about what to collect - and what not to collect. This is Burcaws famous listing of what isnt museum quality - rules that were designed to professional the museum world - and which are superseded now that were interested in not just history but also the way the public understands and uses history Still no two-headed calves, though.

9/11 Memorial Museum, 2014

74 Weve become much more interested in objects as relics, as sites of memory - the invention of the memorial museum broke Burcaws rules.

The scope of the museum should be strictly defined and limited I think we are all agreed as to the local character predominating Everything not occurring in a state of nature within that boundary should be rigorously excluded.

Sir William Flower, Local Museums, 1891

75 Note Sir Flowers line about state of nature - he wants to collect the pure, things as they were before commercial, global influences. Thats almost impossible, of course, and now we are as interested in those influences as the pure. Were interested in tourist art, in the impact of the global flow of materials and ideas, global bricolage.

Loango market stall selling art to tourists, about 1910

76 Theres always been tourist art

Anthropology Museum, Northern Illinois University,

77 TOurist art is interesting because it shows not purity but mixture, not single traditions but cosmopolitanism

in the faculty essays - Heather Akou mentions that Somali costume has always been about bricolage - couldnt find a picture, but bricolage doesnt do well in museums weve liked purity.

Given the uniquely detailed record of contemporary life recorded by today's ubiquitous media how best are museums to record and present contemporary life in their collections?

Owain Rhys

78 Finally, theres a new interest in contemporary collecting - breaking old rules about waiting to see what might be worth saving Some museums are setting up new categories of collections - objects easier to deaccession if it seems collecting them was a mistake.

Once we have them how to deal with objects?

Respect the object

79 The word Id use to describe it: we must respect the object. This means each thing seen separately, protected, held for ever.

The Rembrandt Rule

80 All objects equally precious - the historic house museum world is talk about the Rembrandt Rule - the idea that everything needs to be treated like its a Rembrandt. click once for both images -

They are starting to ask the question about whether this is true - whether it would be better to tilt more toward education and less toward preservation - a hot topic in the museum world.

Bryan Collection, New-York Historical Society, before 1908

81 This was not always the case. Note the way these paintings are hung - floor to ceiling, overlapping - not respectful in the current sense.

"Primitive Negro Art, Brooklyn Museum, 1923

82 In the Brooklyn Museums 1923 Primitive Negro Art exhibition, blankets were hung on the wall and draped over stools. Perhaps the Brooklyn Museum thought it OK to break the rules because it was displaying primitive art?

Forestry Hall, American Museum of Natural History, 1911

83 The ultimate taboo: Open the case and touch the flowers. Museums are supposed to keep the cases closed!

Open House, Minnesota Historical Society, 2006

84 Benjamin Filene, the curator of Open House, broke many rules: Not authentic artifacts from the house; words and artifacts mixed promiscuously; many of the artifacts not museum artifacts - bought for this exhibit. Many dierent voices overlapping.

The Lost Museum, Brown University, 2014

85 Artist Mark Dions imagined reconstruction of the oce of John Whipple Potter Jenks. A biographical sketch in objects - even though none of these artifacts have any actual connection with Mr. Jenks.

Dangerous Liasons, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2004

86 One of the most shocking exhibitions ever at the Met. Not shocking because of the sex but costumes from the collection shown in a lively way and placed into period rooms. And broken objects!

Party Time, by Yinka Shinobara, OBE, Newark Museum, 2009

87 Yinka Shinobara re-imagines a period room as a dreamscape - breaking all of the rules! A wild party in a Victorian dining room! Headless manikins with their feet on the table!

Maira Kalman Selects, Cooper Hewitt Museum, 2015

88 Maira Kalman not only cuts open the back of the chair to install a screen she has handwritten labels!

Artists bring a refreshing willingness to break the museum rules.

The wistful, sentimental appearance of this head made it a favorite of romantically inclined visitors until Dorner corrected the false impression by as truthful a restoration as possible.

Samuel Cauman, The Living Museum, 1958

89 Conservation philosophies and guidelines change over time. Alexander Dorner, director of the RISD Museum of Art in the 1940s, had strong feelings about what it meant to do a truthful restoration - what we would call a reconstruction.

Objects are authentic, unique and precious

90 Or, as Walter Benjamin said, authentic objects have an aura. Reproductions dont have an aura - they are not embedded in the fabric of tradition. Museums have brought into this - not always but certainly over the past century.

Mona Lisa at the Louvre

91 Our model for art: a single precious original thing.

Gallery of Classical Antiquity, Brown University, 1893

92 Early museums were much less concerned with authentic, and more with teaching. And so cast museums were common.

This is Browns museum of casts - * and other casts, now in the basement of the economics department, for some reason

Claude Monet Studio, Giverny

93 All of the paintings here are copies.

Feeling Van Gogh, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, 2015

94 Some interesting new possibilities if we let go of the idea of the original being the only thing the museum is about. This is not a visitor feeling an original At the Van Gogh Museum, visually impaired visitors can feel a 3-D printed version of Sunflowers, as well as explore a model of his The Bedroom and smell lavender. s

3-D printed 6th century sword, Nasjonalmuseet, Oslo, Norway

95 3-D printed sword that looks and feels like original, so that visitor can touch it. More or less authentic than the original in a case?

Keep objects safe, forever

96 Museums like to think they keep objects for ever. I want to ask two questions. Do they, and should they?

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, 1880

97 Answer to the first: they dont really. (Of the 174 paintings that were part of the Metropolitan Museum's first purchase in 1871, only 60 are in the collection now. Only 19 are on view today.)

George Perkins Marsh collection, Smithsonian Institution, 1849

98 Of the first collection at the Smithsonian the George Perkins Marsh collection of 1335 European engravings and 300 art books, purchased 1849 - perhaps 400 left at SI. Some sent to Corcoran, some to Library of Congress some destroyed in 1865 fire

United States Exploring Expedition, Smithsonian Institution

99 US Exploring Expedition - 1838 -1842 - collected some 40 tons of specimens - 4000 ethnographic, 2000 birds, 50,000 plants Came to Smithsonian in 1858 Jane Walsh, at NMNH, devoted years to tracking down the ethnographic collections - about two-thirds still there - the rest distributed 800 of 2400 artifacts were missing - distributed to individuals, but mostly to museums as starter kits much lost to fire, etc., at these other museums need to do more of this museum taphonomy

Storage, Old Sturbridge Village

100 And to the second question I asked before - should they?? : It seems to me that theres an ethical issue here: museum objects arent useful if they are never used. Behind the scenes of every museum are storage rooms - usually with more than 90 percent of the museums collection hidden away, most of it never to be displayed.

When Ive taken students to visit museums, this is always what they like best - what they remember most. But theyre also horrified by the notion that no one gets to see them

Bird Storage, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution

101 Collections are essential for research, especially in natural history

Anthropology Storage, Museum Support Center, Smithsonian Institution

102 And to a lesser extent, in anthropology

Firearms Storage, United States National Museum, Smithsonian Institution, about 1920

103 But perhaps less so in history. In fact, the history of collections in history museums is a discourse of constant worry about what to do with collections? How do we use them? How do we prove that they are valuable, useful, worth the high price it costs to store them?

No matter what standard measure objective scholars use they can hardly avoid the conclusion that the study of artifacts has contributed to developing the main themes of American history almost not at all.

Cary Carson, Colonial Williamsburg, 1978

104 Cary Carsons 1978 worry is still mostly true.

1 out of 3 museums: it seems unclear who is responsible for storage

1 in 4 museums: storage areas so overcrowded that it has become difficult to get from one end to the other.

1 out of 10 museums: the theft of objects from the collection is considered to be a major problem.

2 in 5 museums: an important lack of management support for storage-related activities and a lack of trained staff

International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property, 2011

105 And our storage is in bad shape!

It is the [museums] obligation to remove from the collection material:

That does not relate to the museums mission That the museum does not have the resources to

preserve.

American Association of Museum, Ethics of Deaccessioning, 2000

106 One answer, of course, is to take our deaccessioning responsibilities more seriously - if not

we end up with objects that we never use

Raiders of the Lost Ark, 1981

107 I couldnt resist

We need to think of storage as more than just - dead storage. And museums have started to find ways to use their stored collections for their educational goals, to bring them to life.

CultureLab, Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology, 2012

108 But more immediately - we need to put our museum storage to work

At Brown, we put our museum storage racks inside of glass exhibit cases. We literally put storage on display!

Glasgow Museums Resource Centre

109 The Glasgow Museums Resource Centre is open for occasional visits - organized mostly for storage, but also for display.

Henry R. Luce Center for the Study of American Art, Metropolitan Museum

110 Many museums have densely packed open storage rooms - in combination with access to collections data on screens, a way of letting the public see collections that would otherwise be hidden.

Visible storage in the porcelain galleries, Victoria and Albert Museum

The Clothworkers Centre for Textile and Fashion Study and Conservation,

Victoria and Albert Museum

111 And, of course, visible storage and study rooms are becoming more common. Here, the Victoria and Albert Museum.

*

We aim to remove every barrier possible between the public and the collectionsTheres a special intimacy that comes from encountering an object first hand. I personally believe we can trust the public more with things, and perhaps it might even be worth changing our policies on conservation to enable such access.

Kieran Long, Senior Curator of Contemporary Architecture, Design and Digital, Victoria and

Albert Museum

112 The V&A is asking: How can we reinvent museums - how do we change the rules - so that the public can make use of our objects?

The expansive Art Study Center allows visitors to request objects not currently on display in the galleries, facilitating self-directed teaching and learning from works in all media, the Art Study Center encourages extended interactions with original works of art.

Harvard Art Museums

113 Harvard Art Museums new Art Storage Center - anyone can ask to come and see any work of art.

Andy Warhol, Raid the Icebox, RISD Museum, 1970

114 Some of the most fascinating exhibits mix the storage and the gallery - the first one was Warhols Raid the Icebox

The Lost Museum, Brown University, 2014

115 The collection of the Jenks Museum at Brown was lost, literally carted o to the dump - here, its storage recreated as an art project. 80 student artistss were given lists of collections that did not survive, and summoned forth their ghosts.

Curator RulesCurators are experts, and

make the choices

116 Finally, some more general curator rules.* When I gave an earlier version of this talk, the title was read as The curator rules!, with an exclamation mark. Im more interested in that phrase, without an exclamation mark.

The museum must remain firmly in the control of a trained elite [to] maintain standards of quality independent of the contingent values of daily life. Museums must direct public tasteand not be dictated [to] by it.

Paul J. Sachs, Harvard Museum Program, 1920s

117 Curators make choices both because they are trained to - they were what Sachs called the trained elite. Paul Sachs was head of the Harvard Museum program in the 1920s and 30s - trained most of the museum directors of his day - and this still stands as widely held belief - even if most museum directors are less likely to be so blunt.

http://harvardmagazine.com/2002/09/reverence-for-the-object.html

The strong sense of high purpose and personal responsibility and the strict intellectual integritymark the museum curator. As a professional he is a stronghold of individual initiative and responsibility in a world threatened by the ant heap of collectivism.

Remington Kellogg, Director, USNM, 1952

118 Remington Kellogg at the Smithsonian: the curator as a stronghold of individual initiative and responsibility in a world threatened by the ant heap of collectivism.

A fine example of Cold War rhetoric! Curator as John Galt!

"If an exhibition hall is to approach its ideal, its plan must be that of a master mind, while in actuality it is the product of the correlation of many minds and hands.

Carl Akeley, In Brightest Africa,

1923

119 Akeley was the mastermind of the natural history dioramas at the AMerican Museum of Natural History.

Our exhibitions represent primarily the judgment of the curator-in-charge as to the best method of dealing with his subject.

Robert Multauf, Museum of History and Technology,

1965

120 Robert Multauf, explaining why the Museum of History and Technology - todays National Museum of American History - was divided into exhibits organized according to the specialized interests of the curators.

The first task of every museum is adding to the happiness, wisdom, and comfort of members of the community.

John Cotton Dana, 1917

121 John Cotton Dana is represents another tradition - museums looking not to their own interests or expertise but that of the community. This has become increasingly common in recent years.

Mark Dion, sketch for The Curator Vanishes, Minneapolis Institute of Arts, 2011

122 Mark Dions Sketches for Curator's Oce 2011 - an installation at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts that oers the empty oce of the museums mysteriously vanished first director of contemporary art.

He asks the question: what happens when the curator vanishes?

Expression, Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, 2013

123 One answer: Ask non-curators what they think. Let them make choices about art and artifact to display.

Exquisite Things, Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology, 2012

124 Write on the outside of cases and give people pens

One Room, RISD Museum, 2013

125 Give artists uncharted spaces to work in, and to present their own work.

Photos courtesy S. Hollis Mickey, RISD Museum

Bill Adair, Benjamin Filene, and Laura Koloski Letting Go?: Sharing Historical Authority in a User-Generated World, 2011

126 Or, as an important recent book suggest let go. Letting go means working with the community, working with your audiences in new ways.

Alternative Museum Organizational Chart

127 It might mean reorganizing the museum so that curators are part of a team responsible for visitor experience, not collections.

Theory of Change, Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History, 2015

128 It might mean moving beyond thinking about museums be only about education - and individual education - and think about what the museum does for the community.

To sum up lets think about rethinking the rules.

Rethinking the rules

129 First, the display rules:

Display rules Designed around looking (not other senses)

Clear lines and divides between exhibit and visitors, narrator, audience and subject

One story, beginning to end; neutral, unbiased, single voice, a simple straightforward narrative

Focus on objects, respectfully treated, or a narrow definition of context

Conveys authority

130 Some of the rules for exhibition; Model is an old-fashioned university lecture!

What would happen if we broke these rules?

Object rules

What counts as an object is narrowly defined: museum quality, old, original condition, of interest to a curators scholarly interest

Display objects in a respectful way

Keep objects safe, forever, even if that means not using them

131To what extent are curators thinking of the big picture of the museum, to what extent their own work? what structures shape collecting?

Curator Rules

The curator is the expert

The curator is an academic subject-matter specialist, not a generalist

The curator is anonymous, the voice of the museum

The curator is not part of the story

132 And finally: the curator rules? The traditional rule is that the curator is an expert, and a specialist - and that expertise is defined as academic, subject matter expertise. This assumption about the nature of expertise allows the curator to be not a person, not part of the story, but an anonymous voice of authority.

This last rule seems so central to museums - but broken now in every other medium. What would happen if we broke these rules?

Let go. Share authority. Its not about you.

Put the audience first.

Overcome bureaucracy.

Make museums useful.

Breaking Rules

133 Some final thoughts on how we might break the rules. What if we put the audience first? If our collections and exhibits overcame the bureaucratic structures of the museum? If we first asked, as John Cotton Dana suggested, how might we be useful?

Todays Museum: Innovation, Change, and Challenge

134 Finally, to return to the question of innovation, change, and challenge in todays museum.

Todays Museum

135 Todays museum, Ive suggested, inherits a great many rules - assumptions, expectations - from a long history of museums. But its also a moment when we are getting better about acknowledging that we can break some of those rules. (Though not good enough, Id say.)

Todays Museum: Innovation

136 What innovations are need? Not technological ones - though it seems that the digital space opens up new possibilities for story telling and sharing. Rather, the innovations needed are cultural - new ways of thinking about our work, the culture of our organizations.

Todays Museum: Innovation, Change and Challenge

137 Opening up our work - taking a hard look at our culture - will help us change. And thats the greatest challenge.

Thank you

George Scharf, Staircase of the old British Museum in Montagu House, 1845

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