The first panel, featuring James Panero, Bruce Cole, Karen Wilkin & Eric Gibson
panero: I’d like to start with a Seussian hypothetical: “If I ran the museum.” In my talk, I ended with one suggestion—expansion of open storage. What would you do, Bruce, to address some of your concerns, if you ran the Indianapolis Museum, for example?
cole: I’d get rid of the eighteen-hole golf course.
panero: I thought you’d say that.
cole: Also, I very much like the idea of these focused exhibitions. I think this is a good way, when museums are strapped for money, to concentrate on one work and some peripheral material. Yesterday I saw this little exhibition of Alexander Hamilton, with about twenty objects, at the New York Public Library. And I’ve got to say, I learned a tremendous amount about Hamilton in a very short period because it was done well.
panero: A museum today justifies its activities to its board and to the public through turnstile metrics. What if moma’s entry rate were to go down 20 percent, 30 percent? That would clear out the museum, but it could be perceived, by the public, as a failure.
wilkin: Interesting thought. Of course, circulation is so awful, I don’t know if that would make any difference. You see all the visitors getting off the escalator and going into the wrong end of the permanent collection galleries, because they can’t figure out where the beginning is.
gibson: I think so much of it comes down to the architecture. Visitors are looking for guidance. How do I get to what I want to see? What do I want to see? If it’s just this huge cavernous space, like moma and Tate Modern’s Bankside building, of course, you’re going to wander in, look around, go in the wrong entrance of a gallery. So to answer your question: What should a place like moma do? I think they need to completely reconceive their idea of a building.
cole: I think a lot of this, at base, springs from what’s happened to the study of art history. As a recovering art historian—the problem is that postmodern art history does everything but talk about objects. It sees objects as a reflection of something else, something in society. It’s increasingly difficult now for museums to get people who are trained in what the traditional curatorial skills for museums used to be.
wilkin: It’s crucial, because the way art history has been taught for the last twenty years, the object is no longer primary. The object is a jumping-off place for theory. And of course, this is going to be reflected by the people who are emerging from those programs. Barnard, back in the late Bronze Age, when I was an undergraduate, had a course in connoisseurship that was taught in the museums by the late, extraordinary Julius Held, the great Rubens scholar. Now there is no connoisseurship course. They have a year-long course in theory, which, I’m told, doesn’t even use images.
cole: But that’s the convenient thing about theory; you don’t actually have to look. You can just hammer any object into your theoretical construct. This is toxic for museums.
panero: Eric, you wrote a great piece for us on cameras in museums, and proposed, perhaps, banning cameras and selfies. Would you still pursue such draconian measures?
gibson: I would, because, as you may recall from that article, I contrasted the situation at the Louvre and other museums with the situation in the Orangerie, where they have a sign saying no photography is allowed whatsoever. And in the Louvre, and moma, and lots of other museums, you have visitors taking selfies with works of art.
So people are not concentrating on looking at objects, whereas in the Orangerie, where no photography is allowed at all, everyone is looking at the pictures. But most museums are afraid that if people can’t take selfies, they won’t come to the museum.
panero: Another problem is that we have a donor class that’s, increasingly, looking to monetize their own collections. They’re interested in contemporary art only. So what do you do about that? That’s almost a bigger issue than the public—I think the motto of today’s art world is “no conflict, no interest.”
gibson: I have one way of combating this problem: When I get a press release from a museum announcing an exhibition of some couple’s private collection, I make sure that that body of work is either already in the museum’s permanent collection or has been gifted to the museum before I decide whether or not to assign someone for review. I don’t want us to be part of the promotional engine for people who want to show their collection at the museum and then as soon as the show is over, take it over to Sotheby’s.
wilkin: I cling to my curator friends who have profound expertise, many of whom are young enough that they’re going to be there for a while. But art history departments are full of people who don’t want to study anything before Duchamp. So we are going to be in a situation where there’s going to be a large pool of incredibly ignorant characters.
cole: And if you look at the disciplines, and the hiring patterns in art history departments, say, over the last forty years, what you find is that when you lose somebody who’s interested in Netherlandish painting, they’re replaced by somebody who’s interested in contemporary art. And the same thing is true with the Renaissance.
The second panel, featuring Roger Kimball, Michael J. Lewis, George Knight & Philippe de Montebello
kimball: I had not known that the beginning of the Hippocratic oath was “I swear by Apollo.” But certainly, the ambition to “first, do no harm” is an important one.
Michael, you spoke of that poem by Rilke on the archaic bust of Apollo, which says, “you must change your life.” And I think that, in some sense, the contemplation, the attractiveness of works of art, the reason why we value them, is precisely for that revelatory moment. You talked about the corrosive attitude and activities of this progressive dismantling of the museums. I wonder if you had anything more to say about that?
lewis: That’s the biggest question of all: the promotion of virtue. And it’s bigger than the museum. Governments used to exist as instruments of virtue. There were good things that must be commemorated. And as government has gotten increasingly involved in things, like—
kimball: Bathrooms?
lewis: Bathrooms, yes. But I was thinking of state lotteries. When government gets into the vice business, there is no longer a common understanding that our public institutions are instruments of civilization. The Apollo Belvedere—and Louis Kahn’s buildings—offer opportunities for the quiet contemplation of a single object, but our society doesn’t encourage it.
kimball: Very good. I think both George and Philippe alighted on one of the paradoxes of our panel today, which is the impermanence of permanence. Of course, we are interested in museums because they have this curatorial role. Perhaps permanence is the wrong word, but they seek to retard the inevitable entropy that attends to all human constructions. When I was a child, I never gave much of a thought to flowers. I thought, “I guess they’re pretty, but who cares?” But I find that as I get older, it’s precisely the evanescence of the blossom that makes them so poignant. So I look forward to spring, and the return of the tulips. They only last a week or two, but how beautiful they are. And part of their beauty, of course, is their very impermanence.
de montebello: If anybody here is in the PR department of a museum, I think they should immediately take notes. And I think the new message should be “Hurry to the museum, while the works of art have not yet totally disintegrated.”
I have to say, despite all of the nostalgia and melancholy, and all of the things that are happening in museums that we heard today, I have a great respect for public audiences. I think the people who really seek out fine things still find them in the midst of all of the superfluous material that is thrown into museums. Most people who seek the right in museums will find it. So I’m fairly confident about the future. It’s when the Met and the Boston museums start to actually dismantle their galleries altogether that we will have to worry. But they haven’t done that yet.
knight: To your question, I would say it’s simply the notion of absolute permanence that I think we probably have to relinquish. I’ve heard many people speak today, regretting dramatic ruptures in the course of the development of museums; I agree with those concerns. But I think the museum’s role as protector of art work is to foster a continuity, which is ever nourishing to human life.
lee rosenbaum (from the audience): I’m going to pose a devil’s advocate question. Most of the discussions today seem to be largely characterized by nostalgia for the way things used to be when those of us of a certain age first began visiting museums. I have that nostalgia too, but that was then and this is now. So my question is: have there been any changes to increase visitor engagement, and to attract larger audiences, more diverse audiences, that you would approve of?
knight: One thing that I’ve heard a couple of times this morning was references to the exhibition on Alexander Hamilton at the New York Public Library, which I’m dying to get down to see. I have to believe that such a show arose out of a brilliant, very popular piece of theatrical art, Hamilton, the musical that we’ve probably all seen or are hoping to see. It suggests to me that there is a backflow of very popular culture into the culture of exhibitions. I actually find that to be encouraging.
de montebello: I think the question is accessibility; we have to be realistic. As you quoted me earlier, Roger, “Art is not fun.” And to represent it as such, as an alternative to Madison Square Garden, doesn’t do any good. The visitors will be disappointed at looking at a Poussin and will not be amused.
From time immemorial, fine art has always been, in a sense, reserved for those with the right preparation and disposition. Today, people simply visit the Louvre the way they take the Bateaux Mouches, or go to the catacombs; they check the Louvre off their bucket list. They have no particular interest in the art, except maybe the slaves of Michelangelo because of the name, or the Mona Lisa.
kimball: We need to end now, but one thing that The New Criterion has quoted, I think from its very first issue, is Matthew Arnold’s famous admonition that we should disseminate the “best that has been thought and said”—and one could add “painted” and “sculpted,” and so on—as broadly as possible.
And I agree with that, but one has to, in order to make sense of it, stress the adjective. It has to be the best. You don’t water it down. You don’t turn it into entertainment. You don’t want an entertaining version of Hamlet, you want the real thing. You want the real painting of A Dance to the Music of Time, not some fake Poussin.