Indecent Underexposure
What would it look like for museum leaders to commit to a socially engaged museum practice?
Most American art museums today confront a seemingly impossible task: during these times of racial reckoning, august art institutions have to answer to their history of predominantly showing and collecting white male artists, having overwhelmingly white, male and older boards of trustees, and having predominantly white and male top executive staff. The pace by which they are acting (if at all) on these inequities is so slow that every hopeful development feels like a drop in the bucket and only heightens the feeling that it will take generations for real change to occur. As we know from psychology, the first step in confronting a problem is to accept that you have a problem and understand what the problem is. Along with it is the urgent need of museums to truly understand the communities who they should serve outside of nominal grant proposals and reimagine their role as a platform of reflection and debate around social and political issues. However, judging by their limited and token actions, most art museums appear light years away from even understanding the depth and seriousness of their lack of diversity and their disconnect with the publics they aim to serve.
But I am here to tell you that there is a simple and much faster way to take a first step for institutions to at least gain that kind of introspective knowledge: take the senior staff out of institutional storage and have them commit to do ongoing visitor service and education support work. As part of their 9-to-5 jobs, dedicate a few hours every week to serve and engage visitors. Start a practice of deep, unscripted, continuous long-term relationships with the museum’s publics and the larger art community. And have the museum’s board members, without any exceptions, do the same.
In the late 1990s, when I was part of the staff at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, we got a new museum director, Bob Fitzpatrick. He was an unusual selection for a museum executive, since his background was not in that field (at the time he had recently been CEO of Euro Disney). As someone with an unorthodox background, he also introduced unorthodox approaches to the museum. One of his first directives was to ask the entire staff, without exception, to do frontline shifts at the museum— be it as museum guard (and actually wearing a guard uniform), at the coat check and so forth (a practice that as I understand was also followed at Disneyland).
The gesture may appear to some as some kind of institutional gimmick. Yet, it was a revelatory experience for many. To this day I still think of it as a useful approach. If you are an art museum’s board member and have never sat at an information desk of a museum for a week, or help organize a museum education workshops for inner city youth I would highly suggest doing so: you would gain surprising new insights about the museum’s publics.
I admit that the exclusivity of working inside the comfort of the museum offices and out of view of the public can be thrilling. When I had my first museum job (an intern at a large museum in the early 90s) I felt so important with my museum ID, going around the galleries and then entering the heavily guarded, climate-controlled museum office area where research, meetings and deep thinking could take place. The ability to be sealed off from the public is a privilege: as one ascends in the hierarchy of the museum (and especially in the curatorial and executive side) the exposure to the regular public becomes more and more diminished. Curatorial offices in museums often have a sepulchral silence, akin to that of a library, and the predominant vibe is one of discreet internal conversations and monastic-like work.
Public engagement amongst curators often takes the form of interacting with high-level donors at cultivation events or starring in largely staged and choreographed public programs, live or online. These, however, are closer to campaign events than authentic dialogues with outside interlocutors. In the meantime, it is the task of lower-level staff — admissions, security and education, mostly— to deal with the public on a day-to-day basis and organize and manage the aforementioned events and be the human connection between community partners, schools, and regular visitors.
This is so much so that the very notion of being in direct touch with the museum public might seem novel, even radical, for a high-profile figure in the art world, including artists. Back in 2010, when Marina Abramovic’s concept for “The Artist is Present”— her solo performance accompanying her retrospective at MoMA— was announced (“the artist will be sitting every day at the museum galleries from opening to closing for three months!”), someone who worked in the Visitor Services department said to me: “So what? That is exactly what I have been doing here every day for the last 15 years. Sitting here, at the desk, from opening to closing.” Needless to say, those who work in those areas of the museum can share powerful insights about the humanity that is exposed to art that often is not thought about by leadership. In contrast, high-level administrative staff does not have to deal with the day-to-day, messy and emotionally-charged exposure to humanity, with all its virtues and defects. This is not to say that many of them spend time in the galleries, but most often than not they do so as anonymous observers.
A decade or so ago, at a discussion with high-level curators on the topic of the institutional voice of the museum, I made the point that the only way to make the voice of the museum more personal was to take a newspaper-like approach in terms of the Op-Ed section: there should be a greater emphasis in the personal take, and we should all as employees should have greater visibility as we expressed our views. I was quickly put down by the group, being told that it was “really hard to do”. The unspoken part, I interpreted, was that the authoritative message of the museum would be put at risk since not all staff are art experts. Intimacy, they seemed to imply, should not be achieved at the expense of expertise.
Time, I would argue, has proved me right: the institutional voice is on the way of irrelevance, and there is an increased attention to the personal voice. What matters to audiences is not the information presented, but the ways they can connect emotionally with art. And there is a wider recognition that thought leaders are individual curators, artists and thinkers, not large entities or corporations. Which is another way to recognize what we have always known: that institutions are nothing but abstractions, and they are only worth the value of the specific individuals in them.
As one can easily notice, whenever a museum hits a crisis the immediate instinct is to revert to the institutional voice. This is often done by the museum’s spokesperson and at times the museum’s director as the staid representative of the organization. But overall statements of this nature are contrived, stiff, almost identical in their legalese-like language, and almost devoid of any human quality. While they are earnest attempts at damage control, in the 21st Century these big government-like statements only worsen the trust that the public might place in the institution, and in fact confirm the public suspicion of internal hysteria around the seriousness of the controversy in question.
Compounding the problem is that, particularly in times like these, leadership in museums almost obsessively insists on that unified voice and strongly discourages the public voicing of personal opinion as part of an effort to maintain “focused messaging” in its PR efforts. In reality, as those who have worked in museums (or for that matter any large organization) know, there are always intense internal debates about the direction of the institution, its policies and its values. But the culture dictates that these debates must not be externalized.
They should. I suspect that the public would relate to the fact that, just as it happens in every other aspect of life, debates around art and art theory are deliberative in nature and never completely settled, and that institutions are comprised of individuals with valuable but different, sometimes opposing, and even contradictory positions on all sorts of topics related to art, culture and politics. I do believe that we are arriving at a political moment where it is accepted that dissenting opinions are part of a healthy and democratic team. We need not go far to find examples, starting with the current US Vice-president.
Lastly, a museum cannot achieve institutional transparency so long as its staff can’t speak for and by themselves and without the imposition that anything they say has to be in representation of the larger institution. In addition, the individual museum worker feels disenfranchised when they feel that their voice is not appreciated or being allowed to be heard by the public.
But while the issue of dealing with transparency and the collective voice of the museum is yet another factor that needs to be dealt with as part of the reckoning around the role of the institution in the public realm, even more important to this moment of introspection is that need of instituting a practice of asking staff at all levels – and very specifically those at the highest levels—to engage in ways that go beyond manicured and staged events. Museum trustees would learn a lot from being part of frontline activities and committing to partake in them not as silent observers but as someone responsible to help and interact with the public. The immediate objection would be that they are never required to do these kinds of activities and that they can’t put in the time. But if supporting a museum is considered public service, and given that when joining a board one needs to agree to a set of rules —including paying dues and attending board meetings— why not making it a requirement that they also need to commit to learning what it is like to serve and engage with the public in person?
Next, a hurdle that would need to be overcome is the tendency of thinking of the public as novice consumers of experience without any meaningful background or knowledge in art. In the worst cases, I have encountered many curators over the years solely interested in curating for the higher crusts of the art world intelligentsia who would hopefully do the peer review of their work, with the public being an after-thought, or worse, a nuisance—an attitude that often makes me recall the character of Ron Swanson in Parks and Recreation: “I hate the public. The public is stupid.” This perception of course overlooks the fact that some of the most committed participants in museums are artists, art historians, critics, and other individuals who are highly invested and proficient in the art discourse, and these are precisely the groups that often feel the most disenfranchised, the ones that are most aware of the hierarchies of exclusivity reflected in the museums and their programming. It is their criticism also that is the most informed and based on a genuine concern and personal investment in the institution.
Again, this small suggestion is not meant to solve the museum’s problems. It is merely a proposal for a simple initiative that in fact should have happened decades ago. And while true diversification of institutions remains an urgent but far-away goal, this idea in contrast can be put into practice tomorrow. As a museum educator and public programmer for many years, I know full well that a museum exhibition usually takes years to organize, but a public program in a museum can happen from one day to the next. It offers a very different kind of dialogue with an audience, but it can be deep, it can be immediate and effective, and it can be a transformative and a learning experience for everyone involved. It is through daily interactions with our public that we can understand from experience where they are, and how we can better reach out to them.