Karsten schubert the curator's egg

Karsten Schubert

T urator's The evolution of the museum concept

from the French Revolution to the present day

Ridinghouse

Third Edition: Published in zoo9 by Ridinghouse / Karsten Schubert 5-8 Lower John Street Golden Square London WIF 9DR www.karstenschubert.com

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First published woo, reprinted 2002 by One-Off Press and distributed by Christie's Books

© 2000, 2002 and 2009 Karsten Schubert

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The cover shows: Karl Friedrich Schinkel drawing of the Alte Museum, Berlin 5823 -3o Inset: Benjamin Zix Napoleon and the Empress Marie-Louise visiting the Salle Laocoon ofthe Louvre by night 1810 and Tate Modern, London zoo8

Note to the new edition: The Curator's Egg was first published in English in woo; a second edition was printed in zooz. Since then the book has been translated into Turkish, Japanese and Italian, and a Spanish translation is forthcoming. The text of this new English edition follows that of the original, except for a few minor corrections and the addition of a new epilogue, 'Democracy of Spectacle: The Museum Revisited'. This was originally written as an afterword to the Spanish translation; it has been revised and updated for publication here. The new chapter was copy-edited by James Beechey. The third edition was overseen by Doro Globus and the production was coordinated by Marit Miinzberg.

HON

N410 .S33 2009 Schubert, Karsten The curator's egg : the evolution of the museum concept from the French Revolution to the present day

Foreword 7 Introduction 9

I 1. Beginnings 15

2. Paris and London 1760-187o 17 3. Berlin 1900-1930 29

4. NeWYOrk 1930-1950 39 5. Europe 1945-1970 51 6. Paris 1970-1980 56

II 1. After the Centre Pompidou 65

2. The 'Discovery' of the Audience 67 3. Artists 81 4. Politics 88

5. Architecture 1: Making and' Remaking Museums 99 6. An Experiment: The Global Museum 113 7. Architecture 2: Museum Makeovers 121

a. Modes of Display 134 9. Bouvard and Pecuchet: Epilogue 143

III Democracy of Spectacle: The Museum Revisited 157

Bibliography 181 Index 185

188

Norman Hampson, Sanat-Just (Oxford: Basil Blackwell Ltd, 1991).

189

Margaret Yourcenar, Memoirs OfHadrian andReflections ofthe Composition ofMemoirs ofHadrian (London: Penguin, 1986), p z88.

1. Democracy of Spectacle: The Museum Revisited

The present order is the disorder of the future. Saint-Justin

There is nothing more easily destroyed than the equilibrium of the fairest places. Marguerite Yourcenar169

Since The Curator's Egg was first published nine years ago much has changed in the museum world. While the historical facts remain the same, the current trends and debates that I set out and the conclusions I drew at that time require elaboration, cor- rection and update. As always, when trying to predict the future one can only extrapolate from the present. Yet reality moves in strange and unpredictable ways, as is the case here. The cultural landscape has altered greatly since the turn of the millennium. What then seemed vague trends are now established truths. The public and professional debate about museums, already shrill a decade ago, has since become even more aggressive, partisan and often self-serving and dogmatic. It would be no exaggera- tion to describe it as a battle for the life and soul of the muse- um. The battle lines are drawn between, on the one hand, those who align themselves with the new museums as a great success story, over-run with visitors, the latest entrant in the 'cultural- industry' league, and, on the other, the keepers of the flame, the defenders of an old museum ethos, invoking primarily scholar- ly and educational goals. At one point, it seemed, this conflict could be sketched out by comparing Tate Modern in London on one side of the Atlantic and the Museum of Modern Art in New York on the other. This was a seductive pairing and made for noisy discussion because it allowed each side to denounce the other as destructive and vulgar or elitist and out-of-touch. The ready-made simplicity of this black-and-white argument has

DEMOCRACY OF SPECTACLE: THE MUSEUM REVISITED 157

been irresistible for many authors and critics. Yet, like all simplistic readings, it does not reflect reality and has obscured the complexi- ties of the issues at stake. In the end, this is not a conflict between the keepers of the flame and the new barbarians. It is about what kind of role the visual arts are to play in our culture and, by exten- sion, what role culture is to play in our society. It is nothing less than a debate about one of the fundamentals of democracy.

The notion that museums should somehow pay for them- selves (either by charging visitors or by way of private and cor- porate sponsorship) has long been commonplace in the United States. This was, in part, a logical extension of the concept of private individuals taking responsibility, a characteristic of the North American museum landscape from its inception. The idea is relatively novel as far as European institutions are concerned. It was first propagated in the United Kingdom, without subtlety and to dreadful effect, under the Thatcher government in the 198os. Elsewhere in Europe, though this shift seems increasingly inevitable, it is still met with widespread professional and politi- cal resistance. If, initially, this change seemed to entail no more than a switch of paymaster (from public to private), it has since become obvious that it has had profound effects on the outlook and ethos of museums. It is generally agreed that a historic tip- ping point has been reached,"° though not all would concur with the art critic David Carrier's recent claim that we are seeing 'the end of the modern public art museum'.111

In the past, the concept of the museum arose from the princi- ple of making an elite culture available to all, in order to educate to the highest possible standard and provide the greatest enjoy- ment. This model of the museum emerged from much the same Enlightenment mould as notions of democracy and education. The idea of the museum as egalitarian enabler has never lost its allure; and elitism for all, a notion of glorious and radical ambi- tion, simultaneously naïve and highly potent, steered the museum for the better part of zoo years. By and large, the balance between utopian dream and everyday reality held remarkably well.

Today, it seems that curators have lost faith in the democ- ratising power of the institution and that these revolutionary ideas no longer hold any appeal. Museums have forgotten their revolutionary origins and their extraordinary history. In the new

170

The most spirited recent defence of the museum is contained in a series of lectures given by, among others, Philippe de Montebello, Glenn D. Lowry and Neil MacGregor, reprinted in James Cuno (ed), Whose Muse?Art Museums and Public Trust (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2004)

171

See: David Carrier, Museum Skepticism. A History of the Display ofArt in Public Galleries (Durham and London. Duke University Press, aoci6), pp 585-207.

172

Adorno, Theodor. Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life, (London and New York: Verso, 2006) p 200.

museum, the individual visitor is no longer considered, and no credence is given to the idea of elite culture being offered to all. The new museum has no time for such delicate complexities. In its fixation on numbers (box office or, to use the language of

Tootfall'), together with its fear of either underestimat- ing or overestimating the audience's capacity to understand, the new museum has sidelined its old utopian ideals, which are now deemed to be pitfalls. In the process, art for all has given way to the 'democracy of spectacle': an ambition to be attractive to the greatest number of people at all costs. This has become the new museum's blanket justification and its strongest defence.

If mass appeal is the best defence apologists for the new museum can muster, it is also the crudest. It is crude because it can be used to parry any sort of criticism, above all the dreaded charge of elitism. It deliberately muddles the issues (above all, the distinction between elite culture for all and culture for an elite) and closes off any discourse about the nature of the funda- mental changes that the new museum proposes. As for the mass appeal of the new museum, it is a questionable argument for its validity. As the philosopher Theodor Adorno has observed, 'the culture industry piously claims to be guided by its customers and to supply them what they ask for The culture industry not so much adapts to the reactions of its customers as it counter- feits them?"' Adorno was referring primarily to the film indus- try, but his observation also holds true for the new museum. By turning itself into another branch of the culture industry, the new museum has not just suspended its old guiding principles but has, as we shall see, turned them upside down. It has, in the process, let go of its historical roots and its intellectual purpose. Shifting the emphasis from education to entertainment, it has changed the ground rules - only without, alas, alerting its visi- tors. By this sleight of hand, the old museum's politicised citi- zen and visitor has become the new museum's passive consumer, simultaneously manipulated, disempowered and infantilised.

Rosalind Krauss was the first to observe this new trend in her celebrated essay The Logic of the Late Capitalist Museum' (1.990). She spelled out its consequences presciently: the new museum would 'forgo history in the name of a kind of intensity of experi- ence, an aesthetic that is not so much temporal (historical) as it is

158 THE CURATOR'S EGG DEMOCRACY OF SPECTACLE: THE MUSEUM REVISITED 159

now radically spatial'.173 This goal would be achieved by revers- ing all the guiding and defining principles of the old museum. Quantity would supersede quality. Diffusion would displace concentration. Chronology would be replaced by revival, mem- ory by amnesia, authenticity by copy, order by chaos. Instead of focus there would be distraction and history would be sacrificed for novelty. In lieu of preservation there would be disposal, and sensation and spectacle would take the place of contemplation and experience.

For Krauss, the artistic model for this shift was Minimalism or, more precisely, the 'articulated spatial presence specific to Minimalism'.174 Viewing an exhibition of works from the Panza Collection at the Musee d'Art moderne de la Ville de Paris in 1983, Krauss observed that, more than the art on display,

it is the museum that emerges as [a] powerful presence and yet as properly empty, the museum as a space from which the collection has withdrawn. For indeed the effect of this experience is to render it impossible to look at the paintings hanging in those few galleries still dis- playing the permanent collection. Compared to the scale of Minimalist works, the earlier paintings and sculpture look impossibly tiny and inconsequential, like postcards, and the gallery's take on a fussy, crowded, culturally irrel- evant look, like so many curio shops.'"

The implication of Minimalism here has since become some- thing of a critical cliche and I will discuss the validity and limits of this line of argument later. For Krauss, the new museum had substituted the erstwhile experience of the viewer, contemplative and framed by personal knowledge: 'In place of the older emo- tions there is now an experience that must properly be termed an "intensity" -a free-floating and impersonal feeling dominated by a peculiar euphoria." In other words, the museum offers an experience akin to a visit to a department store. Krauss had no doubts about the ultimate outcome of this gradual shift. In her view, the 'industrialised museum will have much more in com- mon with other industrialised areas of leisure - Disneyland, say - than it will with the older, pre-industrial museum. Thus it will be dealing with mass markets, rather than art markets, and with simulacra experience rather than aesthetic immediacy.' 177

160 THE CURATOR'S EGG

173

Rosalind Krauss, The Logic of the Late Capitalist Museum', in: Claire J Farago and Donald Preziosi (eds), Grasping the World: The Idea of The Museum (Aldershot,

Ashgate, 2004) p 604

174

Krauss, op.cit., p 601

175

Krauss, op.cit., p 6oz

176

Krauss, op.cit., p 610

177

Krauss, op.cit., pp 611-612,.

178

That this should occur at a time, post -1989, when the capitalist free market model became ubiquitous, is no coincidence.

179

Unexpectedly, given its historic policy of disengagement from globalisation, France has emerged in the vanguard ofEuropean countries implementing the `Krens doctrine'. Both the Louvre and the Centre Pompidou are due shortly to open antenneswithin France and both institutions have recently engaged in plans to operate Guggenheim-style franchises abroad. Thus far, the Pompidou's hopes of gaining a foothold in Asia have suffered several setbacks, though negotiations to open a satellite museum in Shanghai are ongoing. In 2003 the Louvre entered a three-year collaboration with the High Museum ofArt, Atlanta, lending the museum (in which the Louvre now occupies its own wing) some of its most prized treasures in return fora fee ofEuro 13 million. And in 2007 the French government signed a contract with the United Arab Emirates whereby, for fees totaling over s billion, the Louvre's name, its curators' expertise and works from its collection and those of other French museums will be loaned to a museum to be built in the oil-rich emirate ofAbu Dhabi, as the centrepiece (alongside, inevitably, a proposed Guggenheim museum) of a major tourist development on Saadiyat Island. The scheme has been attacked by many senior figures in the French museum world; see: Editorial, 'A Desert Folly', The Burlington Magazine, May 2007, p 263.

When Krauss wrote her essay the trends she described were only beginning to emerge and, to many observers at the time, her conclusions seemed unduly alarmist and wildly exaggerated. In fact, reality far surpassed even her darkest predictions. The con- cept of the late capitalist museum has since been implemented step by step, with astonishing rapidity and against little critical resistance, suggesting it was the only outcome historically possi- ble.'" To begin with, this trend was contained largely within the Guggenheim Museum in New York and its various international satellite projects. Thomas Krens, the Guggenheim's director from 1988 to 2008, became the poster boy of the new museum, its most outspoken defender and ardent practitioner. Before long his model gained wide currency. Today, many museums all over the world are run, if not in name at least in spirit, according to what might be termed the `Krens doctrine'.

That the new museum should seek its salvation in commerce highlights an historical paradox, for the idea of the museum as a non-commercial sphere was programmatic from its inception. For the founders of most nineteenth century museums in the English-speaking world, they were the anti-realm of their own commercial activities, a place where money could transmutate into something higher. The museum's unprecedented author- ity in cultural matters was the result of this particular division. In complete reversal of this reality, the `Krens doctrine' is an attempt to square the circle, to turn the museum into a cultural industry without surrendering its authority and to commercial- ise it without jeopardising its special status. Although several of Krens's most ambitious projects have failed to materialise - proposals for Guggenheim franchises in Taiwan, Rio de Janeiro and Mexico have all been shelved - his doctrine has nonethe- less become a powerful dogma, embraced, to varying degrees, by museums the world over."' Like all powerful dogmas, it is rarely questioned and never fully explained. For a whole gen- eration of museum directors and curators, it has become the sole guarantor of institutional survival and legitimacy. While some adherents go so far as to say that museums are nothing but specialist businesses active in the field of high culture, oth- ers talk more delicately about the need to run their institutions in a business-like fashion.

DEMOCRACY OF SPECTACLE: THE MUSEUM REVISITED 161

There is no denying that, for a while, this new approach brought spectacular results: museums were the great cultural success story of the late twentieth century. New ones opened seemingly every month; old ones were expanded or reconfig- ured. Audiences grew, collections were built, and major exhibi- tions circulated to an ever widening range of venues. Museums became the new civic status symbols, much as theatres and opera houses had been in the immediate post-War period.

But this approach has not proved the panacea its promoters imagined. What seemed at first an effective medicine has begun to reveal some troubling side effects. These can best be summa- rised as the creation of moral and ethical ambiguities that had hitherto been absent from the museum sphere. The inherent contradiction at the centre of the Wrens doctrine', the conflict between corporate ambition and cultural status, has not yet been resolved. Increasingly, it seems that it never will be. The major- ity of museum officials (directors, curators, trustees) remain in denial, but the chorus of discontent grows ever louder 180

It is a hallmark of late capitalism that capital and power have been rendered strangely invisible - that is to say, their presence is undeniable, but their source is obscured and their direction- al flow hard to chart. A corporation wields power, yet how it is constituted and from where it emanates is difficult to pinpoint. The same holds true of the museum in its new cultural-industry incarnation. A myriad group of contributors make up the institu- tion's power. From within, there are the director, chief executive, trustees, curators and those responsible for marketing and public relations. From outside, architects, artists, consultants and guest curators are called upon to reinforce the institutional message. From time to time, politicians and sponsors choose to interfere. This no longer amounts to a classic power pyramid; and it would be futile to attempt to describe or analyse the institutional struc- ture as such. How decisions are arrived at and how they are final- ly implemented - the what, why, where and when of this process - have all been rendered opaque and, as a result, the new muse- um, like its corporate model, has become strangely unaccount- able for its actions. Within an institution, contributors to this intricate web of power and influence hide behind one another. Decisions are described as 'collective', even when they are not. see: Cuno (ed), op. pit

180

When things go awry, blame for 'bad' decisions is instinctively placed with others, preferably outside the institution: mimicking corporations, the new museum likes to cite market forces, politi- cal circumstances and changing times (shifting markets, global trends, competition) as the trigger for its actions, in the process giving them an almost Biblical inevitability that is safely beyond review or criticism.

Ultimately, it is irrelevant how decisions are arrived at or who drives and implements them. For the sake of the present argu- ment, it is sufficient to look at the results. What has the late-cap- italist museum, post-Krauss and post-Krens, become? What are its hallmarks? What are its particular qualities and weaknesses? I will focus my analysis on the three areas where almost all muse- um activity is now concentrated: architecture, permanent col- lections and temporary exhibitions and displays. How have the politics and demands of the new museum affected architecture, collecting policies and exhibition-making? How has the desire to attract large audiences impinged on these core areas? How has the escalating need for non-public income (sponsorship and box office) shaped museum agendas? What are the positive and the negative results of the paradigmatic shift set in motion over the last two decades? What bearing have these changes had on the museum's standing in the wider cultural and political context? And how will all this determine our future understanding of and attitude to museums?

Architecture

Architecture and location have always been the visible calling cards of the museum. They are a public statement of its cultural ambition, A prominent geographical location marks the muse- um's exalted civic status, its central place in the fabric of a city in particular and of a nation in general. By locating the national museum in the former royal palace, the French revolutionaries in 1792 set a precedent that has been followed ever since: the choice of place signified both the exceptional status and the central- ity of the new institution in national discourse. If the choice of location remained important, so did the choice of architectural

162 THE CURATOR'S EGG DEMOCRACY OF SPECTACLE: THE MUSEUM REVISITED 163

language. The exterior of the building prepared the visitor for what to expect inside. Architecture left no doubt about what the museum was about, articulating the cultural hierarchy upheld within. Consequently, variations on classical models remained a hallmark of museum architecture well into the twentieth century. Even high-modernist buildings, such as Mies van der Rohe's Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin (1965-1968), were loaded with classical references. This remained the rule, more-or-less, for nearly two centuries.

However, something strange seems to have happened to museum architecture over the last two decades: buildings have become autonomous, by severing the link, first, between exterior and interior and, secondly and even more problem- atically, between interior and content. It is tempting to place Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao (1993-1997) at the beginning of this trajectory; but, with hindsight, the Neue Pinakothek in Munich (1977-1981) and James Stirling's Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart (1981-1984) are the true precursors, their conceptual radicalism masked by nineteenth century ref- erences (to Schinkel's 1825-1828 Alte Museum in Berlin in par- ticular). In this respect, Stirling's well-known quip at the open- ing of the Staatsgalerie that it would have looked better without art, was prescient. Since then, architects have increasingly taken liberties and created buildings that pay less and less attention to the requirements of art and artists. Gradually, museum archi- tecture has emancipated itself from its function. If, in Bilbao, Gehry made at least half-hearted concessions to the needs of the museum and shoe-horned, albeit uncomfortably, relatively conventional galleries into the folds of his baroque exterior, more recent architects seem to be no longer willing to make even such basic allowances. Daniel Liebeskind's Jewish Museum in Berlin (1997-1999) is a building that has been much complimented for its eloquent symbolism, but this held true only as long as the museum remained empty. Once the curators installed their exhibits, the interiors became a claustrophobic, cluttered mess: content and envelope were aggressively at odds."'

The result is not always as disastrous, and in the majority of cases the mismatch is merely irritating. At Tate Modern (1996-2000), Herzog and de Meuron's curious lack of willingness to consider the

164 THE CURATOR'S EGG

181

The same happened more recently in San Francisco at the new De Young Museum (by Herzog and de Meuron, opened 2005)

182

The result will no doubt replicate what happened in Barcelona with Richard Meier's Museum of Contemporary Art, a museum forever in search of an identity and mission.

183

See: Suzabbe Greub and Thierry Greub, Museums in the 21st Century: Concepts, Projects, Buildings [exhibition catalogue] (Munich, Berlin, London and New York: Prestel, 2006) pp 138-139.

184

Greub and Greub (eds), op cit., p 138.

185

Greub and Greub (eds), op cit., p 138.

basic requirements of the museum continues to interfere with the art on display. Their insistence on installing fluorescent lighting has been one of the most frequently discussed faults of the build- ing, as has their insistence (against all professional advice) of lay- ing raw oak flooring that was to acquire a patina through use over time. The result is an interior that looks forever gloomy and grub- by. Another example of this disregard for function is Tadao Ando's Fort Worth Art Museum (1999-2002), a building so severely mod- ernist that works of art within it merely play a supporting role. In the opening displays, a Warhol self-portrait at the top of the main staircase appeared like ornamentation - a detail - the sole pur- pose of which, it seemed, was to throw the architecture into higher relief. More recently, Zaha Hadid's Museum of Contemporary Art in Rome (begun in 2005) is a building that seems to have been commissioned with no other brief in mind than the creation of a landmark, a museum without collection, exhibition programme or declared purpose."' The exterior has finally taken over at the expense of all else. If anything, this trend has accelerated over recent years: a recent traveling exhibition 'Museums in the zist Century: Concepts, Projects, Buildings' documented about two dozen current projects (including Hadid's Rome museum), every one of unprecedented theatricality, as if an entire generation of architects was suddenly inspired solely by German Expressionist cinema."' Centrifugal, exploding, expanding, dynamic, throb- bing, pulsating, pivoting, sculptural, operatic, delirious, high-oc- tane, futuristic, narcissistic - this is only a small catalogue of the adjectives useful in describing the latest crop of museum projects. These are buildings in which art plays a secondary part and, at the most extreme, is done away with altogether. For example, in the Museum of the Hellenic Word in Asia Minor, in Athens (currently under construction), Anamorphosis Architects 'translate the con- text to be depicted - the history of Hellenistic Asia Minor, from beginnings to the present day - into spatial experience, or, as they themselves call it, a three-dimensional monument'. 1" Their 'anti- object concept of exhibitions is, in the first place, a criticism of the collecting and purchasing activities of museums [.. .] Secondly it is a

criticism of architecture that mutates into an advertising medi- um.' 185 A new generation of architects, it seems, has appropriated Krauss's critique and adopted it as their credo.

DEMOCRACY OF SPECTACLE: THE MUSEUM REVISITED 165

By and large, architects' accelerating claims to autonomy as far as the function of museums is concerned have gone unchal- lenged. One reason is, perhaps, that a museum's quest for fund- ing is made much easier by presenting funders (public or private) with an emblematic landmark building. In this equation, con- ventional functionality is of little concern.

As for the dozen or so books on recent museum architecture, they too note the divergence between form and function only in passing. They are, without exception, authored by architectural historians or architecture critics and thus written from the archi- tect's perspective. They comment on the emancipation of muse- um architecture from function but do not take issue with it. It is also noticeable that the majority of illustrations in these publi- cations show buildings empty, devoid of art or visitors. To my knowledge, no museum director or curator has gone on record to criticise this disturbing development in museum architecture, recalling the fraught relationship between architect and client satirised by Tom Wolfe in From Bauhaus to our House."6 Instead, curators muddle through at great cost and effort with buildings barely suitable for the function they were supposedly designed to accommodate.

The choice of architectural language, or the disconnection of form and function, is not the only problem; it is also the scale of many museums that brings buildings into conflict with the art on display. The most notorious example is the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, a space that, as a matter of course, dwarfs any work of art shown within it, presenting artists with a challenge that they have rarely met successfully. The same holds true for the huge central atrium and the enormous gallery devoted to con- temporary art in Yoshio Taniguchi's new Museum of Modern Art in New York (1995-2003) or the oversize special exhibition hall at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. 187 The gigantic museum not only makes the art on display look unimportant, as Krauss observed, but it also leaves the visitor dissatisfied, lost in a labyrinth and unable to take it all in. (It is no coincidence that small, intimate museums remain so loved by the public).

As yet, no lessons have been learned from all of this. Tate Modern's proposed glass ziggurat South Tower (also by Herzog and de Meuron) seems to combine the worst of these twin

166 THE CURATOR'S EGG