Guide to New Museum Studies

While the new wave of museum studies was still gaining momentum, a well-informed and not unsympathetic reviewer commented, "We have reached the limits of one thousand flowers blooming."⁷⁷ The limits have proved both less and more constraining than she may have supposed. Museums, museum-like institutions, collections, and exhibits have gone on multiplying, sprouting off from or against established institutions. Rather than withering with globalization, they have blossomed more than ever, depending on the theory, as an unintended consequence, a cover for political control and capitalist market penetration, or a site of productive resistance to the leveling pressures of capitalism and technology. As for limits, the appeal to pluralism has turned orthodox with its own variations on the jargon of "multiculturalism," "polyvocality," "decentering," "reflexivity," or "hybridity." Budgetary stringency and stiff competition in the culture marketplace have dramatically increased since the 1990s. The benefits of more specialized, more culturally diverse museums have run up against the liabilities of the withdrawal of broad-based public support. By licensing incommensurability or by striving for balance that may result in obscuring or trivializing difference and fail to satisfy anyway, the pluralist solution has become part of the problem.⁷⁸ In a recent anthology on the notion of cultural hybridity, Annie E. Coombes and Avtar Brah offer a powerful assessment of the pitfalls of celebrating difference.⁷⁹ Thomas F. Gieryn gives gives a sobering account of striving for "balance" in a close analysis of the rhetoric of the disputes over the Enola Gay and the National Museum of American History's 1994 exhibition Science in American Life. He learned that the mantle of fairness, trust, and credibility was the prize in a tug-of-war; the frank recognition that there were "multiple epistemic communities" played into the hands of the most partisan contenders. Gieryn ends up "depressed by the realization that none of our sometimes well-intentioned rhetorical weapons (objectivity, interpretative skill, dispassion) are fail-safe in convincing everybody else to accept our stories over different ones better aligned with their interests and faiths…, and cheered only the score at half-time: a one to one draw."⁸⁰

James Clifford's adaptation of the notion of "contact zones" to museums is an unflinching and perhaps the most cogent attempt to square the circle of universality and difference. Anthropologist Mary Louise Pratt defines a contact zone as "the space in which peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict."⁸¹ Clifford takes off from there to argue that museums can be seen as sites of "an ongoing historical, political, moral relationship--a power-charged set of exchanges, of push and pull." Since such exchanges are not symmetrical, reciprocal, or homogeneous on either side, smoothly controlled from the top down or uniformly resisted from the bottom up, "community experience" and "curatorial authority" have no preemptive rights. "By thinking of their mission as contact work--decentered and traversed by cultural and political negotiations that are out of any imagined community's control--museums may begin to grapple with the real difficulties of dialogue, alliance, inequality, and translation."⁸² And in doing this, our itinerary so far will suggest, museums will be drawing on the mixed identities, functions, and values they have long since accommodated over time.

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As much as difference and dissension, the newer museum studies are preoccupied with dilution and distraction. This is a museum variation on historians' worries about historical amnesia, the speeding up of time, and the impact of new technologies, not to mention a sluggish job market. With museums updating themselves as cultural marketplaces, anchors of redevelopment projects, public service centers, and architectural showplaces these preoccupations are all the more intense. The most common complaints inside the museum world are that authority has shifted away from curators to the design, outreach, and development staff; that the blockbuster show has turned into a media circus, a funding device, and a business deal; that museums have sold their souls to a global network of infotainment and, slightly better perhaps, edutainment. According to visitor surveys, the public is hard pressed to tell the difference between museums, exhibits in department stores or airports, and historic districts, or theme parks.⁸³

However, practically everyone agrees that “experience” is a priority of the up-to-date museum. The latest edition of a professional museum manual is perfectly straightforward about this: “the criterion of success for a museum exhibition is whether it has achieved an affective experience, inducing a new attitude or interest, not whether visitors walk away from the museum having learned specific facts or having comprehended the basic principles of a scholarly discipline.”⁸⁶ Explanations vary. David Lowenthal, master chronicler of modernity's indiscriminate appetite for the past, plays on a willful inversion of Victorian standards: "artifacts give way to performance, display cases to interactive engagement, memorabilia to montage."⁸⁷ Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett points to mass tourism and mass media, particularly film, as models for visitor-friendly museums that "aspire to the vividness of experience, to immersion in an environment, to an appeal to all the senses, to action and interactivity, to excitement, and beyond that to aliveness."⁸⁸ Theme parks and Disneylands have come in for blame, though the evidence might suggest that the inspiration worked the other way around: open-air museums and reconstructions came first, beginning in the late nineteenth century with Denmark's pieced-together "traditional" village at Skansen.⁸⁹ Critics hold new technologies accountable, but Frank Oppenheimer pioneered the interactive, hands-on museum in the pre-digital age. Oppenheimer described San Francisco’s Exploratorium as “a museum of science, art, and human perception” and freely acknowledged the lessons he had learned from established science and technology museums in Europe.⁹⁰

Hein’s ancient philosophy and the examples of Skansen and the Exploratorium already suggest that these developments are not so revolutionary as enthusiasts and critics make them out to be. The didactic museum has never altogether suppressed the old frisson of "wonder": the blockbluster show is the Wunderkammer’s successor.⁹¹ Stephen Bann has shown how experiential reality, the sense of "being there," contended with temporal distance, the sense of a remote and receding past, in the thinking of the antiquarians whose collections stocked the new public museums in France and England. The two sides of modern historical consciousness still rival one another in museums today. One ideal leads to the evocation of a milieu and ultimately to the interactive display, the other to intrusive labels and methodical itineraries. ⁹²

The late Francis Haskell’s study of the rise of the art exhibition begins with behind-the-scenes preparations for a contemporary art show that, absent the jet transport planes, could just as well apply to the exhibit of Old Master pictures at Manchester in 1857.⁹³ The Manchester show's civic and commercial sponsors commissioned a vast glass-and-iron building with a special railway station attached. They solicited "art treasures" from collections all over Britain with the aim of showing up the Continent while promoting the reputation of Manchester as more than the gritty engine of commerce and industry. The display of more than five hundred Old Masters still counts as one of most spectacular assemblages of masterpieces ever brought together under one roof. Although the pictures were supposed to be hung on the latest principles of chronology and national school, the arrangement broke down after the second room. Photographs, tapestries, weapons, ivories, statues, modern British paintings, and an exotic Indian Garden Court vied for attention with Raphael, Titian, and Rubens. Queen Victoria’s Van Dyck portrait of Charles I commanded a position of honor and blocked the view along the axis of the main hall. Over 1.3 million people visited the exhibition in four months, including workers' groups and school children. Whether they left more enlightened than before is a moot point. There was no lecture hall and the labels were sketchy so as not to compete with catalogue sales, but a waggish printer published a pamphlet called "Bobby Tuttle and his Woife Sayroh's visut to Manchester un' the Greight Hert Tresures Palace owt Trafford" [Old Trafford, the exhibition site]. In any event, concludes Haskell, "the efforts made at social 'outreach' far outstripped those upon which museums congratulate themselves today."⁹⁴

For all the precedents, no one doubts that Information Technology has driven profound changes and enabled ever more sensational effects. Self-styled progressives in Canadian and Australian museum circles have enthusiastically welcomed the democratic, community-building potential of new technologies. George F. MacDonald, perhaps the most influential spokesman of this position and a director of both Canadian and Australian national museums since the 1980s, ties the case to post-modernist media theory. As information and experience contest property and objects as status markers, so the argument goes, museums will gain a new lease on life "as places for learning in and about the world in which the globetrotting mass media, international tourism, migration, and instant satellite links between cultures are sculpting a new global awareness and helping give shape to what Marshall McLuhan characterised as the global village."⁹⁵ Locked away under glass, the old museum collections are, in MacDonald's blasphemous quip that some museum directors might discreetly applaud, a geriatric burden requiring expensive life-support systems. A burgeoning class of new visitors has different expectations anyway, given its inclination,

to reject traditional, low tech, interpretative technologies that employ academic jargon with which they have no familiarity; its preference for new information technologies, with which many people feel comfortable and in control…; its greater interest in behind-the-scenes technical operations; its demand for non-collections-based facilities and services, such as lounges, restaurants, and film presentations.⁹⁶

There are many red flags here, not least because MacDonald, however unfair, may well be right. An otherwise unruly coalition of professed traditionalists, technology skeptics, and theoretically-armed critics of "Late Capitalism" and "Neo-Liberalism" charge the high-tech agenda with being at once free-wheeling, reductive, and determinist about technology as well as society. Depending on the lexicon, the new dispensation is a populist delusion, technological hubris, or false consciousness. One of the most insistent and most recent critics is Timothy W. Luke, who finds Late Capitalist cunning in the "insinuation of entertainmentalities into museum space," with the pretense "that simulation duplicates 'the feel' of it all…."⁹⁷ After updating a conventional view of the serious, if not exactly cheerless functions of museums, Luke indicts ostensibly good democratic intentions as vectors of the disciplines of "governmentality" and the exigencies of capitalist globalization He finds the results more conducive to the production of consumers and tourists than citizens and to the building of markets than minds. The most disturbing failures of the new museum culture to deliver the heightened conscience and consciouness of a liberal outcome are precisely those projects most devoted to such a mission. Luke’s most telling examples are the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles and the National Holocaust Museum in Washington, D. C.⁹⁸

The differences between technophiles and critics of new museum technologies are often represented as quarrels between "popularizers" and "traditionalists." But the labels hardly do justice to positions that are neither so popular nor so traditional. MacDonald's case for museums enhancing popular experience comes close to condescending to the people; the most articulate "traditionalist" arguments come from sophisticated radical critics such as Timothy W. Luke. Conflicts along these lines have by and large become ritual tilts in any event. Most museum professionals have already either embraced or conceded the case for more "accessible" museums "responsive" to a broader and more diverse public. The multimedia museum display and the interactive computer station have become standard equipment in the most traditional museums, and the "virtual museum" has not triumphed over the real thing. Contrary to some predictions, and many fears, few of these pixel productions pretend to reproduce or take the place of museums on the ground ; some do humdrum informational work, most advertise, many add online features to existing real-time programs.⁹⁹ Meanwhile one of the most consistent (and arguably most encouraging) conclusions from visitor surveys is that the actual experience of people in museums is varied and inconsistent. ¹⁰⁰

In April 2002 a New York Times special supplement saluted a "Golden Age of Museums"; a sequel in March 2004 promised "Exhilaration, Inspiration, Wonder."¹⁰¹ The wonder toward the end of this Brief Guide is the disparity between the glitter, possibly fool's gold, and a museum literature with a sense of crisis and foreboding. The museum publicity teams are clearly doing their work, but outsiders may be puzzled—so for that matter may insiders.

One easy explanation is that we are dealing with two sides of same phenomenon, a kind of bipolar disorder in the museum world. That there has been a worldwide museum boom for the past twenty or thirty years is indisputable; a simultaneous boom in museum studies, also indisputable, can be thought of as a discursive shadow, the underside of success where critical reactions and anxieties are played out. Accounts of this sort are a useful check on both the bulls and the bears of the newer museum studies. But they do not tell us much about the issues at stake.

Another possibility is that museums are "in transition," suspended between past practices and future prospects. This is a view that Hilde S. Hein puts in the broadest philosophical context: museums have given up on “the singularity of truth” for “the “promotion of multivalent plurality…in a world that affirms the global while denying the universal."¹⁰² Counting collapse as the ultimate transition, Douglas Crimp’s On the Museum in Ruins imagines the modern art museum imploding on its own airless elitism. The upbeat counterpart of these dismal transitions only changes valences. For George F. MacDonald demoting received practices means promoting a vibrant union of democracy and technology.¹⁰³

The problem with transition arguments, dark or light, is that their inclines are too steep. They presuppose some utopian or dystopian point of departure and a correspondingly low or high point of arrival. On the one hand, Hein idealizes the goals of a perfect museum—“to teach discrimination and discernment; to develop a culturally specific sense intellectual, moral, and aesthetic values; and to come, by that route, to self-scrutiny and self-knowledge"; then she pits the ideal against a drearily dysfunctional present "when the objectivity of objects disintegrates, the self reverts to privacy, and the separateness of others is merely an accidental projection of one's own consciousness"¹⁰⁴ On the other hand, critics who start with harsh indictments—hidebound routines, complacent superiority, and subservience to money and politics are the usual suspects—leave precious little hope for anything short of a revolution. Precisely because present and future directions are problematic—indeed, "in transition"—these formulaic scenarios are not helpful. One clear lesson of this Brief Guide is that museum history is fraught with complex and often conflicting motives.

Historians are inclined to see proof of complexity as an endgame, then to disclaim further responsibilities on the grounds that the future is not our business. What would it mean to bring complications to light and take on responsibilities too? The question and the answers are all in a hard day’s work for public historians involved with museums or museum studies programs. Though historians in variety of fields have occasionally done cross-over stints as consultants or curators for museum shows, for most academic historians museums are a small if by now well-tended subfield of cultural history. We owe to an Australian museum professional who is not herself a historian and does not expect historians to become museum workers the most searching treatment so far of the potential impact of historical perspectives on museum theory and practice. The title of Andrea Witcomb's Re-imagining the Museum: Beyond the Mausoleum sounds like an exercise in museum-bashing, but her intention is to get “beyond” the attacking and the defensive modes of the newer museum literature. And her main strategy is eminently historical: to confront stereotypes and pseudo-histories with historical cross-currents that will seem familiar to users of this Brief Guide.

To begin with, Witcomb argues that one of the most damaging misrepresentations is the association of museums with narratives of modernity. In the battered but still standing version they are beacons of reason, civilization, and enlightenment; in a mirror image they are complicitous and dispiriting extensions of the sins of the West. Witcomb questions these associations without simply rejecting them in an a priori move of her own. Marshaling examples mostly from the newer museum studies, she shows how eclectic, inconsistently modernizing, often "irrational" even the most self-consciously modern museums have been. This leads to a conclusion with practical applications: museums cannot be held hostage in the present to totalizing visions of their past or likely future.

Witcomb's second objective is to encourage fresh encounters between academic studies of the culture and historiography of museums and the literature of museum practice. This amounts to asking people who write about and work in museums to do their homework. Her close analysis of the benefits and liabilities of two interactive historical exhibits in Sydney, Australia, suggests how productive this can be, not least for its bearing on the yield of different ways of plotting social and cultural history.¹⁰⁵ If linear exhibitions reinforced dominant cultural narratives, as if the nation were a single community, they also constituted a shared public space and gave visitors the referents and defined routes that, according to visitor surveys, they wanted. Serial arrangements offering alternative paths and discrete displays suited a pluralistic social history and encouraged interactive choices, but they also proved distracting and, for some visitors, disconcerting. Either/or choices have, as usual, a reality problem.