For the dissertation, I’ve lately been reading up on the founding of MoMA’s film library in the 30s. Looking back, it seems such a seminal time for hierarchy of art and culture in the US. Not only was the museum taking popular, mass-media products seriously as art - with their own masterpieces, movements and aesthetics - but it transformed the exhibition of painting and sculpture in the modern museum by instituting a revolving exhibition structure that more or less imported department store culture into the realm of high art. For both of these, the museum was accused of debasing high culture with a commercial mentality. Over the long run - indeed by the postwar years - it was clear that the moves were part of the shift of modernity, an unavoidable adaptation to a changed relationship between segments (high, low and middle) or the cultural hierarchy.
With that in mind, the New York Times article on changes in the Brooklyn Museum leapt out at me.
Planned for an independent city that was absorbed into New York shortly after the museum opened in 1897, the Brooklyn Museum watched its fortunes suffer with those of its borough. Budgets dwindled along with attendance. By the 1990’s, attendance had dropped to 200,000 a year.
Now the museum, led by its director, Arnold L. Lehman, is changing course. It has all but abandoned efforts to lure visitors from Manhattan and is now, with the help of an image consultant, concentrating almost exclusively on its own backyard — the 2.5 million residents of Brooklyn
The article is a pretty even-handed assessment: on the one hand concerns about dumbed-down curatorial labels and memorabilia exhibits and on the other hand evidence of nontraditional museum goers now visiting the institution. But it’s clear that the dilemma the Museum is facing is simply an exacerbated (because of attendance problems) instance of a dilemma facing the entire museum world. The economics of high art and the shift in experience and taste brought on by mass media have put pressure on institutions to appropriate commercialized and lower-brow exhibits and exhibition strategies.
The Museum of Fine Arts’ planned exhibit of Ralph Lauren’s cars strikes me as one of the more shameful marketing gambits, but at least the MFA seems to have adopted a bifurcated strategy: using sometimes dodgy blockbuster shows to fund quality acquisitions. The other strategy, which the Brooklyn Museum seems to be edging toward, is changing the focus of all exhibits (though in fairness their current exhibit on Brooklyn artists sounds quite good), and that complete surrender seems to me to hold the greater danger. It’s all a good thing to question the elitism implicit in curation and to think of creative ways to bring people into museums who otherwise would not. But in competing with more popular culture, museums have to be careful that they don’t end up creating inferior pop culture.
In sum, there’s an opposite dynamic at play from what was behind MoMA in the 30s. Instead of attacking elitist conceptions of art by extending modes of aesthetic and art-historical understanding to popular culture objects, we have now not a further extension of the realm of the aesthetic to car design or movie memorabilia or rap music (which would be quite welcome), but rather a facile populism that pretends we can’t parse aesthetic judgment because people might stop coming to the museum if we do.
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