Art is a Fine Large Word

Throughout this collection of essays, John Dana references the art museum as the example of everything he thinks a museum shouldn’t be. I have found this to be both entertaining and frustrating. Entertaining because of the snarky and often off-handed manner in which he makes these comments, and frustrated because he seems to regard the art museum as so beneath him that he does not propose any set of solutions for its improvement. Dana seems to have a certain fondness for detailing hypothetical museums, but he does not give the art museum this treatment. He spends a great deal of time and energy criticizing art and art museums and then gives no time to the solution.

In the final section of this collection of essays, Museums and Art,  Dana discusses art in America in two essays, one focusing on the significance of art in America and the other focusing on the art of America. In the first, Dana describes art as a way to “...conceal thought, and to conceal the want of thought (Dana, 1906, 201)” He goes on to tell us to define and limit the use of the word, and not to fool your pupils with it. In the end, Dana concludes that art is not a teachable endeavor, and that the time spent teaching a student to draw when that student is not artistic is time wasted (Dana, 1906).

I am an art teacher, and I most emphatically disagree with Dana on this point. It is my most sincere belief that all of us have a need to express ourselves, and that art is a way in which we can do that. Not everyone uses art making as a mode of expression, but that is not because they can’t.  I have been teaching art for a year now, and that is a remarkably short period of time. In that year, however, I have seen dozens of students who were told that they were not artists create some of the most creative and poignant works I have ever seen.  My job is less teaching technique and basic principles and more encouraging my students despite their inhibitions about art. It is very disheartening to face a classroom of twelve year olds who have already been convinced that they cannot create art.

I wonder now if Dana was as ahead of his time in this mode of thought as he was with most everything else he discussed in his essays, or if this denouncement of art and art making is a deep-rooted myth we have been perpetuating for a century or more.

The Idea of the Teaching Museum

Let me start by stating that I find the fact that most museums spend a huge portion of their budget on taking care of a collection that is rarely if ever seen by the public that museum serves is a woeful travesty and should be one of our top priority issues in the museum field. This is a delicate subject for many reasons, and I do not argue that the objects sitting in collections storage departments across the world to not warrant care. What I do argue is that museums based on collections typically house 90% or more of their collections in storage, and that this is unacceptable. Museum budgets are stretched thin as it is, and it is unlikely that collections departments will continue to receive even the limited funding they are typically awarded given the tight economy and its effects on museums.

My argument is twofold. First, museums need the money used to care for the 90% of the collection in storage to build exhibits and education and evaluation staffs. Second, the objects being cared for by museums are sacred, priceless, and in many cases incredibly delicate and are often not cared for as well as they should be due to budgetary restraints of the museum. I can’t honestly say that I have come to a solution of any reasonable kind for this conundrum. John Dana, however, has something to say on the matter that does come with an interesting, if vague solution.

Dana proposes the teaching museum, which is an institution comprised of objects that are of the public and offered to the public (Dana, 1918). In the teaching museum, there are no restrictions on objects or object handling, and consequently visitors would be allowed to touch, play and use the objects as needed for study or research (Dana, 1918).

Given even my limited experience with collections care and management, I see many flaws with this plan. First and foremost I think that the mental health of registrars and collections managers the world over would be in serious danger were we to announce that some of these priceless objects be passed about by eight graders on a field trip. I also think that this would necessitate a selection process for which objects are important enough to be kept locked in the basement that would be drawn out and arduous. However, in the end I see the teaching museum being an incredibly useful element to any community.

Institutions like this already exist on most every major college campus. At IU Bloomington, for example, the Lily Fine Arts Library houses an impressive library of rare, antique books that are available to students by request for research. At the Indiana Historical Society most of their collection is available to any member of the public, also by request for research only. 

Dana seems to be taking this one step further, in taking away the exclusivity of the research museums and making all objects available to all people. I think the ideal is a happy medium. If museums were to donate even 5% of their collections to a teaching museum, the money saved would be staggering, and the potential benefit to the community immeasurable.

The Final Book Discussion—Live and In-Person (or perhaps on Skype)

Greetings one and all.  I hope that you’ve all been enjoying the book discussions thus far. I’m excited and impressed with all of the comments everyone has put out there so far. 

As you have no doubt noticed, we’ve come to the end of the books! It’s time for the final discussion. You are all invited—so here’s the deal,

Wednesday, November 16, 2011, 7:15 pm at The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis.  You MUST rsvp if you would like to attend in person, or if you want to try to participate on-line. 

If you plan to attend, please post your response here or call 317-274-7332 and leave a message.

Hope to see you there in some form!

This is not a library!

This post is a bit out of order, given that the last one takes us to the end of the book, but indulge me here. I wanted to discuss what Dana has to say about museums and education-- a topic obviously relevant to this course. Some of what I noticed about these sections are similar to comments we've made all semester about what a visionary Dana was. He accurately predicted many of the educational practices that have now long been a part of museum work, such as the suggestion that "the teachers in all schools will be given courses of lessons on the use in the classroom of illustrative material of whatever kind they need and the museum can furnish" (189). Sounds like teacher training (and possibly curricula generation!) to me, but Dana goes further than things museums have actually done at present with some of this statements. He's rather ambitious at times, and it would certainly be interesting to see what he would have to say about museums today. Would he be disappointed that we do not have a branch museum in every school (189), or that most modern museums are not "very much like a lending library" (191) ?

Of all the staggeringly accurate statements Dana makes in this book, his final section on education is the most impressive. He writes that "a museum is not a school; it cannot afford to become a school," (196) and while he probably have meant "afford" in a basic, monetary sense, I think there is so much truth in that statement taken another way. One of the reasons I am interested in museum education is that there is more flexibility in a museum to find out what works (as well as what does not) in terms of how people learn-- to study processes associated with learning, to experiment with new methods, and to make changes based on those findings. Not that there is never innovation in the traditional educational system, but it seems that the basic structure is unchanging. Students may try any number of new activities or systems, but the pattern of lectures directed at rows of desks seems permanent. Dana wrote in 1928 that lectures "are generally thought to be quite the most ineffective form of educational effort" (195). Museum education is an area that can break away from that pattern. A museum can be a tremendous resource for traditional educational structures, but it can also create very different learning experiences.

I am amazed by Dana's proclamation that a museum is not a school, and should not try to take the place of one. Though the course that museums have taken into the 21st century is not necessarily the one Dana envisioned, they embody a number of his hopes. They may not be touchable libraries with satellite sites in every school, but they have embraced the educational mission to the extent that it forms the basis for the definition of a museum. Whatever judgment Dana might pass on museums today, I am sure he would appreciate that.

(Yes, if anyone is familiar, this post title is a reference to 1990s Nickelodeon programming, just so you know!)

The Art Critic...

I thought that Dana and I were on the same page. Up until this point I have followed along with his musings on museums, and for the most part have been amazed at his prescience when it comes to museums. I have read along and nodded my head in agreement until the very last section. Why did he have to say those nasty things about art and art museums? I realize that it might not be for everyone, but come on!

He begins well enough (with me nodding along). His definition of art is simple and optimistic; he defines art as a thing with the “permanent possibility of an agreeable thrill” (p. 202). I love that definition, though I might take out the qualifier “agreeable” and just assert that art has the permanent possibility of thrill. I think art can cause agreeable feelings for some and disgust in others without losing its artiness (its all about personal preference). I can even approve of his apparent contempt for American taste and his argument that Americans only appreciate beauty where they have been trained to appreciate it (p. 204-5).

But he really loses me when he asks the reader, “If you could control the art teaching in the United States, and had a moderate amount of money and a few good teachers, what would you do?” He answers his own question by suggesting that teachers focus on teaching a few (naturally talented artists) the skills necessary to create art, and to teach everyone else the very basics. Ultimately he advises the reader to not “waste time” by teaching students who were not born to be artists (p. 209). I have a major problem with this – since when is any kind of art instruction a waste of time? Even if a student does not become a great master, how is acquiring skills not beneficial? And why in the world is he advising the teacher to make those kinds of subjective judgments of their students – especially when he seems to have a problem with American judgments of taste in general? It seems like a dangerous road to go down, Dana.

I could have forgiven his suggestions about teaching art (after all he was writing a loooooong time ago), had he not also attacked the art museum. He begins the section “The Use of Museums” by listing all of the things (in his opinion) that art museums do not do. Apparently art museums do nothing but collect and preserve objects (p. 220), and Dana seems to believe that department stores do more to influence taste and aesthetic appreciation than an art museum could ever hope to (p. 221). Throughout his writings, Dana has suggested that people can appreciate art and beauty in places other than museums – and I totally agree with him on that point – but here he suggests that an art museum is not a place where one can develop taste and get inspiration. That just seems harsh. Of course an art museum can inspire people – just as much as that 15 cent piece of glass or a hastily positioned rubbish bin on the side of the street. If there is inspiration to be found in that bin, there is inspiration to be found in a museum.

Final Thoughts

“Every public institution should always have before it an ideal of public service far above that which it dares hope attain. It should not have its eyes on the ground or be for a moment satisfied with what it has done” (p. 178). As an early museum theorist Dana’s ideas were radical. His views on education, worth, and composition of a museum were accurate in my opinion. I enjoyed reading his rationale as well as his basic museum ideology. His ideas on lending were intriguing and adventurous. However, the aforementioned quote was probably my favorite in the book. It is not only a good guide for museums but for life. However, in his writings on the Newark Museum, Dana seemed to be pretty satisfied with his work, and I wonder if that stunted any of his later writings. Granted, as a leader in the Newark Museum, Dana would have had great interest in touting the museum but he did not tell the reader where the weaknesses of his museum were. He seemed to believe his small museum had the perfect balance, and was a trendsetter of the museum world. Dana spent much of his writing encouraging the use of local and common goods. And yet when he wrote of what the Newark Museum featured, he wrote they showed “Greek and Renaissance sculpture in casts; small American and other bronzes; the work of engravers of the first rank; the printing of American’s leading printer” (p. 160). Granted he also mentioned some that they displayed “Newark-made jewelry, Newark-made buttons and medallions, leather goods, textiles” (p. 176). Moreover, his vignette on bathtubs was a great idea that I loved, but it did not sound like Dana ever acted completely on that notion of beauty in the most common artifacts as he never mentioned whether the museums broadening ideas of beauty ever translated into an exhibit (p.174-175). I wonder what collection, the everyday objects or rare artifacts, won in the end. If only there was a means to discover where they were housed in comparison to traffic flow, how much of the museum’s funds were dedicated to the different collections, and how the museum field reacted to the Newark Museum.

Today, the Newark Museum’s websites declares it is the largest museum in New Jersey, quite the accomplishment considering its humble beginnings that Dana mentions. I have never been to the Newark, but I wonder if Dana’s ideas can still be seen today. It certainly seems like there might still be an element of him in these exhibitions http://www.newarkmuseum.org/OngoingExhibitions.html Then again, I would like to think there is an element of Dana in most museum exhibits today.

Communities and Cooperation

At the very end of the section on the "experiment" that was the Newark Museum, Dana describes an institution with an acquisitions policy so in tune with the needs and desires of its community that it would still be considered a model example. In fact, the Newark Museum from its foundation, had a clear sense of its own circumstances-- how it should use local resources to meet local needs and its geographical relationship to very prominent museums in New York. Rather than trying to compete with the grand, seemingly comprehensive collections held in some of the New York City museums, the Newark Museum had "a policy of acquiring and using only what can be made effective in the life of its community" (181). Much of what the readers of this book have said over and over is how applicable Dana's ideas are to modern museum work, but I am forced to repeat those sentiments yet again in this post.

His embrace of the fact that the Newark Museum did not have the objects and resources of larger museums, but that there was so much value in having the city around them is quite astounding. One might laugh that his museum once staged "a showing of bathtubs made in New Jersey," (180) but it's also easy to believe that such an exhibit might have shown the people of Newark how "art and science and industry were made to seem closer to everyday life" (180). The Newark Museum tried to fill the space the community had open for it, rather than try to rival the nationally recognized museums. The Newark Museum based its collections on the principle of utility, meaning the power of its exhibits to "inspire by their beauty, stimulate creative design or creative ideas, or have educational value" (180-181). Dana also advocates for a "less is more" approach in exhibit design because a small, well-designed exhibit can convey messages more effectively than a sprawling, unfocused one. These ideas show up all over my 21st century textbooks! Today, it seems that even the largest, wealthiest museums are expected to evaluate how they measure up in terms of meeting the needs of their specific communities. In 2011, the museums Dana was determined not to struggle to imitate are working to be more like his Newark Museum was.

If this seeming model of a community museum has not already made you wish for a time machine, perhaps the prospect of visiting the 1923 exhibit on China, discussed in this section, would. According to Dana, "China: The Land and the People" was the product of an extraordinary amount of US-Chinese cooperation. I want to see this exhibit. Dana certainly makes it sound like a landmark achievement, devoted to "promoting understanding and sympathy between nations," and breaking "down hostility and open[ing] up paths to friendship" (181). Yet, it's so difficult to envision an exhibit during that time satisfying our modern requirements for collaborative work and the representation of multiple perspectives, especially given the knowledge of some of then contemporary cultural or ethnographic exhibits. I really wish I could see "China: The Land and the People," and evaluate it for myself.

Déjà vu

So I was reading along in The New Museum and I had a funny feeling that I had already read this chapter. After rubbing the sleep out of my eyes and looking more carefully at the chapter called “A Museum Of, For and By Newak” I realized that I had in fact not read it – I was just experiencing that maddening sensation of déjà vu. Phrases and ideas raised by Dana were calling to my mind a fuzzy familiarity – I had definitely read something similar before. I hastily thumbed through my syllabi for my classes this semester and came across an article title that sparked a connection – Stephen Weil’s “From Being about Something to Being for Somebody: The Ongoing Transformation of the American Museum.”*

The title of Dana’s chapter and Weil’s article even convey a similar sentiment. Throughout The New Museum Dana asserts that museums should think about their communities, and In this chapter he details how the Newark Museum is striving to be for somebody. The Newark Museum lends objects to schools and other community organizations for the purpose of study, but also to inspire local designers. With Newark’s rich history in manufacturing, the museum has tried to create exhibits about manufacturing on a local and national level, even highlighting the work of Newark craftsmen. The Newark Museum does all of this because, as Dana notes the Newark Museum is trying to be an “assistant to all educational activity throughout the city” (p. 174).

Weil also writes about providing educational services to the community as a benchmark of the contemporary museum (p. 229). Weil’s article is really a review of the history of American Museums, so there is much discussion of before and after in a effort to demonstrate where we are now. He discusses how museums of today are in “marketing mode” whereby they find out what their public needs or wants, and then try to deliver what the public wants (p. 233). The way that Dana describes the work of the Newark Museum, seems to fit in in with Weil’s description of the marketing mode.

My favorite part of Weil’s article, after having read Dana, is the very beginning where he describes the post World War II museum as collections focused. 50 years later, he asserts, we are beginning to think more about the public (p. 229). Later he mentions Michael Spock’s idea circa the 1960’s that museums should be focused on the public. But Dana was writing these things in the early part of the 20^th Century!

It just continues to amaze me that Dana was writing these things so many years ago, and yet his ideas and musings feel so contemporary. It makes me think that we may never quite be as far along as we would like in figuring out the role of museums in our society.

Industrial Museums

In this post I would like to call attention to John Cotton Dana’s chapter entitled “An Industrial Exhibit in a Municipal Museum.” Overall, I think Dana’s explanation of the exhibition sounded excellent. There was a single focus, varying displays, and interpretation. Moreover, I loved that there was to be a potter working on a wheel for three hours every day. The audience that the Newark Museum pulled in was described as diverse and intrigued (although he did not give his means of gathering this information). Moreover, this model Industrial Exhibit even featured a civic theme as it was associated with “the ‘Buy in America’ campaign (p.154).

Today it seems industrial sites do not have the personal appeal that many other kinds of museums. However, by following some of Dana's advice, progress could be made. Granted the industry of potting is significantly easier to interestingly interpret than say the construction of a sofa or the production of chicken breasts, but the same ideology can essentially be applied.

We live in an increasingly materialistic society. Our things are said to define us, and yet somehow there is a disconnect in between our interest in the making of our things and the emotionality of a little retail therapy.Perhaps if we connect the buying to the interpretation, and do a department store style museum, there would be more interest in seeing an object’s creation just like the TV show “How It’s Made.” Moreover, if the objects were built on site, is there any better “Buy in America” advertisement for today? The tangible connection to the past could be invaluable. Old Sturbridge Village in MA sells the products their living history actors create, would it be too far to push an industrial museum to do similarly? This could be a dangerous proposition for a nonprofit (or a for profit), and the ethical boundaries would need to be set. However, in this economy wouldn’t the sale of goods be able to make up some of the lost donations and admission?

Regardless, Dana had some excellent ideas for interpreting industrial sites.

Retrofitting Radicalism

In my introductory post, I mentioned that the reason I choose to read The New Museum was that it was fascinating to me that a book published nearly a century ago could still be considered a relevant piece of museum theory. There are many pieces of Dana’s introduction that make it clear that this work is as revolutionary today as it was in 1917, and the fact that Dana was of this school of thought so long ago is at once humbling and alarming.

My thoughts on museums

My museum of choice has always been the art museum. As an artist and art history buff, I have loved art for as long as I can remember. It wasn’t until I was a freshman in college that I realized that only a small portion of people willingly go to museums in their free time, and fewer still actively enjoy and participate in the museum experience. Many museums are developing innovative programming and exhibits aimed at creating interactive, participatory museums devoted to visitor experience, and it is in this regard that art museums tend to fall behind.

It is for this main reason that I believe art museums are in need of a total redesign, from the ground up. No more cyclopean halls filled with a labyrinthine array of cases and corridors, no more tombstone labels and scholarly exhibit scripting written by curators for curators. Instead, the art museum needs to become an educational institution based on educating every person who walks in, and focused on becoming a community center. While this may be the goal according to many an art museum mission statement, the fact of the matter is that few people posses the tools to interpret the traditional art museum, because art education is a largely secondary subject in schools. Once children get to high school, studio art is almost completely optional. Art history, theory and communication classes are only offered once students enter college, and even then they are not required. Our society does not value art or art making, but it does acknowledge that art is worthwhile and important. In Eilean Hooper-Greenhill’s article Education, communication and interpretation, she explains that even those who do not frequent museums are comforted by the existence of museums (7, 1998). 

As Dana was saying...

A century ago (I know I keep saying this, but I can’t get over it) Dana wrote that, “[The New Museum] is not friendly to the ‘museum’ atmosphere, which is depressing and numbing to the sensitive visitor in direct ratio to the self-conscious grandeur and refinement of its architectural container (25, 1917).” Throughout his essay on the New Museum, Dana describes the concept by both what it is, and what it is not. Here, he provides an inspired system of measurement for the traditional museum experience. He goes on to say that not every museum will create the same experience, but that in the world of the New Museum, that is a desirable state because “the world needs variety more than it needs standards (32, 1917).”

While it is exciting for me to see that someone else with far more experience and prestige has thought the same thoughts that I have been grappling with for so long, it is also frustrating. In so much time there has been so little change, especially in the art museum which Dana describes even then as being the epitome of the traditional museum experience (26, 1917).

So what?

As discussed in Elee’s article Rules for the (R)evolution of Museums, museums are beginning to understand their role as societal educators, “...but there is still much to be done to work against the entrenched cultural hegemony that museums often represent (23, 2010).” Given the state of art education in our society, it is all the more important that art museums recognize their own role in the perpetuation of the perception that museums are dull mausoleums of culture. Art museums have the tools to become houses of art education, filling in the gapping voids left by public education, but they must first acknowledge that this is their responsibility.  

Dana calls for a whole new museums that is completely separate from the art museums or a traditional gallery, but I think that Dana’s ideas could be applied to a new art museum that uses its existing collection to recreate the entire museum experience.

Museum Gloom

I wanted to touch on the section entitled "The Gloom of the Museum." Just from its title, I was expecting a discussion of the often cited eerie qualities that some museums are said to possess-- a "deadness" or "sterility." So, I was quite surprised that this section focused more on the valuing of non-American objects over American ones, and the architecture and placement of museums. There is so much discussion in the museum field today about serving the specific needs of their communities, and it is interesting to see Dana try to formulate what a museum in an American city should be. I am afraid it's going to become very repetitive for the readers of this blog to see the readers of Dana's book exclaim repeatedly that, yet again, he has anticipated another extremely relevant problem in the modern museum field.

One of the things I found most interesting in this section was Dana's perspective on the potential utility of reproductions. He mentions the importance of utility numerous times, and declares that it is "ludicrous" for anyone to "treat with scorn modern reproductions of old things which they have pronounced beautiful" (56). Obviously, there is much information one can learn from original objects that one cannot gain from reproductions. For example, a cast of a dinosaur bone cannot provide insight as to the internal composition of that bone, no matter how high quality the cast of the outside surface is. However, I think we can see a very real shift in the way reproductions are accepted and used in many types of museums today. In most instances, the original objects in a collection are not going to be available for public handling, but replicas and models based very closely on the original materials can be beneficial learning aides in the absence of the real things. I am thinking of the prevalence of touchable materials included in exhibits or presented at mobile stations staffed by facilitators. These things are able to stand in for the "real" objects in the collections, and in some cases, museum visitors are allowed to touch those guarded "real" objects. I got to touch a T. rex bone yesterday, and I think Dana would be pleased.

I also thought it was fascinating that Dana predicted the concept of branch museums. I have seen this idea mentioned elsewhere, and I cannot for the life of me locate the sources of the examples I have in mind! I will try to get back to you about a museum, and I am thinking it was on the West Coast, tried the satellite museum program, renting off-site gallery space in another part of the city. Modern museum outreach and mobile library vehicles seem to be picking up on the branch idea-- that offering a variety of locations will build community ties and help museums better serve their communities. It may have taken the bulk of a century, but we are perhaps finally at a point where museums are experimenting with ideas like those Dana described.

Some Things Never Change in a Changing World

In Chapter IV of The New Museum Dana asks the reader, “In a Changing World, Should Museums Change?” I was intrigued by the title of the chapter but then dismayed to read that it was about the most suborn of established institutions… the art museum. Now I happen to know quite a bit about art museums, having worked in one for about the past two years, and I happen to really like them. Before you buckle down and prepare to defend Dana, let me just say that I also happen to agree with his assertion that art museums are stuck in their ways and are could be doing more to serve the needs of their communities.

Something that I find fascinating about Dana’s writing is that even though he was writing in the early portion of the 20^th Century, his ideas are still so relevant to discussions that we are having about museums here on the front lines of the study of museums. It is eerie the way that his description of the way that art museums define what people view to be good art (because it is displayed in a museum). He gives an example of an “art enthusiast” that claims to have not seen art before visiting the great museums in New York (p. 103). I would agree that contemporary art museums still have some of the same troubles that art museums in the early 20^th Century seemed to have. People still seem to feel that art museums (in general) are elitist and are unsure how to act in an art museum. They walk through the doors and immediately accept the information that is provide by curators as fact, and that the objects on display are representative of the best art. But Dana also reminds us “art is not in a museum save in relatively unimportant quantity. Art is where it is seen and merely where self-constituted experts have placed it“ (p. 131).

It is quotes like this that make me forget that I am reading something from long ago. Dana’s attitude toward art reminds me of ideas more commonly associated with Visual Culture, which as an academic discipline is only just begging to take hold in many universities. Visual Culture focuses on the study of culture that relies heavily on visual media for the communication of ideas. It is similar to traditional notions of art except that visual culture is more often found outside of museums. Dana gives the example of the department store and the way that displays and images readily visible to shoppers are works of art (p. 131-132). He also discusses the beauty that can be found in a 15 cent piece of glass, if you are open minded enough to see it as such (p. 132). Today visual culture can encompass things that you see on television and in print media (among a long list of other things). It would be interesting to know what Dana would think about the visual onslaught of imagery that takes place in a location like Times Square. Would he view this imagery with the same reverence as the glass of water?

So, would Dana still say that museums should change in a changing world? Absolutely. Would he say that art museums have totally caught up and are deftly adapting to the changing world? Probably not, though he may be slightly encouraged by steps made since his lifetime. I think he would probably say that there is still more that could be done. Given his musings on art, I would love to know what Dana thinks about the field of Visual Culture, and whether or not he feels it has a place in museums.