I talk a lot about arts organizations needing to focus on the experience of art rather than just the production or presentation of it…not ‘experience’ in the flashy, theme-store sense, mind you, but in the essential connection between perceiver and perceived that great art moments provide. It’s so easy to get stuck in the production-oriented metaphors we use to describe our work (presenter, producer, outreach, education…all one-way words leading from us outward). But even as we get that right, there’s another wrinkle to our charge as stewards of the cultural experience that makes life even more complicated.
Nonprofit or public arts organizations also must hold the option of that experience open for those not ready to connect (those not old enough, those not born, or those generations yet to come). We must work in such a way that preserves the artifact or experience in time. In a sense, stewardship of creative works is an extension of our focus on experience…only it requires that we preserve something for a future experience we may never live to see.
The challenge of that, especially in a highly-charged economic environment for nonprofit culture, has become apparent more than once. For example, fellow blogger Tyler Green has a wonderful essay about the ethics and stewardship of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, and their deal with the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas. He questions their ‘rental’ of 21 Monets to be displayed in a commercial gallery there — especially as the power went out for several days, leaving the paintings to bake in the desert heat.
On the flip side, there are organizations and individuals working to liberate creative artifacts to ensure their preservation and access. One example is Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive and Rick Prelinger, a film collector, who are suing the federal government over changes to copyright law (here’s an article in Wired magazine about the case, and here’s a case description from Stanford). The suit suggests that copyright law, as now conceived, unreasonably blocks creative work from entering the public domain (especially works that nobody has a specific interest in).
Yet another example of the struggle of stewardship comes in the seemingly endless arguments about the Barnes Collection (that may well end with a series of court hearings beginning today, see this piece in the Wall Street Journal for more). The question there is whether moving a historical collection of exceptional art to a new location will preserve or destroy the experience of it, as intended by its original donor.
It’s extraordinarily inconvenient to manage a business model that requires not just an emphasis on building experiences now, but also a stewardship of experiences yet to come. But that inconvenience is a large part of the nonprofit fiscal privileges we receive to do our work. When creative objects become more like assets than elements of the public trust (as I’ve discussed before), we only get deeper in the hole.
