The new museology

Public Interest, Spring, 1997 by Lynne Munson

Our relationship with museums is based on trust. But while we expect history museums to know the facts and science museums to understand the math, we demand more from art museums. We go to paintings and sculptures much as we do great novels, expecting that we might acquire information, though primarily seeking to experience art itself. We know that we react differently to Vermeer's intimate, pausing interiors than we do to the fleeting images of everyday life. Still, few of us believe we will ever grasp the elusive quality that defines art against everything else. So we rely on the art museum to provide us with the best examples of man's aesthetic soul.

When we visit today's art museums, however, we are often confused. Many museums are altering their buildings, revamping their programs, and spurning the very idea of aesthetic quality on route to the goal of becoming "pluralistic institutions." Yet the result has been anything but pluralistic. In reality, the traditional meritocratic museum, which celebrated aesthetic excellence regardless of origin, has evolved into a highly prescriptive institution, more dedicated to subverting the "master narrative" and deconstructing genius than to enriching visitors' minds. In the end, the so-called revisionist art museum is replacing the idea of a continuous and progressive evolution of artistic achievement with a heroless tale of cultural production.

Revising excellence

The traditional museum assumed that the ability to experience art was a shared human inclination. Columbia professor and Nation art critic Arthur Danto, revisionism's foremost theorist, has explained, "As recently as 20 years ago there was a certain consensus in moral philosophy and in the philosophy of art that ethical and aesthetic values were universal." According to Danto, a "recent turn in ethics and in art marks the disintegration of this consensus."

It is, in Danto's words, the "museum of interest and identity" we face today. Premised on the notion that our response to art is determined by our race, class, and sex, the revisionist museum assumes that we go to art seeking to affirm our group identity. Visiting a museum is not an intellectual act, but a political one, as Danto defines it:

To experience the art is, from the very start, to have an interest - not personal or individual, but the interest which has as its object the furtherance of the group to which one belongs. The art is there for the sake of that interest.

A museum visitor who is a waitress only identifies with works that cater to marginalized laborers. Black visitors are only interested in African art - and so on, with as many permutations as race-class-gender-based diversity allows. In the revisionist museum, no artwork - no matter how old or how great - escapes this analysis.

Museums once catered to a single audience: the visitor seeking to experience greatness. Such a mission presupposed an agreed-upon set of standards by which to judge artwork. Connoisseurship - the close examination of art objects through consideration of the characteristics that compose form, including color, line, subject, space, and composition - was the practice museums relied on for determinations of quality. Stylistic differences aside, art objects from any culture were assumed to be striving for this aesthetic greatness.

But revisionists never talk of standards, quality, or greatness. Danto argues that the museum's emphasis on quality "imposed an irrelevant conception of the ideal of the museum." Art historian and former Whitney Museum curator Benjamin H. D. Buchloh has called quality "the central tool which bourgeois hegemonic culture (that is, white, male, Western culture) has traditionally used to exclude or marginalize all other cultural practices." To say that one painting is better than another, one period of art making more successful than another, or one civilization more aesthetically achieved than another has become an act of prejudice. According to University of Chicago historian Neil Harris, "Classification has come to be seen as an act of domination."

Revisionists stress leveling established hierarchies of masters, mediums, and movements. "We do film, we do Rembrandt," explains Michael Ann Holly, art department chairman at the University of Rochester. Similarly, the Hirshhorn Museum's Stephen Weil objects to the favoring of painting over the work of "potters, goldsmiths, tailors, carpenters, sandal-makers, or jewelers." According to Well, painting's elevation is likely the result of "historical happenstance," when the notion of art was "fabricated in Florence toward the end of the fifteenth century." But if greatness is merely "happen-stance," Michelangelo fares no better than a fifteenth-century Italian weaver, and a nineteenth-century French post-Impressionist no better than today's postmodernists. That is the ultimate goal of the revisionist museum: to create a situation where standards are relative, where everything becomes art, and where politics is left free to guide the museum's mission.