Museums From Now On

This crisis of forced isolation has emphasized questions about the meaning of museums. The questions have been around for a long time.

Once upon a time, one could only get a good art education by traveling (that is, by being rich enough to travel extensively). One needed access to the museums of the world – enough access to generate lively mental representations. Morse, before he invented the telegraph, was trying to democratize this a bit, by painting a replica of a Louvre gallery for the edification of North Americans who could not afford passage to Paris.

Then reproduction took off, and reproduction got better and better, and cheaper and cheaper. A late stage of that has been reached recently; museums that have closed have put large parts of their collections online, sometimes in astonishingly detailed reproductions. (See the app Art Authority for a kind of summary of what is possible.)

I saw into the bizarre state of things-museum on a visit to the State Egyptian Museum in Munich. They give visitors an Ipad with really good gps; it knows exactly where one is in the museum, so that it is presenting an image of the item one is looking at, as one is standing in front of that item. One also has information and links and all that annotation-in-depth that the Germans are good at. As, one walks around, the question just won’t quit: what do these objects add? The Ipad image is generally clearer, and shows more sides. One sees details one could never see through the museum glass. So, at the exit questionnaire, I am inclined to write: “Sell the objects. Keep the Ipads. No one will ever know the difference.” I don’t think that response would endear me to the staff.

I like museums. I visit my local art gallery, affectionately renamed MIA, about once a week. But the staples of my artistic nourishment are the thousands of images in my pictures file, set up to appear on my screen at random, every 5 seconds. I can’t visit a museum every day, but I can see 500 images every day, and that is important to my comfort and peace of mind. 

I have struggled to find a particular use for MIA, one not well served by good photos of MIA-things. One idea I had was to try to remember rooms, and to treat the rooms or sections as works, as attempts to teach something. I am maybe a third of the way through learning the third floor galleries; rehearsing them is comforting when I can’t sleep or need dental work. And the pieces do start to converse with each other, and to raise questions about the mind (and in some cases, the sanity) of the curator. (One consequence: I get really upset when they move something I like and won’t tell me where they put it. It is like losing a pet. This is worse when they replace a favorite with something I hate.)

I am sure that, for people with very good eyes (physically sound eyes and the training to use them well), these questions will seem just crazy. For them, the original painting has nuances that reproductions don’t capture – perhaps nuances that only appear when the object is seen at different times of day, with different light. I respect that expertise, but not enough to let go of my question. It isn’t clear to me that no reproduction could ever capture the putative nuances, and, more important, I can’t see them, and most of the people I run into in the museum can’t see them – don’t have the eyes or don’t have the training. So, once again, for most visitors, what is the museum for? How exactly does it help?

Decades ago, I annoyed my art history friends by suggesting that every small town in Minnesota should have a small museum with a rotating collection of first-rate reproductions. This suggestion was met with two kinds of scorn: it wouldn’t be good enough, and small museums, when they exist, should buy and show contemporary work. I think the technology has superseded my original suggestion: now, anybody with a decent LED screen can have a very good museum, to taste.

What is the way forward for museums? I truly don’t know. Partly, I think, they can explore their potential as meeting spaces. People cluster around an image and let that image work on them, and communicate through their responses. This can be done online, but it is most natural and pleasant in a physical museum. Also, the idea of curation should come out more from the background. If the individual images are widely available, the value that a museum adds is in the intelligent juxtaposition of those images, and that value is seldom emphasized. For the curator, I am sure, the objects in a room are in dialogue. They add up to something. The visitor needs an introduction to that kind of thinking, room by room. 

When the museums re-open, visitors will have had a rest from their usual habits. Will they continue to visit museums in the same way, for the same reasons? If not, then museum staff will have to re-imagine what they are doing. Now would be a really good time to start that.