What Do Museums Have to Say to “The Public”?
Two weeks ago, I wrote about how cultural shifts in the 1960s pushed art museums to think more about their “publics” than their objects. This shift became further entrenched when massive cuts to public funding in the 80s forced museums to rely heavily on ticket and merchandise sales. Anyone who has doubted that art museums and their multi-million dollar collections really need to charge for admission has only to look at the crisis mere weeks without visitors caused major US museums. One way or another, “the public” matters.
Museum exhibitions since the 1980s oscillate between the critically derided but publically adored blockbuster, and the critically adored but publicly ignored (or ridiculed) academically “public” exhibition (never mind the truly excellent modest exhibitions of art that seem to be ignored by both factions.) Rirkrit Tiravanija cooking Thai food at MoMA, Carsten Höller installing a two-story slide, or Simone Leigh hosting meditation workshops at the New Museum may launch a thousand doctoral dissertations, but they say little to the casual art-going public (have they even read Bourriaud!?).
Artists and curators are haunted by the notion that the public must be told what they want and bribed into wanting it. Museums may relentlessly position themselves as the antidote to “consumer culture,” but they employ just the same tactics, the critical difference being that advertising firms don’t mind us knowing we’re being advertised to.
While the display of historical works of art still leans on the 19th century pedagogical mission of museums in the form of educational (but accessible!) wall text, museum programming and contemporary collections are slaves to this notion of the bribe. Audiences are endlessly “invited” to participate in activities transplanted from everyday fun and enjoyment into the crisp white cube.
I’d venture that if Pierre Bourdieu’s 1969 poll of visitors to French public museums, The Love of Art, were conducted today, the conclusions would remain largely the same: visitors tend to leave museums feeling they lacked either the knowledge to understand or education to engage. [1] Despite decades of “outreach” and an army of low-wage curatorial staff constantly revising those fussy wall labels, the layman’s experience of the art museum does not satisfy.
All of these efforts have brought museums further from, not closer to, what is universal and valuable in art: sensuous experience. I am reminded of poet Heinrich Heine’s comment on the critics of his own time back in 1831:
The poor, wretched rascal with his miserable intelligence or ‘understanding,’ he knows not how accurately he condemns himself. Poor understanding or sense should never have the first word when works of art are discussed, any more than it was called to take a leading part in their creation. The idea of a work of art is born of the emotions or feeling, and this demands of free, wild fancy the aid of realization. [2]
His words still ring true: our intellectual formulations bar the feeling through which we can meaningfully engage with works of art. The presentation of works of art by museums remains rooted in that poor understanding, and the visitor feels his understanding poorer still when he finds he’s not in on the joke. Staging meditation workshops or installing slides in galleries may seem a radical idea to the curator, but it leaves the general public wondering why they had to go through the rigamarole of museum etiquette to partake in activity available in any city park.
Enter Oklahoma City’s National Cowboy Museum, specifically Director of Security Tim Tiller. When the museum closed and staff were sent to work from home in mid-March, Tim, the only regular on-site employee and social media newbie, was given the keys to the museum’s Twitter account and asked to take over their social media presence.
Tim’s tweets have big dad-who-just-got-an-iPhone energy. His first tweet ends with the word “Send.” He still signs “Thanks, Tim” at the end of each post, and even though “Seth from Marketing,” a character we often see referenced in Tim’s feed as a mysterious guide, taught him about hashtags, Tim still tags every post #HashtagTheCowboy. (You can now buy #HashtagTheCowboy merch.)
Yes, Tim is the kind of voice we need during the COVID-19 lockdown. His sincere charm cuts through the digital cacophony and has earned the Museum a growing Twitter following and global platform. But more importantly, it’s the voice we’ve needed from art museums for a long time.
On the museum’s Dorothea Lange exhibit, Tim writes, “Her photographs are very moving. That is a photo of her. She looks like someone I’d want to have a beer with.” On engagement: “Seth in marketing told me that asking questions on the social media is good for ‘engagement.’ Let’s get engaged! LOL! Thanks, Tim I’m very happily married to Tina though.” He’s quite fond of the museum’s Frederic Remington paintings and sculptures. He makes a mustache connection with a Nicholas Samuel Firfires painting. He explains what triptychs are with the same ease with which he delivers cowboy facts and puns.
Tim is honest about what he doesn’t know (one of his first Tweets was a request for tips on using Twitter) and even more honest about what he does: what he thinks of, and how he connects with and responds to works of art and historical artifacts. In Tim’s tweets the felt response reigns. Education is a shared pleasure rather than a didactic offering.
Unlike the professionally shot images of artworks that we typically see online (and that make up all of those painfully dull “virtual exhibitions”) Tim’s low-fi pictures show art as we see it when we visit museums: at odd angles and through glass display cases that reflect the EXIT signs in the corners. Documentation images show disembodied objects and collections; Tim’s photographs are invitations to experience the exhibits in all their reality through his eyes.
There are no prerequisites for Tim’s Twitter feed — it does not assume existing knowledge. Unlike the anonymous voices (unpaid interns) behind major museum’s feeds, it assumes no disembodied authority. As a New Yorker with little prior interest or knowledge of cowboy history, I was never the audience for a museum in Oklahoma on the subject. But Tim makes me (and The Cowboy’s three thousand plus Twitter followers) feel welcome there. He doesn’t tell me how to understand the collection; he shows me how he sees it.
In both museum outreach and contemporary art criticism, the things we feel when we walk through galleries — the things that don’t require MFAs or reading lists — are too often eclipsed (or outright substituted by) half-baked theoretical frameworks and poorly understood philosophy. Works of art become props for the trendy theories of the day as we brag about our expertise. They become the means for proving points rather than the ends of experience. Museums’ obsession with “the public” has done nothing but infantilize the uninitiated by either dictating interpretation or offering everyday experiences masquerading as fine art.
Museums are not the “ignorant schoolmasters” advocated in Rancière’s trendy theory, nor should they aspire to be. They do educate. But to educate a public — a public whose attention they rely on for their very existence — they cannot rely on condescension and trinkets.
For decades museum professionals have insisted that public engagement is central to their mission. A tiny museum in Oklahoma may have finally accomplished just that. Tim invites by example anyone who wishes to engage freely with art: to react, to laugh, to make connections, to question. He neither assumes nor demands scholarly credentials, just encounters with works of art. //
Untitled (Slide), 2011. Installation view: “Carsten Höller: Experience,” New Museum. Benoit Pailley.
[1] Pierre Bourdieu, Alain Darbel, and Dominique Schnapper, The Love of Art: European Art Museums and Their Public (Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1991).
[2] Heinrich Heine, “From Salon of 1831,” in Art in Theory 1815-1900 An Anthology of Changing Ideas, ed. Charles Harrison, Paul Wood, and Jason Gaiger, 1 edition (Oxford, UK ; Malden, Mass: Wiley-Blackwell, 1998), 83.
