Quai Branly in Paris: Why Critics Don't Matter

Today's NY Times article (reprinting Friday's International Herald Tribune article), about the enraptured non-traditional museum audiences flocking to Paris' Musée Quai Branly of non-Western art, is another illustration of a point brought home to me when I reviewed the Smithsonian's new Museum of the American Indian: Press previews, during which only critics prowl the premises, may not always be the best time to evaluate exhibitions and installations.

What you miss is a big part of the museum experience: its impact on real people, not jaded "experts." When I visited the Museum of the American Indian, after it had opened to the public, I was struck by the "stirrings of Indian spirit" that seemed to transport visitors "as soon as they enter the museum's majestic 120-foot-high rotunda," as I reported in the Nov. 18, 2004 WSJ.

Holland Cotter, who recently revisited the Museum of the American Indian for the NY Times, now seems to have come closer to my view:

Many critics had complaints about the inaugural installations. I did. I was looking for an art museum, and what I found was something different. In its permanent home on the Mall, where it opened last year, the museum has sustained its rethought identity. And I have become more comfortable with that identity. I still have gripes, but my expectations have changed. For one thing, I've seen that when the revised model works, it really works, as it does in the Pacific Coast show.

A similar revisionism is already buoying Quai Branly, which was savaged earlier this summer, at the time of its opening, by the NY Times' chief art critic, Michael Kimmelman. He called it "brow-slappingly wrongheaded" and "rather insulting to the cultures that they're ostensibly meant to honor."

But the diverse visitors interviewed for Friday's IHT article by Caroline Brothers did not feel insulted. They felt empowered:

Strolling through its winding walkways, people may find the museum stirs a quiet pride in their origins, an impulse to communicate a sense of identity to a new generation, and amazement that such fragile, handmade objects have managed to survive at all.

Even more revelatory than Brothers' article is the accompanying slide show, posted on the Tribune's website only. Here we see the rapt faces of visitors of all ages and ethnicities, accompanied by their appreciative comments.

After my contrarian review of the Museum of the American Indian, Richard West, its director, wrote me an appreciative note, observing that "these spaces are meant to be 'peopled.'"

Maybe we coddled critics need to mingle more with the common folk.

COMING SOON: MORE THOUGHTS ON NON-TRADITIONAL MUSEUM AUDIENCES