Toward a Museum of the 21st Century
We’re 15 years into the new millennium, but our museums don’t seem to be aware. They’re stuck in the late 20th century, the Arrogant Age, with its love of gigantism in architecture and art. Frank Gehry’s 1997 Guggenheim Bilbao,
a sky-reacher with a sasquatch footprint, scaled to accommodate
colossal Richard Serra sculptures, epitomized that love. Mr. Gehry’s
2014 Vuitton Foundation museum
in Paris, a glass galleon packed with bland blue-chip cargo,
reconfirmed it. So we’re still waiting, scanning the horizon for a new
kind of museum, a 21st-century museum, to appear.
How
will we know it when it arrives? There will be no single model, and
there shouldn’t be. Art and life, which are equally a museum’s business,
are too complicated to be reflected in any one mirror. The new museum
won’t be defined by architectural glamour or by a market-vetted
collection, though it may have these. Structurally porous and
perpetually in progress, it will be defined by its own role as a shaper
of values, and by the broad audience it attracts.
A
new version can’t arrive too soon. Existing ones are, in crucial ways,
stagnant. Broad attendance numbers may give the opposite impression:
Major urban museums in the United States are getting crowds in the door,
but diversity isn’t coming in with them. Despite the dramatic increase
in minority populations in this immigrant nation over the past
half-century, and a wave of multiculturalist consciousness, our major
art museums remain largely the preserve of better-off whites, a group
that is losing its majority status in urban settings.
And,
more recently, there is evidence of significant shifts within that core
audience, as once-shared pools of knowledge and interest change. These
changes are most graphically evident at so-called encyclopedic
institutions, like the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In them, non-Western
art has always been a hard sell. But increasingly, so are formerly
reliable stretches of Western art.
The
Met’s European painting galleries, although splendidly reinstalled a
few years back, get relatively light foot traffic, partly because the
cultural references in much of the work have lost currency. Even a
generation or two ago, the myths and religious subjects that form the
basis of, say, Italian Renaissance painting would have been familiar to a
general public, thanks to surviving public school variations on a
“classical” education. But with changes in schooling in a country that
has grown increasingly secular, viewers of art predating Impressionism
typically don’t know what they’re looking at.
The 21st-century
museum is going to have to find ways tell them. And this may well
demand particular curatorial skills, such as ever more imaginative
storytelling, and the use of quasi-ethnological approaches to
presentation. Even in a media-driven age, much art is, at some basic
level, personal. People made it, reacted to it, treasured it in ways we
can identify with. But art is also intrinsically political, designed to
shape a view of the world in empowering ways, ways that write certain
people and ideas into the record and leave others out. We need to see
art from both perspectives.
Museums
like the Met are themselves grand history-writing-and-editing machines.
Spectacle is built into them. But if they’re going to become
21st-century institutions, they’re also going to have to function in the
mode of university teaching museums. Experimental — interdisciplinary,
cross-cultural, self-critical, heterodox — approaches to art will have
to be tried out if an audience for history, which is only as alive as
our sense of investment in it, is not to be lost. (For a comparative
look at some recent methods, I recommend Peggy Levitt’s “Artifacts and Allegiances: How Museums Put the Nation and the World on Display,” just out from University of California Press.)
Whether
any amount of inventiveness can arrest the current retreat from art’s
past is, of course, a question. Again, the metrics are paradoxical.
Whereas other branches of the arts, like classical music and ballet, are
attracting fewer and fewer young people, museums are attracting many,
yet the interest of those visitors appears to be specific and narrow:
contemporary art. And because the future lies with this audience,
museums are shaping themselves to it by acquiring and exhibiting more
and more contemporary work.
I
speak generally: The fact that older art has become hard to acquire,
for reasons of price, scarcity and legality, is also a factor. But the
reality is that, along with perennial favorites like Vermeer, van Gogh
and Picasso, contemporary art is one of the few surefire draws. Even
unlikely institutions are getting the message: not long ago, the Morgan
Library & Museum did a Matthew Barney show.
This being so, you’d think that a new museum devoted to contemporary art would be the place to find a 21st-century
paradigm, but so far, no. The Broad, which opened with tremendous
fanfare in Los Angeles this fall, is not a contender. A classic example
of a private museum transformed into a public monument, it is devoted to
the collection of the multibillionaire Eli Broad and his wife, Edythe,
longtime Los Angeles residents who began buying seriously in New York in
the early 1980s, when stars of a slightly earlier era, like Richard
Prince and Cindy Sherman, were working in SoHo, and younger figures like
Jeff Koons had emerged in the East Village.
Aucun commentaire:
Enregistrer un commentaire