This article was published in Museum News, November/December 2002.
A museum is, among other things, a specific place—a building or site of some kind, in or on which we keep our collections and greet visitors. Even in the electronic age, this probably will remain true for most of us, most of the time.
So, buildings are important and buildings have to be right. They have to be able to show and store our collections—two very different functions. They have to be welcoming and secure, relaxed and tight, open and closed—all at the same time.
Without buildings, particularly large and beautiful ones, we would not attract the collections that fill them. Our donors want to know where their gifts are going, that the gifts will be seen and admired, and displayed in a place worthy of them.
A building project is, therefore, a chance for us to create a work of art, or at least to be involved in creating one. Museum buildings have become one of the glories of contemporary architecture, with their own specialists and historians. In fact, the process of making a building—the meeting point of so many concerns and constituencies, from curators, artists, and donors to city officials, engineers, and architects—is a microcosm of what museum directors do every day, but with a positive, tangible outcome and, hopefully, a beautiful one.
In the last 25 years, I have been involved in building extensions at two art museums and now I’m planning for yet another. The extensions were all necessary and important; they brought each of the institutions to a new level of achievement, to a new awareness of what was possible, even to a new conception of the mission.
And yet, and yet . . . I say, no new buildings! The epidemic of museum building is unsettling. More than half of the museums in the Association of Art Museum Directors—102 institutions—are planning major renovations or new construction. The Getty has created a spectacular “campus” in Los Angeles, while my hometown of Ithaca, N.Y.—population: 29,000—has seven museums and six are planning new buildings. A magnificent new building—hardly an addition—has become a tourist destination in Milwaukee, a signature site for the whole city. And “Bilbao” has become synonymous with the power of a single building to turn a city around and make it famous. Cultural tourism has become an industry all its own and new facilitiesare often the draw—the proof that the museum in question, and its city, are worth visiting.
We certainly should feel pride that our institutions are this important to society, that our influence and relevance extend beyond our circle of close friends and “museum junkies” to those who rarely visit any museum, who may not even care about art. But this importance brings with it a very seductive danger. We may become so relevant to the self-image of our community, never mind the community’s economy and politics, that we may forget our primary duty—to collect, preserve, and interpret the art of the past and present for everyone who comes through our doors. We are in danger of losing our focus on what got us, personally, into this business long ago—the art itself—and what makes our institutions relevant to people in the first place.
Has a new building become a substitute for new thinking? Has it become a way of putting off a solution to more difficult, more intractable issues than space? Difficult as it is, has it become easier to build than to rethink our mission, or build our collection, or go in new directions with our programs or our audience or staff? Are we building, in part, because money for construction is easier to find than money for the annual fund or, especially, the endowment? Does a new building change our mission in unexpected, sometimes unwanted ways, focusing our attention on service to tourists and conventioneers rather than on our function as a meeting place between students, schoolchildren, and adults, on the one hand, and original artworks and objects, on the other?
If this happens sometimes, it is certainly understandable. For example, a fairly minor Dutch painting, such as one by Gerard Dou or Jan van der Heyden, routinely goes for well over $1 million, and the ante is raised the closer we get to the present or to household names. Which would we really choose—a new building costing $25 million or a set of five superb $5-million paintings? Which one is easier to find, explain, and raise money for? Which one buys a lot more visibility and greater feelings of achievement and new beginnings?
It’s a pity that, often, the answer is the building, instead of the objects that go into and justify it. This can lead to distorting the mission and confusing ends and means. It can lead to donor and staff exhaustion and, strangely enough, it can have less of an effect on audience growth than everyone expected. As for the quality of the museum experience itself, which is more educational and inspiring for the visitor—to walk through a new addition or to see those five major paintings? And don’t forget the financial impact of an expanded physical plant—not just the direct expenses but also the increased time and effort that trustees, director, and staff have to put into fund raising. Often, this fund raising is just to stay even and not to build an endowment for the tough times.
Buildings are necessary; they will and should be built. However, they can be dangerous, and there are other ways to serve one’s institution and community. Surely, we as a profession can find other measures of achievement, tangible and intangible. The most important, in my opinion, is the collection. A balanced collection of works of art, in various media, that give the visitor the whole history of world art at a high level of quality, or whatever it is we are trying to teach, is a triumph, immensely difficult to put together and almost as difficult to install and explain. Yet it may be the greatest service we can offer our audience. There are other measures: an energized staff or board of trustees, a new circle of museum friends, outreach to new and diverse communities, a new focus for the education department, digital access to the collection, a new HVAC system, a series of books on the collection, a partnership with a local university, even a new mission. It can take a year, sometimes two, to come up with a mission that everyone accepts and is excited about. The importance of all these achievements is self-evident and should be enough to make us feel we have spent our time well.
Money has always been the mother’s milk of American museums, and this won’t change, given the cost of our buildings, our staffs, our collections, and our ambitions. Somehow, however, we have to find ways other than the size of our budgets to define ourselves, what we do, and the services we offer. There has to be another way to measure our moral commitment, our value to society, our true success—and this measure has to be acknowledged both by the museum profession and by our audiences.
In the meantime, I invite you to visit the Johnson’s new wing in a few years.
Franklin W. Robinson is the Richard J. Schwartz Director, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y.
