CONCLUSION: BEYOND BILBAO

This book began with a desire to better understand the conflicts of opinion that characterize public debate about art museums and their place in society. To that end, each chapter attempted to put key issues in historical perspective. Two things should be clear after reading this book. First, the issues facing museums today are not new, and some of them are as old as the museum itself. As we have seen, shifting circumstances cause certain issues to gain greater urgency at different times. Opinions will also vary, and postmodernism has heightened debate by arguing that truths are contingent and that things once taken for granted are susceptible to revision. The latter position has itself been contested by proponents of traditional values. In the face of controversies and divergent views, James Cuno and fellow contributors to Whose Muse? insist that the public's trust in museums depends on a broad-based reaffirmation of first principles, or “truths,” beginning with the primacy of art objects whose authenticity is beyond doubt. Other more recent priorities, they claim, such as audience building, diversity, community activism, and expansion (through new buildings or branches), are secondary, if not contrary, to a museum's proper mission. Cuno and his colleagues are right to focus on the good museums do; criticism too easily overlooks their remarkable success over the past two centuries. But at the same time, assumptions should not be made too quickly about what the public trusts museums to do or who constitutes the museum's public. The “truth” about a painting by Rembrandt can extend beyond its attribution to include questions of provenance and function (who owned the painting in the past, and how was it used and valued at different times?) and the circumstances of its acquisition by the museum (did it pass through Nazi hands during World War II?). Should minority populations trust a museum that privileges Rembrandt, or one whose outreach efforts are only token programs? At a time when some museums are eliminating admission fees, should we trust others that say they have no choice but to raise their prices?

Nor should reaffirmation of traditional values blur recognition that different institutions face different challenges. An old museum full of mainstream Western art will look to the future differently from a community-based museum of African Diaspora culture or a start-up institute of contemporary art. The mainstream museum may have problems with restitution or outdated environmental controls, the diasporic museum may need to build a collection, and the contemporary museum may want to put itself on the map with a splashy building. All three may be financially insecure, but they will approach the challenge of fund-raising in different ways.

Whatever the source or motive, criticism that sparks reflection and debate is good for any institution. The last twenty years or so have witnessed a remarkable invigoration of museum culture and discourse. What can we expect in the years to come?

A decade after the opening of the new Guggenheim in Bilbao, the building boom continues. In New York City alone in 2006 more than sixty arts institutions were undergoing or had recently completed architectural renovations or new construction at a cost of some $3 billion.¹ Skeptics continue to warn (and in some cases wish) against expansion, worrying that the market cannot sustain an infinitely expanding cultural sector, but there can be no denying that museums and allied cultural venues are now central to the mushrooming global tourist industry as well as local community development. High culture has become an engine of urban renewal throughout the West. Expansion can be justified, in other words, both economically and politically—an extremely potent mix. On the level of psychology and emotion, beautiful museums offer a safe and seductive environment and are attractive as such. Disagreements will continue about what constitutes a beautiful or effective museum, but that architecture is central to the museum experience cannot be in doubt. Because the psychic, emotional value of our environment and the spaces we inhabit is vague and understudied, it is too easily underestimated. Those who argue for greater access to museums have trouble articulating why access matters. We lack compelling language to justify the social value of art.

A stunning space is part of what museum-goers pay to enjoy, but, as consultant Adrian Ellis states, “[A] splendid building is only part of the equation. The other part is the quality of the programming and the resources [that institutions] can bring to bear on the programming.”² A general rule of thumb for art museums holds that the greater the collection (a museum's chief asset) and endowment, the less need for alluring architecture, shops, and cafés. However, special exhibitions, retail, and restaurants have become so much a part of the mainstream museum experience that those few museums that do without them now seem perverse and unnecessarily ascetic. Museums that trumpet their permanent collections struggle to find effective means of stimulating higher visitation. One emerging strategy is to make permanent collections seem less permanent and more like temporary exhibitions through rearrangement and focused thematic shows.³ Creative “showmanship” of this sort (to revive a term popular in the 1920s) may raise the hackles of conservative critics and curators, but a static collection makes for a static public, which many museums neither want nor can afford.

Indeed, audience cultivation and analysis constitute a likely area of future growth as museums seek out previously untapped segments of the population, such as hard-to-reach teenagers (fig. 110).⁴ Expanding the museum-going public, whether for ideological or economic reasons, will continue to be a widely shared goal of most institutions, and the challenge will be to balance the allocation of resources and programming in such a way that no one feels short-changed. At the same time, a powerful new trend in the field is the spread of “niche” museums targeting communities underserved by mainstream institutions. Whether those museums can survive financially by appealing to narrow interests remains to be seen. As if in response to the embrace of cultural difference at smaller institutions, mainstream museums have aggressively laid claim to the center on the strength of a universal humanist mission that in theory includes all and is rooted in the primacy of objects regardless of who comes to see them.

At the heart of the British Museum, Norman Foster's Great Court (2000; fig. 111) models for the rest of the world the new claim of a transcendent global embrace. Opened at the start of a new millennium, the domed courtyard unites visitors from disparate lands with elemental sculptures from the ancient civilizations of Egypt, Rome, India, Assyria, Europe (Celts), and Oceania (Easter Island). In the middle of the court is the old Reading Room, transformed into a modern information center and library “focusing on the world cultures represented in the British Museum.”⁵ From under the ethereal dome, access is given to galleries of Egyptian sculpture, ethnographic collections (allowing visitors to see “the works of recent non-western societies…in their proper context among other world cultures”), and the King's Library, home to an exhibition about the museum's history that reinforces the timeless message of Tennyson's lines inscribed in the floor of the court: “and let thy feet / millenniums hence / be set in the midst of knowledge.”

110. “Dude, Where's My Museum?” Museum News 84 (September–October, 2005).

111. Norman Foster, Great Court, British Museum, 2000.

112. The Euphronios Krater on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2006.

The claim to transcendent relevance has also been mobilized to defuse mounting restitution claims, the most combustible issue facing encyclopedic museums. Even as the crisis of Nazi loot subsides a decade after the international initiatives of the late 1990s, other demands arise to keep the issue of restitution in the foreground. In 2005, Italian authorities went public with damning evidence that many classical antiquities prominently displayed in North American museums, including the Getty, Met, and Boston MFA, had been illegally excavated and exported. Media reports showed Getty curator Marion True bundled into court in sunglasses like a mobster.⁶ Rather than endure a prolonged and embarrassing court case, one museum after another negotiated settlements behind closed doors. In exchange for returning looted artifacts—foremost among them, the famed Euphronios Krater (fig. 112) acquired by the Metropolitan Museum in 1972—the Italians offered long-term loans of similar material.⁷ The Italians hope the publicity will dampen enthusiasm for undocumented antiquities among the world's wealthy museums; the latter, meanwhile, admit to no wrongdoing and reaffirm the ideals set forth in the Declaration on the Importance and Value of Universal Museums (2002) (see Appendix). Countering the parochial interests that motivate repatriation claims, the declaration insists that “museums serve not just the citizens of one nation but the people of every nation.”

What do museum professionals beyond Europe and North America make of the declaration? For George Abungu, former director of the National Museums of Kenya, the Declaration on Universal Museums “is a way of refusing to engage in dialogue around the issue of repatriation.”⁸ Abungu himself does not believe in mass repatriation, but he does want “dialogue between museums, and between museums and communities affected by issues of repatriation, in order to reach amicable solutions.” Fellow African Kwame Appiah sides with the universal position, so long as meaningful dialogue is part of the equation between rich and poor museums. Using the British Museum as an example, he writes: “However self-serving it may seem, the British museum's claim to be a repository of the heritage not of Britain but of the world seems to me exactly right. Part of the obligation, though, will be to make those collections ever more widely available not just in London but elsewhere, through traveling collections, through publications, and through the World Wide Web.”⁹

Thinking of his native Ghana, Appiah says: “I'd rather that we negotiated as restitution not just the major objects of significance for our history, but a decent collection of art from around the world.”¹⁰ The problem with cosmopolitanism, so far at least, is that it works only in one direction—toward the already bountiful museums of the West. While museums in Europe and the United States promote the benefits of universality for their own citizens and affluent tourists, what becomes of the museums and the populations they serve in the rest of the world? As George Abungu noted, the signatories of the declaration all hail from rich Western museums, heightening suspicions that what motivated the document was not so much a genuine desire to share as a fear of losing hold of their fabulous collections. What realistic chance does Mali or Guatemala have of either repatriating its own patrimony or borrowing Western art from New York and London? Putting aside legitimate security concerns at museums in the developing world, we still seem years away from seeing Rembrandts and Rothkos from Amsterdam and New York in an Accra museum. At the same time, are universal museums in the West doing all they can to promote the sort of cross-cultural dialogue that Abungu and Appiah have in mind? Who gets to take part in that dialogue and to what end? Making the world's museums truly cosmopolitan would be a noble (utopian?) goal for the global twenty-first century.