The idea of the museum as a public institution is primarily a creation of the Enlightenment. The museum was construed to be fundamentally educational, a venue for the systematic organization and presentation of artistic, natural, and scientific phenomena. Inherent in this is the idea of the museum as a public space, dedicated to the diffusion of knowledge. The great museums of the Enlightenment—the British Museum or the Louvre, for instance—epitomize this effort to create a taxonomy of both the natural and artistic worlds in order to make them intelligible and accessible to a broad public.
The great museums of the United States founded in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, or the Philadelphia Museum of Art, were founded on the Enlightenment model, but unlike the British Museum or the Louvre, they were privately owned and financed institutions. They depended for support not only on the relatively few wealthy individuals who founded and subsequently supported them, but also on their ability to establish and nurture a relationship with the communities in which they exist.
In the United States alone there are currently some 3,500 art museums and according to the most recent statistics they are visited by over 68 million adults a year, an astonishing number that works out to roughly one out of every three men and women in the population. Supported by a booming economy, intense civic pride and the local and state governments’ growing awareness of the economic benefits of cultural tourism, museums across America have become the defining public institutions of their communities, often housed in spectacular new buildings or additions designed by internationally celebrated architects.
Given the success and popularity of art museums there is a certain irony that their credibility is now being questioned. As art museums dramatically increased their audiences, adopted marketing strategies from the business world, and began demonstrating that they could generate substantial economic returns for their communities, the public and the media started to take a much closer look at their operations. And with this attention came an awareness that art museums, like other institutions, are not perfect, that they occasionally engage in questionable practices, whether allowing a sponsor to effectively buy an exhibition, or giving control of exhibition content to a donor or collector, or programming exhibitions solely to generate income, or entering into arrangements that involve real or perceived conflicts of interest.
The most notorious recent example of this occurred at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, when it presented Sensation, an exhibition of young British artists from Charles Saatchi’s collection, and found itself initially under attack by the mayor of New York for displaying what he perceived to be blasphemous art, and then by the press for being less than forthright about a number of facts, including whether Saatchi was also a major financial donor to the exhibition. The crisis was provoked by the mayor’s rash actions, and the museum had to fight to keep its doors open. But the museum’s protection was never in doubt, as was clear from extensive pre-existing case law, and like every other major paper The New York Times defended Brooklyn’s right to present the exhibition.
What the Times and other papers criticized repeatedly was Brooklyn’s apparently intentional misleading of the public over the way in which the exhibition was financed. Having promoted Sensation with a highly inflammatory advertising campaign that centered on the slogan, “Health Warning: the contents of this exhibition may cause shock and vomiting,” and deployed the marketing tactics of a major movie studio, the museum discovered that it was now the subject of the very attention it had generated. The media, not to mention the public, did not like what it saw. The museum’s programs and practices were scrutinized and its ethics were questioned, and even its most ardent supporters wearied of defending the institution against the constant barrage of accusations that came from the press and the public at large. Indeed, this scrutiny was so intense, and its implications for other museums so potentially damaging, that the American Association of Museums took the unusual step in the aftermath of Sensation of adopting new guidelines concerning the financing of exhibitions and the avoidance of conflicts of interest in order to bolster public confidence in museums and demonstrate to lawmakers that museums are capable of policing themselves. Whatever gains the museum may have had in attendance and profile were more than offset by the fact that this came at the cost of public trust in the institution.
Public trust is a term that implies both a set of responsibilities to preserve, protect, and enhance property held on behalf of the public and a code of conduct to ensure that this responsibility is discharged with the highest degree of skill and diligence. As public institutions, museums are expected to act and behave in a way that is in keeping with the perceived values they embody. This is true regardless of whether they are privately or publicly funded, civic or state institutions.
We want our art museums to be places of repose and contemplation—venues of discovery and learning, awe and wonder, where we can become absorbed in the power and beauty of art. But museums, especially large metropolitan ones, long ago ceased to be simply quiet abodes of the muses, if they ever were. They have become highly complicated institutions
with extensive collections, staffs, and publics that include annual visitors, members, individual and corporate supporters, artists, tourists, and scholars, as well as those who may never actually visit a museum but who believe in their mission.
The key term here is moral authority, which brings us back to the issue of responsibility and where we began. If art museums are to continue thriving they must recognize that their moral authority derives from the trust the public invests in them because the public believes they are acting responsibly and for the common good. Lessening of trust is ultimately a loss of a museum’s authority and credibility, and once lost, that trust is very difficult to regain. The question, however, is not whether art museums can find a way to embrace commercial culture but whether they can demonstrate that there is a clear and discernible difference between art and commerce that is worth preserving. This is not an easy task in a world where art and commerce can, and often do, merge seamlessly into each other, where museums can become part of vast entertainment complexes, and where museums are compelled to act more and more like commercial enterprises.
Art museums, in short, will be able to survive as mission-driven educational institutions only if they can continue to convince the public that they discharge their responsibilities with integrity and diligence; that there is a discernible difference between the discomforting challenge of genuinely new art and ideas, whether created a thousand years ago or just last week, and the immediate pleasure of shopping at a designer store or going to a theme park; and that they merit the public’s trust in them, and that because of this it is worth according them a special status in order to fulfill their public mission.
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