Museums in a Troubled World

Renewal, Irrelevance or Collapse?

Robert R. Janes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780415463003
• eBook ISBN: 9781134041688
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Museum Administration
• Index: Business

Are Museums Irrelevant?

Museums are rarely acknowledged in the global discussion of climate change, environmental degradation, the inevitability of depleted fossil fuels, and the myriad local issues concerning the well-being of particular communities – suggesting the irrelevance of museums as social institutions. At the same time, there is a growing preoccupation among museums with the marketplace, and museums, unwittingly or not, are embracing the values of relentless consumption that underlie the planetary difficulties of today.

Museums in a Troubled World argues that much more can be expected of museums as publicly supported and knowledge-based institutions. The weight of tradition and a lack of imagination are significant factors in museum inertia and these obstacles are also addressed. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, combining anthropology ethnography, museum studies and management theory, this book goes beyond conventional museum thinking.

Robert R. Janes explores the meaning and role of museums as key intellectual and civic resources in a time of profound social and environmental change. This volume is a constructive examination of what is wrong with contemporary museums, written from an insider's perspective that is grounded in both hope and pragmatism. The book's conclusions are optimistic and constructive, and highlight the unique contributions that museums can make as social institutions, embedded in their communities, and owned by no one.

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Museums and irrelevance

Troubling questions

The Prologue is both fact and fiction, real and apocryphal, and perhaps even a fanciful disservice to the museum world in the eyes of some. There are undoubtedly museum workers who have never encountered any of the characters in this Prologue. I am comfortable with any of these reactions, as the Prologue is intended to highlight some of the uncertainties and difficulties that now directly or indirectly confront museums and galleries, whether they are the fate of collections, the psycho-politics of complex organizations, or our nearly complete separation from the natural world. Of particular note is that these difficulties and uncertainties not only originate in the world at large but are also created by museums themselves. As a result, one must cultivate a respect for uncertainty, especially with respect to the current and future role of museums as social institutions.

By social institutions I mean those that are publicly owned, and thus owned by no one, and engage in activities that are normatively sanctioned. Museums have legislated acts or constitutions, boards of trustees, sources of finance other than shareholders, and are not properties that can be bought and sold.¹ I will argue that the majority of museums, as social institutions, have largely eschewed, on both moral and practical grounds, a broader commitment to the world in which they operate. Instead, they have allowed themselves to be held increasingly captive by the economic imperatives of the marketplace and their own internally-driven agendas. Whether or not they have done this unwittingly or knowingly is immaterial, as the consequences are the same. It is time for museums to examine their core assumptions.

In making this sweeping assessment, I am, of course, generalizing, and I accept this liability as the starting point for reconsidering the underlying purpose, meaning and value of museums. These questions are rarely, if ever, truthfully examined in the museum literature or thoughtfully discussed at museum conferences. On the contrary, museum practitioners and academics are seemingly preoccupied with method and process – getting better and better at what they are already doing well. Over thirty years as a museum practitioner and consultant have sensitized me to the importance of asking questions about the meaning and value of museum work. Admittedly, there is little comfort to be had in asking questions, if one heeds the words of John Ralston Saul, the Canadian essayist. He wrote that ‘to most questions there are many answers, none of them absolute and few of them satisfactory except in a limited way.’²

Nonetheless, there are some essential questions worth considering, such as – if museums did not exist, would we reinvent them and what would they look like? Further, if the museum were to be reinvented, what would be the public’s role in the reinvented institution? It has been noted that ‘the great challenge to our time is to harness research, invention and professional practice to deliberately embraced human values.’ The fateful questions, according to scientist William Lowrance, are ‘how the specialists will interact with citizens, and whether the performance can be imbued with wisdom, courage and vision.’³ My main motivation in writing this book arises from the belief that none of the questions posed above have been articulated by the majority of museums, much less addressed by them, despite there being no more important questions than these for both museums and society at large.

The idea of rethinking the purpose of museums is also an oversimplification and perhaps a pretension – the latter in the sense that expanding the purpose of museums may or may not be achievable. The reader will be the judge of that. Revisiting the purpose of museums might also be seen as an exercise in individualism and a refusal to mind one’s own business. With this comes a certain amount of risk, such as being seen as iconoclastic and overly critical. I concede that these outcomes are possible, which makes it incumbent upon me to be as fair-minded, constructive and as informed as I can be. The reader will also be the judge of that. I intend to be as analytical as possible, although a certain amount of adjuration is unavoidable, having retained my belief in the unrealized potential of museums as essential social institutions.

I have also chosen to address various challenges that mainstream museums are apparently unable or unwilling to consider. This task is made easier by the fact that there are some splendid examples of purposeful museums, which will be considered later in this book. My worry is that these exceptional organizations have not yet formed a critical mass sufficient to overcome the tyranny of tradition which weighs so heavily on their sister institutions. Interestingly, this tyranny is expressed both in the inertia of past practices and in the uncritical adoption of methods, models and practices from the world of commerce. Examining both of these enslavements is yet another purpose of this book.

I must also be clear about what museums I am referring to, as museums are a nearly universal phenomenon in the twenty-first century. The primary focus of this book is Canadian and American museums, with an obvious emphasis on Canada simply because of my work experience. I assume, however, that various parts of this book will ring true with non-North American practitioners, as museums everywhere share a common body of knowledge, theory and methods, as well as the intricacies, foibles and aspirations of organizational life. When this book doesn’t make sense, I am hoping that the dissonance arising from the reader’s unique experiences will provoke both comparison and assessment. Indeed, there may also be a sense of relief, or even privilege, for the non-North American reader as the difficulties confronting New World museums are examined. This is not meant to imply that New World museums are uncommonly weak or incompetent – I simply know more about them. The lack of a truly global perspective in this book reflects the limitations of the author and not the vibrancy and depth of the international museum community.

Where possible and appropriate, I will call upon the international museological literature and I concede at the outset that even this effort will be incomplete. There is important and innovative work under way in Europe and Latin America, for example, although of necessity I have focused on the English language literature.⁴ In the final analysis, none of us can do more than write from our experience. ‘My work is best,’ wrote Wendell Berry, the American farmer, essayist and conservationist, ‘… when I talk as a person who’s not an authority on anything but his own experience.’⁵ The same is true of the observations in this book.

Sobering assumptions

As knowledge and experience are always laden with assumptions, it is best to make mine explicit now. My first assumption is that we, as human beings, are co-creators of our lives and our organizations if we accept the responsibility to do this. By extension, outside experts and consultants do not necessarily know the answers that an organization needs to solve its problems and improve.⁶ A museum’s board, staff and supporters are potentially the real experts on the organization and what is needed – the challenge is to unlock their tacit knowledge and put it to use. There is also an essential role for both unorthodox and non-museum perspectives and this is a valuable contribution that consultants can make. The tendency among museums, however, is to engage consultants to deal with demanding operational tasks, such as planning and organizational dysfunction, rather than as sources of new ideas and catalysts for change.

The reluctance to use consultants and knowledgeable outsiders to tap different, and perhaps contradictory, perspectives to stimulate internal rethinking may be the result of professional conceit or insecurity among senior staff, but the consequences are the same – the loss of untapped internal knowledge and creativity with which to build institutional renewal. The museum consulting business is flourishing, nonetheless, as evidenced by the 90 pages of text on the internet devoted to museum consulting in 2008. A significant portion of the current consulting work is devoted to the recent vanity architecture movement among museums, predicated on the resurrected axiom, ‘If you build it, he will come.’⁷ This critical topic will be discussed later, but I note here that the museum community may have overlooked some important wisdom in its haste to embrace the edifice complex. With apologies to Yogi Berra for recasting his baseball philosophy, ‘if people don’t want to come to your museum, you can’t make them.’⁸

Museums are privileged

My second assumption is that museums and galleries are potentially the most free and creative work environments on the planet – but note the word ‘potentially’. Having been challenged by colleagues because of the undisguised idealism of this claim, I now qualify my enthusiasm. Nevertheless, the scope for creativity and initiative should be just about limitless in a well-run museum. There are very few other workplaces which offer more opportunities for thinking, choosing and acting in ways that can blend personal satisfaction and growth with organizational goals. These opportunities constitute the true privilege of museum work, and it is up to each museum worker to seize them.

Unlike the private sector, museums do not have production or sales quotas, although the current imposition of quantitative measures is certainly moving museums in that direction. Nonetheless, they are still relatively immune to the tyranny of production that marks the private sector. In contrast to the public sector, museums are not forced to administer unpopular government policies. In fact, some museums are now being called upon by government to implement progressive social policies, such as in the United Kingdom, where publicly funded museums, galleries and archives are expected to play a part in the combating of social exclusion.⁹ In short, museums have led a privileged existence as agenda-free and respected custodians of mainstream cultural values – not ever truly wealthy, but mostly comfortable, and certainly not beholden to the incessant demands of the so-called real world. Not until recently, that is – the pressure is mounting.

Most importantly, museums are privileged because they are organizations whose purpose is their meaning.¹⁰ This elegant observation suggests that any activity unaligned with organizational purpose could jeopardize the meaning. A growing lack of alignment is now creating enduring difficulties for many museums, whether or not they are aware of them. In particular, the failure to ask ‘why’ museums do what they do discourages self-critical reflection, which is a prerequisite to heightened awareness, organizational alignment and social relevance. Instead, in the absence of ‘why’, the focus is largely on the ‘how’, or the clichéd processes of collecting, preserving and earning revenue – the latter being the cause of much of the organizational drifting characteristic of many contemporary museums.

If an exhibit gallery closes during public hours in order to accommodate a private wedding and increase earned revenue, is this museum adrift without a home port? Recalling Fuller’s vignette in the Prologue, the admirals on the board of directors may all agree on this course, but what or who is steering the ship? All of which brings me back to the qualifier underlying my second assumption – the museum’s ‘potential’ to be the most free and creative work environment on the planet. This potential will remain unfulfilled as long as mission statements fail to answer the question of ‘why’, and museums continue to accept the host of unnecessary and self-inflicted challenges which are the subject of the next chapter.

Learning means questioning

My third assumption reflects the widespread assertion in our so-called knowledge economy that learning is essential to intelligent and caring change. Much of this appears to be rhetoric, as corporations outsource jobs to sweatshop labour and universities favour techno-scientific initiatives at the expense of those less glamorous disciplines that are committed to critical thinking – the liberal arts, for example. Sweatshops and techno-science are obviously mainstays of hyper-capitalism, but one is hard pressed to see them as commitments to intelligent foresight since they are firmly anchored in the status quo.

More to the point, and one which apparently escapes many who tout its importance, is that learning requires that we ask difficult and uncomfortable questions of ourselves and others. The unwillingness or inability to ask these questions is characteristic of individuals and organizations with a vested interest in the status quo – an obvious explanation for the lack of self-critical and innovative leadership on the part of big business, government and universities. Are any of these massive organizations actually leading the way to a sustainable future, once the magazine advertisements and the election speeches are unmasked? My assumption about learning is grounded in the idea of self-critical and reflective thought, a task which has become an essential survival skill for those organizations and individuals who wish to learn.¹¹ I will ask a variety of uncomfortable, perhaps annoying, questions throughout this book, along with critical observations on all manner of things related to museums. I will be dismayed if the reader sees these as only gratuitous attacks, and heartened if they are seen as invitations for learning and reflection.

The future is not knowable

My fourth assumption requires a brief foray into the future, still a rare topic for museums to contemplate. This is understandable for institutions whose focus is on the past, but it is also slightly schizophrenic, as museums rush to install the latest technological wizardry or attach whimsical architectural appendages to their buildings. Nonetheless, the future requires some serious reflection precisely because it is not know...

Table of contents

• Museum Meanings
• Contents
• Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Prologue
• 1 Museums and irrelevance
• 2 A troubled world
• 3 It’s a jungle in here: Museums and their self-inflicted challenges
• 4 Debunking the marketplace
• 5 Searching for resilience
• 6 The mindful museum
• 7 Museums: Stewards or spectators?
• Notes
• Index