In his book “The constructivist museum”, George Hein quotes Edward
Forbes (a British naturalist) who in a 1853 lecture said that curators may be
prodigies of learning, and yet unfit for their posts, if they do not know
anything about pedagogy, if they are not equipped to teach people who know
nothing.
Years later, in 1909, one of my greatest inspirations, Newark Museum director John Cotton Dana said
that “A
good museum attracts, entertains, arouses curiosity, leads to questioning and
thus promotes learning. (...) The Museum can help people only if they use it;
they will use it only if they know about it and only if attention is given to
the interpretation of its possessions in terms they, the people, will
understand”. And it was in 1917 that he wrote: “Today, museums of art are built
to keep objects of art, and objects of art are bought to be kept in museums. As
the objects seem to do their work if they are safely kept, and as museums seem
to serve their purpose if they safely keep the objects, the whole thing is as
useful in the splendid isolation of a distant park as in the centre of the life
of the community which possesses it. Tomorrow, objects of art will be bought to
give pleasure, to make manners seem more important, to promote skill, to exalt
handwork, and to increase the zest of life by adding to it new interests.”
(both quotes come from “Reinventing the Museum: Historical and Contemporary
Perspectives on the Paradigm Shift” by Gail Anderson).
The people, all
people, are central in the thinking of both men in what concerns the role of
museums. Cotton Dana, though, lived and worked in a critical moment for the
history of museums and their relationship to society. In his book “Making
Museums Matter”, Stephen Weil dedicates a chapter to one of the most decisive
paradigm shifts: in the early 20th century
two major US museums, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the Metropolitan
Museum of Art in New York, determined that the emphasis of their work would be
on the aesthetic rather than the instructional aspects of the works of art that
they chose to acquire or to display. Weil quotes sociologist Paul DiMaggio, who
said that driving this process was “an aesthetic ideology that distinguished
sharply between the nobility of art and the vulgarity of mere entertainment”,
resulting in social distinctions that would also differentiate the publics for
high and popular culture.
This movement was not confined to the US. In fact, it is considered to be a bad replica of
inappropriate models of European art museums. In her 1991 essay “Museums and
Gallery Education”, Eilean Hooper-Greenhill writes about a new generation of curators, from the 1920s onward, which
was less interested in the public use of museums and more interested in the
accumulation of collections. In the process, people were somehow left behind,
museums did not really exist for them, but for the pleasure of the specialists
caring for their collections and some knowledgeable elites. As John Berger
affirms in his essay “Landscapes”, “Anybody
who is not an expert entering the average museum today is made to feel like a
cultural pauper receiving charity.” This is a mentality embraced by a number of
museums professionals (and, among them, many museums directors) which still
holds on, decisively affecting the relationship museums have with society. If
more than fifty years after Pierre Bourdieu’s “L’ amour de l’ art” it is a fact
that the profile of museums visitors hasn’t changed significantly, this is one
place where we should definitely get a better look into.
New mentalities have
formed in the last thirty years, which bring the people back to the attention
of museums of all kinds (as not all museums are art museums). Museums initially
“for” and more recently “with” the people are the dream of a significant number
of museum professionals, who don’t see the functions of collecting / preserving
/ researching as antagonistic to those of exhibiting and communicating. Another
great inspiration for me, Elaine Heumann Gurian, nailed it in her book
“Civilizing the Museum”, when she talked about the “museum ‘and’ ”: the museum
that doesn’t determine that some of its functions are more important than
others or have some kind of priority, but aims to fulfill them all, in order to
better serve the society. The museum is not 'either' collections 'or' people; it's collections 'and' people. There’s no need for museums to choose; they shouldn’t choose. This is what makes them 'museums'.
This week, I heard the
name Rita Rato for the first time. She is the person chosen to direct the Museu
do Aljube in Lisbon, which tells the story of resistance during António de
Oliveira Salazar’s dictatorial regime. Aljube was the place were political
prisoners were held. I was truly surprised to find out that the new director
has a degree in Political Science and International Relations, and no museum
studies or any previous professional experience in museums (the latter was a
preferential factor in the announcement of the post). People with, apparently,
more relevant qualifications were not even interviewed. Thus, I hope that the
concerns expressed by a number of specialists (historians, sociologists, different
museum professionals, as well as museologists) will soon be answered, with all
transparency.
The heated debate
regarding this appointment has once again brought forward an issue I have been
reflecting upon in the last years:
In 2020, shouldn’t we expect that every announcement
for a museum director’s post indicates “museums studies” (in many countries and
languages defined as “museology”) as an obligatory requirement from candidates
interested in running a museum?
This week’s public
debate in Portugal reveals (once again) a number of misunderstandings regarding
the technical preparation and role of museologists. Here are some of the things
I read:
- Catarina Vaz Pinto, responsible
for Culture in the Municipality of Lisbon, stated that “The profile of a museum director doesn’t need to be
academic or museological”. She also defended the choice of Rita Rato not only
for the project she presented (although the post announcement didn’t mention
the candidates were supposed to present a project), but also “for the
expectation that her experience in interpersonal and political relations may
guarantee a generational transition and renovation”. – Question: Does
the counsellor for Culture know what a museologist is? And is an experience in
“interpersonal and political relations” a technical requirement for museum
directors that makes up for the lack of other essential requirements and
professional experience?
- Historian and politician Rui Tavares wrote that Rita Rato’s problem in being chosen for the post is not the fact that she is not a historian or museologist, as there are many excellent museum directors, programmers and cultural managers who are neither (her only problem - O único problema de Rita Rato – being the fact that in a 2009 interview she defended Stalinism and denied knowing anything about the gulags; Rato having been a MP for the communist party…). – Question: who is an “excellent museum director” for Rui Tavares? How does he define “excellence” in this field?
Some further comments
in relation to my own position on this issue further showed that there is not a
clear notion regarding what a museologist studies and does:
- “Historians have often
shown little respect for museologists. 'They are in the canning business', I
heard an older colleague saying one day. Museologists, meanwhile, counterattacked
and gained their market share in the business of the past. (…) Museologists
wish to protect their corner.” – Short answer: being a historian and a
museologist is not mutually exclusive, it’s not a confrontational relationship.
Museology is a specialisation for historians, archaeologists, anthropolgists,
art historians, engineers, astrophysicians, biologists, as well as museums
educators and mediators, marketing and communication professionals and all
sorts of other professionals and researchers wishing to work in museum
management and perhaps also become museum directors.
- “Does someone with general training in museology become automatically qualified to run a museum, be it the design museum, the coaches museum or the cod fish museum?” – Short answer: Yes, together with experience in working in or for museums (by the way, there’s no such thing as a “general training in museology”).
Today, we
find a number of professionals working in museums and they are all museum
professionals (there was a referential
of museum professions published by ICOM – International Council of Museums
in 2008, which would need some updating today). But is not a museologist for
working in a museum. A museologist is a specialist coming from diverse
professional backgrounds who trains in museum management, collections
management, care of collections, communication, education. For almost two
centuries now a significant “corpus” of knowledge, of theory and practice, has
been built and forms the basis of this specialisation, accompanied by
conferences, seminars, debates that keep an intense reflection around the role and
development of museums going. This is the kind of preparation I would like to
see in anyone wishing to run a museum in 2020. After more than a hundred years
of a different paradigm, it’s high time we tried something different, something
more substantial – something Edward Forbes, John Cotton Dana and many others
dreamt of long ago.
This expectation
and demand seems to constitute a threat for some of the people who monopolised
museum directorship in all these years: namely, collections specialists (in
some cases, researchers). Having myself a degree in Archaeology, I am in a
position to guarantee that it was not in the faculty neither in the excavation
field nor while working in an archaeological museum that I developed my
thinking regarding museums and their role in society. Thus, if I had to choose
between an excellent archaeologist and an excellent museologist (with a
background in archaeology or not) to run an archaeological museum, I would definitely choose
the latter. It’s a different kind of knowledge and practice we are talking
about.
This is
not a confrontational relationship, this is not a privilege I wish to give to
museologists, as a colleague told me I was trying to do. All sorts of
specialists and researchers may apply for a position of museum director, but in
2020 they should be technically prepared for it. And many people in our field are
prepared for it. This kind of technical preparation cannot be an “option”, a “prefential
factor” anymore. It’s basic, it’s essential, it’s needed. Good museologists are
those who can give us the “museum ‘and’ ”.
More texts of mine on this subject:
Competition for museum directors: a big step forward, Público, 1.6.2020
Para que servem os museus?,
Público, 21.9.2019
Os museus devem promover a igualdade ou a
sua missão (ainda) é outra?, Público, 1.9.2019 (enrevista à Lucinda
Canelas)
On the appointment of
Rita Rato:
João Pedro George, Aqui há Rato
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