Seven years ago, in the tenth-anniversary issue of The New
Criterion (September 1991), we published an article that asked the
question: “Has Success Spoiled the Art Museum?” In that article, it
was observed that

Of all the institutions of high culture that have undergone
significant change in recent decades, none has been more radically
transformed than the art museum. In every aspect of its function,
its atmosphere, and its scale of operations, in the character and
number of the events that it encompasses, in the nature and size of
the public it attracts, and in the role it plays in codifying–and at
times deconstructing–our ideas about what art is, the museum has
been so dramatically altered in our lifetime that in many important
respects it can no longer be said to be the same institution we came
to in our youth. And of all the changes that have overtaken the art
museum in our time, the most crucial has been the elevation of change
itself to the status of a governing principle.

Today, alas, this principle of incessant change seems finally to
have reached its logical absurdity by producing an epidemic of
professional fatigue in the top ranks of museums, where there are
now more vacant directorships and fewer qualified candidates to fill
them than ever before.

Of the many factors that have contributed to this dismal situation,
surely one is the heedless, headlong pursuit of expansion that has
burdened so many of our art museums with the need for budgets so
vast, bureaucracies so unwieldy, and publicity campaigns so
shameless, that a serious interest in art—and a capacity to make
serious judgments about art—has come to seem almost marginal to
the most pressing concerns of those charged with directing these
institutions. Is it any wonder, then, that some well-known and highly
respected museum directors have lately elected to quit the
profession to take up offers in the auction houses and the art
galleries where,
in addition to higher compensation and shorter
hours, they are likely to have more daily contact with works of art
than is any longer possible for the occupant of the director’s
office? What these departures from the profession signify is a loss
of experience, a loss of connoisseurship, and a loss of mature
judgment, all of which are proving to be irreplaceable. Such are the
casualties of a principle of change and expansion that has
inevitably made dynamism, salesmanship, and show business a more
compelling priority than the serious study of art itself.

Runaway expansion in the museum world is thus having some of the
same effects on the quality of our museums that corporate mergers
have had in the book-publishing world. We no longer expect the CEO
of a major trade publishing house to have any expert knowledge of
books as anything but saleable commodities. We no longer even expect
what are still called “editors” in the book-publishing business to
function as real editors—which is to say, as “line editors,” as
they are now demeaningly stigmatized. In some major houses, editors
are now actually forbidden to spend their office time at such
fundamental editorial matters, which are either “outsourced” or
abandoned altogether. All “editors” are now to be “acquisition
editors” on the prowl for potential best sellers. The only “line”
that now counts is the bottom line.

Museum curators now face similar imperatives in organizing
exhibitions. If the shows they have in mind to organize cannot be
expected to command media attention on a scale that will register at
the box office, curators now know better than to propose them.
Box office has become in the museum profession what bestsellerdom has
become in the book-publishing industry. What in book publishing is
called “buzz,” in the museum world is called “sizzle,” and we have
lately been treated to the spectacle of
a major New York museum
promoting “sizzle” as its principal appeal in full-page
advertisements in The New York Times. Aspiring scholars and
connoisseurs whose interest in art is not the kind that can be
expected to produce “sizzle” will know better than to enter the
curatorial profession—and thus the best recruits for future museum
directorships will continue to be radically reduced in number. All
of which means that the current epidemic of museum fatigue at the
top may only be a prelude to greater losses and disasters to come.
The crisis in book publishing is already demonstrating what the
outcome will produce in the way of lower standards, increased
bureaucracy, and declining quality.