It’s very trendy these days to insist that museums should be visitor-centered, not art-centered. Most recently, I was called on the carpet yet again for suggesting that art comes first, but not just that; in fact, someone I do not know accused me a restarting the culture wars when I wrote here about the Portland Art Museum’s Parklandia. The blog post was called “The Value of Museum Selfies.”
I’m not going to provide the link, partly because the writer misconstrues and mixes up ideas illogically and uses as justification for selfies that they are “pretty awesome” (not to mention badly misspelling my surname and assuming a familiarity that we do not have). It doesn’t get better, and it’s not worth your time. (You can easily find it if you search for it.)
Whether a museum pays attention to art or visitors is a false dichotomy. Â They must do both, and the questions are always: which is the driver and what is the balance. Some museums manage to do it well; others go astray.
But as I was reading the most recent publication sent to me from the Cleveland Museum of Art, I was taken by the way its new director, William Griswold (at left), framed the “issue.” Here is what he wrote:
Cleveland is simultaneously the quintessential connoisseur’s collection and one of the most community-focused museums in the country. At first, this might seem a contradiction; however, it is not if one embraces the premise that the greatest art is great, in part, because it embodies the most eloquent communication of the most universal human experiences. Cleveland has always demonstrated its faith in art to communicate and in audiences to “get it,” and the museum has seen its role as facilitating that connection through beautifully designed galleries, thoughtful interpretive materials, and–in recent years especially–the innovative and intelligent use of technology.
That is exactly right. If curators and museum administrators do their job well, art will do the rest of the job. We need to repeat this, or something like it, again and again.
Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Cleveland Art Museum