Art Museums and the Modern Imaginary
Museums, like hospitals, banks, sport stadiums, apartment complexes, airports, and train stations, are part of our modern imaginary. In the twenty-first century we may take their presence in our world for granted, but it was not until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that people first thought to dedicate spaces exclusively devoted to the celebration and advancement of the arts. They are historical institutions that, like any other, are subject to change. In looking back over the developments of the last one hundred years, Charles Saumarez Smith’s new study, The Art Museum in Modern Times, asks: how and why have art museums changed?
The author, a renowned museum director, provides a brief introduction to the rise of the museum as a modern institution around the end of the eighteenth century. Then, he devotes the bulk of his work to an exploration of forty-two museums across the globe, emphasizing institutions in the North Atlantic region founded after the 1980s. The book ends with some brief remarks on a number of “key issues,” such as the changing roles of clients, architects, artists, and audiences, the impact of globalization and of the digital revolution, the rise of private museums, and the economy of the museum world.
A number of themes recur in the work. First, the tension between aesthetic and didactic. Should the art museum foster an aesthetic experience capable of moving viewers and allowing them to find some rest from the constraints of modern life, or should it be an institution devoted to study, research, collection, and preservation? These two choices represent an old querelle in museology, and the truth is that museums, more often than not, have tried to combine both. That said, Saumarez Smith convincingly argues that from being a “mausoleum” aimed to educate, memorialize, and eventually solidify the “spirit” of a nation, the museum has transformed into an institution in which spectacle, individual experience, and aesthetic have acquired a central role.
A second theme directly follows from the first: the declining importance of historical sequences and grand narratives. If the museum was, among other things, a place where one could learn the history of art, now the chronological organizations and periodizations are considered antiquated, old-fashioned, not “contemporary.” The museum world considers it imperative to escape the linear model of artistic development. Anything deemed “normative,” such as a narrative capable of addressing the progress or historical transformation of art, has come under attack.
Third is the iconic museum. Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao rightly represents a paradigm shift in the way people think about art museums: today, art museums are grandiose and iconic monuments, attractions for mass and elite tourism alike, totemic buildings aiming to create concentrations of economic, financial, and cultural capital. Today, these signature buildings can be found almost everywhere in the world, and they characterize our times as much as the traditional “mausoleum” characterized the nineteenth century. Finally, Saumarez Smith notices a double transformation that is signaling the decay of the museum as a public institution. From being public projects, run by state or city governments for the purposes of public education, art museums are increasingly turning into personal, private foundations whose scope is not necessarily didactic, pedagogical, or interested in making a statement about art history. At the same time, major museums in Europe and America are beginning “to franchise” their collections and/or brand in other parts of the world, most notably the Louvre Abu Dhabi or the West Bund Museum in Shanghai.
Saumarez Smith’s book evinces the descriptive clarity of an historian of architecture and the museum. His case studies follow a common pattern—brief historical introduction, architectural overview, brief accounts of possible issues related to the single museums, and concise summaries of key aspects. That said, the book, which is certainly well written and illustrated, left me with a number of perplexities related to the present and the future of the art museum.
In the museum world, the container is becoming remarkably more important than the content. The emphasis has moved more toward the quality and character of the building as a spectacle, landmark, and iconic site than its function as a receptacle for the display and experience of art. Of course, it’s more complicated than that. Artists, scholars, curators, and viewers might still expect to experience art within art museums. But it is the intellectual atmosphere of museums that has changed. The art museum is not a mausoleum anymore, but a space; not a temple, but a site; perhaps not even a museum, but a building in which people might want to go and meet others, look at some modern and contemporary art, or look at no art at all. It is interesting to recall that when the Louvre in Paris first opened as an art museum in 1793, notices had to be placed on the walls to tell the public to look at the pictures rather than use the long halls for a game of boules. In short, it took a long time for people to learn the practice of giving works of art their undivided attention. Within the last four decades, we have returned to this state of affairs, to such an extent that no one would be shocked to read notices on the walls telling the public to look at art rather than their phones or other people.
If the traditional museum appears, justly, pompous and intimidating, the art museums of the twenty-first century remarkably remind one of those non-places that so clearly characterize our time—if they were to be transformed into shopping malls, hospitals, or corporate offices, no one would really notice it. The goals of self-cultivation, improvement, and intellectual and emotional growth have not disappeared from art museums, and they never will while audiences continue to try to think, reflect, and ask themselves questions while visiting a museum. But, once again, it is the intellectual atmosphere of art museums that has changed. Today, enjoyment is more important than improvement, and museums foster, not rarely, a vague and generic economy of experience. With reason, architects have abandoned the idea of the museum as an intellectual “mausoleum” aimed to memorialize the state, a phantomatic “spirit” of the nation, and the artist as a great genius. Moreover, the experimentation with new forms of display and new architectural solutions between the 1950s and today has been remarkable. And yet, in recent years it has become all too clear that art museums end up providing only an atmosphere of art, an atmosphere of politics, an atmosphere of entertainment, an atmosphere of curiosity, an atmosphere of sacrality, an atmosphere of snobbery, an atmosphere of education, an atmosphere of discovery.
Further, museums have progressively delegated their educative role to the individual responses of the viewers themselves. Visitors are called to form their own opinion, to wander through the collections and experience works of art autonomously. This move in curatorial practices has certainly been liberating, and the emancipation from historical narratives has broadened the possibilities for museums and curators to pursue more issue-oriented exhibitions, experiment with methods of display, and analyze the long history of a theme. This has been and still is exciting. I personally favor exhibitions based on subject matter, issues, and thematic displays over those that focus on strict historical narrative and movements of art. At the same time, this move to transform education into self-learning is something that must be seen within a more ample cultural history. It is a cliché of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, which Charles Taylor has called an age of authenticity, to say that individuals are responsible for constructing their own knowledge, their own intellectual interpretation, their own experience. Museums are abdicating from their role as intellectual authorities. In art museums, narrative and education are old-fashioned. Personal experience, aesthetic appreciation, and individual enjoyment are paramount. Within the context of art museums, this has probably empowered visitors. Within a larger context of cultural history, however, this has had dubious results and has contributed to the widespread attack against expertise and competencies which is a distinctive feature of twenty-first-century culture.
Ultimately, it is true that the traditional idea of an art museum, with reason, has been under scrutiny for the last half century. Likewise, there is room to critique the contemporary museum. With as much uncertainty as there is surrounding the future of museums—and the COVID-19 pandemic has only exacerbated this—museums will continue to be rethought, redesigned, reconfigured, and transformed. At least, I hope so. Saumarez Smith could have said more than he did about some of the significant issues facing contemporary art museums, such as the dubious ethics of catering to wealthy donors, the issue of repatriation, and a certain separation of art from cultural life.
West Bund Museum, Shanghai
In the first sentence dedicated to the section on the modern museum, Saumerez Smith states, “The Museum of Modern Art was deliberately conceived to concentrate on the present, not the past.” Correct, and this has been a great achievement in the history of modern museums. And yet, it seems that today many art museums have radicalized this position. Obsession with the present, without any effort to historicize and understand the present, turns into presentism—that is, an obsession with the present that forgets its relationship with the past, that covers history and humanity with a blanket of generic sameness that muffles difference and dulls memory.
Donato Loia is a Doctoral Candidate in Art History at the University of Texas.