By David Carr
This article was published in Museum News, September/October 2001.
Consider the museum to be a living cultural trust. It is a place that holds objects apart and displays them for interpretive engagements by users. It is a place for the private awakenings of thoughtful and constructive people living contemporary lives. In virtually all engaged institutions-museums, hospitals, schools, libraries-a culture of trust and integrity allows the institution to serve as a credible guide to the complex resonance of our lives, a resource to embrace for clarity in a complex culture.
The concept of a living trust raises ethical practice to the center of every institution and the lives it nourishes. Every professional act in every professional life embodies an interpretation of trust, extending far beyond the letter of the law or the value of the object at hand. To serve in a museum is to serve an ethos of responsible action toward both its collected objects and gathered human beings. These embodied interpretations frame encounters between the collection and its users and provide the culture of learning that gives a character to a cultural setting. An ethic of respect, contextual richness, and generous communication is required to mediate the tensions between chaos and order, between the random and the sequential, between dense complexity and motivated reasoning. This implies an inclusiveview of human beings and a desire to assist them in their private tasks.
The museum's public tasks cannot be less than to address knowledge fairly and completely and, in doing so, to nourish differences of perception and response. This should involve controversy, alternative interpretations, emergingpoints of view. In these pages I have recentlyargued for the "incendiary" museum, the museum that ignites passion and engagement (Museum News, March/April 2000). Here, I suggest that it is a museum's ethical responsibility to do this. In fact, one purpose of the museum is to enable new points of view to appear, through thoughtful experienceswith extraordinary collections. This can happen only in institutions where openness and candor are the rule, and where an impulse to share and explain the richness of knowledge is neither arrogant nor reductive.
Such openness can only occur when ethical practice is at the very heart of the institution's process of thinking, acting, and being.
A museum organizes a high-profile exhibition of contemporary art. The exhibition earns record amounts of attention and revenue. But the museum has failed to disclose that the private collector who loaned the artworks for the exhibition also isfunding the show. This fact eventually is reported in the press. The perception is established that the museum has allowed the collector to gain financially from the exhibition. Worse still, in a single day it has compromised years of trust it has carefully built with its community.
As Trudy Govier writes in Social Trust and Human Communities, we need each other for knowledge. Present and credible for each other, the museum and its users become "a context of witnesses."1 Trust is essential in this relationship. Trust is the hallmark of cognitive life, because it allows a continuity of constructions and observations from day to day and object to object. Trust allows us to assume a fundamental integrity in the workings of the world, especially among transactions related to learning. These are encounters where we must open ourselves to others and allow ourselves to be led, or at least assisted, in collaborations of trust with people whom psychologist Lev Vygotsky (in the context of childhood learning) called "more capable peers."2
It is sometimes the very capability and expertise of the museum that leads its users to feel mistrust or to sense an unbridgeable distance between their entering knowledge and the offerings of the institution. Disengaged from an ethic of collaboration, the remote and powerful museum risks arrogance and false assumptions about its audience. It is always challenged to understand fully the intimate links among the lives of human beings, objects, and information. These are never easy relationships to negotiate or to explain across a diverse and possibly threatened population. And yet this construction of trust is an aspect of ethical service and responsibility to mission that is not merely useful; it is obligatory.
An inner-city art museum comes to realize that few people from its own neighborhood ever visit the museum. The director and staff commit to an active outreach program. After a tour by a local middle-school group, the staff ask if the students feel welcome inside the museum. There is an awkward silence until one student says, "The only people in here who look like me are the guards. Why should I feel welcome?"
In my view, the situation of the engaged learner is open, tentative, and vulnerable; we might assume the person to be captive in the acts and insights of becoming and, in some sense, unfinished and incomplete. The self-determined learner is at least peripherally aware of this, and is knowingly dependent on a situation where information, narrative, and involvement all are offered in an environment of trust. From an ethical perspective, the museum is required to cultivate and communicate the values that assist a trusting user: responsibility, fairness, and a long view of the world at hand. For the museum user, a palpable environment of trust and credibility invites the risks of intellectual engagement. For the museum itself, public trust is a result of promises made and kept by the institution to inform, communicate, and display with integrity and even courage.
The stakes are not small. The museum is an entity that emanates dense waves of power, value, and authority. It is endowed with power by its treasures, and by its control of knowledgeand information. It directs the public's attention, gives us objects in galleries, sequences, and patterns over which we have no control. Visitors are given the museum's constructions; they hear its explanations and experience its simulations of context. Their own voicesare not particularly important in this relationship-and who is present to listen? However grateful and edified they may feel, from moment to moment in the museum visitors have no power over the specific design of their experiences.
When people feel powerless, mere spectators in the museum, an ethical lapse has occurred. I suggest that, just as a museum demonstrates its integrity by how it holds its objects and respects their ownership, there are ethical reasons to regard the user's attention and learning with similar care, if public trust matters to us.
A museum organizes an exhibition of contemporary art. Among the many works is one that depicts a Christian deity, the Virgin Mary, in contemporary clothes with some bare flesh exposed. Several leaders of the local Christian community are outraged. They organize protests, contact thepressand local legislators, and demand the removal of ico the art and the museum's director. The museum confesses to being shocked at the outpouring of animosity from this community.
ETHICAL CONSTRUCTIONS OF PUBLIC WORK CREATE A STRUCTURE OF TRUST. This public construction begins with a relatively simple document. The core of an institution's authentic identity is grounded in the strength and clarity of its mission.
As an ethical foundation, the mission cannot be overvalued. The mission is a form of contract: it allows a dedication of function, it prescribes a pattern of collection and growth, and it identifies a core of messages and ideas to be communicated through programs and exhibits or through objects, specimens, and the contexts in which they are shown.
For the visitor, a mission and its public interpretation are explicit promises made directly by the well-informed human beings in the institution to the presumably less well-informed human beings at the door: When the mission is regarded as a contractual, active, and ethical document, its promises have important implications and unspoken parts. It is our intention to do this, the promise says.
Among the public promises made is the assumption that a museum-as an administrativesystem,a collectorof objects,and an educator-also has the characteristicsof an ethical, reflective, evenan altruistic,actor. The museum asksof itself,' What are the best possibleeffectsof what this institution can do?How might it most usefully develop its collections, teach its users, and influence its cultures? And, in doing so, how might it best fulfillits mission and prosper as an institution?"
No aspect of the museum is immune from the influenceof the pervasivemission: not management, curation, education, design, public service,restoration, or preservation. All are challengedto be current and attentive. When the ethical museum is embedded in an evolving set of values and promises, it can better demonstrate a way to understand and address the challenging situations of a contemporary life. The museum has the responsibility to grasp conflicts among theories and attempt to explain them; and it has a voice to articulate the tensions of learning we all must resolve by taking steps toward the things we do not yet know.
EVEN IN CLEARLY GROUNDED SITUATIONS, ETHICAL ISSUES ARE CONTINUOUSLY PRESENT,CONTINUOUSLY CREATING USEFUL AMBIGUITIES FOR LEADERS AND THEIR INSTITUTIONS. How could it be otherwise? Because museums and other cultural institutions often require big money, because they are so often attractive to extravagant sensibilities, and because they frequently seek survival through generous political attention, they are ethically permeable institutions. For a price, they can deliver temporary fame to their benefactors. For alluring flash, they can embrace entertainment at the cost of education. For survival, they can accept gifts, entertain naming opportunities, and glamorize galleries without necessarily addressing the "agenda of the institution or extending the reach of its mission. When a gift retains even a slim tether to the ego of the giver, rather than to the giver's generous nature, we have a problem.
A museum announces the acceptance of a record-setting gift from a wealthy donor. The gift is so generous that an entire wing of the museum,namedfor the donor, will be built. In the flush of excitement during the announcement, the donor is asked to recommend what the new building's exhibits might contain. To the staff's surprise, she provides a detailed list, despite having no curatorial expertiseor even relevant experience.There is confusion among all parties: are these recommendations or demands?
It is clear to our professional organizations that venal compromises of mission are inevitably bad for the museum's sense of integrity and purpose, and equally damaging to public trust. So complex is our world that its ethical standards are codified, revised, and periodically recodified in great detail and diversity. More than 60 statements are gathered in AAM's Codes of Ethics and Practice of Interest to Museums,3 a volume in its Professional Practice Series.The best of these statements compose a formal structure of mission, obligation, and responsibility. They reflect a level of dedication, character, and care that subtly emerges from the texts. Even the least elaborate ethics codes are direct and sharp in their strictures, almost a set of commandments made robust by their clarity. "Treat all people with civility, avoiding harassment and discrimination," the Entomological Society of America advises its members. This is simply what is done, the code asserts.
A reading of several of these codes suggests that, despite their disciplinary diversity, statements of professional ethics may be reduced to a small number of shared essential guides for behavior, almost completely derived from two principles (as articulated in the ICOM Code of Professional Ethics):(1) "Museums are the object of a public trust whose value to the community is in direct proportion to the quality of the service rendered"; and (2) "intellectual ability and professional knowledge are not, in themselves, sufficient, but must be inspired by a high standard of ethical conduct."4 Beyond rules and laws, a fundamental professional ethic addresses service to othersand the inspiration of altruism. A review of several codes suggeststhese ethical consistencies.
*The need to protect the assumptions of trust and regard between an institution and its public, with professional standards prescribed for virtually all aspects of institutional operations- from development of diverse audiences to assurances of professional credentials, continuing education and training, and currency of practices.
* Establishedstandards for acquiring, managing, using and preserving cultural properties and living collections, showing "informed respect" for their "character and significance"and amoral responsibility for their survival. (American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works). Objects must come to no harm. Accurate, explicit, and current records of collectionsmust be kept. Among all currently evolvingethical issues, clearly the most serious are those addressing the removal and fair restitution of powerful collections,particularly human remains, "illicit" traded objects, sacred ritual items, and stolen objects.
* Respect for users, stakeholders, and communities, giving special attention to the voices of individuals and groups, the vulnerability of youth, and visitors with special needs related to ability, literacy, or economics. Codes also address the physical safety of museum users. And the most enlightened ones emphasize provisions for public involvement and inclusion in museum governance and planning as a matter of ethical concern and articulate commitments to equity and diversityamong audiences and staff.
* Respect for information and its authenticity and a "commitment to candor and truth" (American Folklore Society),given to the audience in straightforward ways. Uncredited use or other theft of information, misinformation, and censorship are all forbidden.
* The primacy of the museum's independent intellectual judgments, uncompromised by the special interests of funders, donors of objectsor collections,lenders, political powers, favors, or an array of conflicts of interest.
A trustee of a major history museum maintains her own private collection of objects similar to those collected and exhibited by the museum. A rare object of this sort comes up for sale in another city. The museum bids for the object. The staff then discovers that the trustee also is bidding to purchase the object for her private collection. Questions arise as to whether she used information gained from her position as trustee to prepare her own bid. There is serious concern that this situation will be exposed in the press.
WHILECODES ARTICULATE PRINCIPLES AND ADVICE TO GUIDE PROFESSIONAL BEHAVIORS,THE REAL VALUE OF AN ETHIC LIES BEYOND THE CODE, IN THE MEETING OF OBLIGATIONS AND THE GIVING OF ATTENTION. Codes of behavior cannot in most situations be absolute statements: we use them to understand the thin tissues and characteristics of formative trust, interpreting them in specific situations. It is the task of every professional to interpret the ethical code as a living document. AAM begins its Code of Ethics for Museums with these words: "Ethical codes evolvein response to changing conditions, values, and ideas"; it goes on to say that a code will "rest upon widelyshared values."5
As every museum professional knows, cultural settings are part of a living social and intellectual fabric-"living" because the lives of users are permeable to the messagesand lessons of the museum's evidence. In consequence, the life of the user becomes different and may continue to change over time. We might say that a newly rewoven living cultural fabric is issued from the museum at the end of everyvisitor's day. There is nothing rule-bound about it.
Similarly, museum work is always a human endeavor, subject to the fluidities of cultural values, social politics, intellectual disciplines, and the evolving bodies of law and practice. All professional acts-collecting, interpreting, planning-are public interpretations of the contract between an institution and its users, a contract that is grounded in the museum's mission. Throughout the Code of Ethics for Museums, the words "mission" and "public trust" are pervasive,attesting to a fundamental altruism in the institution itself and also in its attention to its own integrity. These are not stated in a minor key. The Code goes on to say:
Taken as a whole, museum collections and exhibition materials represent the world's natural and cultural common wealth. As stewards of that wealth, museums are compelled to advance an understanding of all natural forms and of the human experience. It is incumbent on museums to be resources for humankind and in all their activitiesto foster an informed appreciation of the rich and diverse world we have inherited. It is incumbent upon them to preserve that inheritance for posterity. . . .
Loyalty to the mission of the museum and to the public it serves is the essence of museum work. . . . Where conflicts of interest arise. . . the duty of loyalty must never be compromised"6
An ethical statement is not simply about behaving fairly and keeping objects safe. It is also about actively doing good, presenting and extending authentic and authoritative knowledge, and sustaining an institutional structure that assures both integrity and access. For the museum, an ethic of public trust is not simply useful or decorous, it is obligatory and active every day. It is valuable as a statement of record and as a training document for new professionals. It is at times a procedural document, assuring consistency and fairness. Because it can be renewed and revised, the ethical statement can become an instrument for dialogue, for developing new policies and preparing the museum for changes in technology and content. The irony of an ethical code is that it asserts a common moral accord for an entire institution or profession, when in fact it is only by specific, decisive individual acts of ethical responsibility that the code is made real. The ethical code is meant to address the personal instrumentality of its agents.
A Holocaust survivor discovers that a painting exhibited in a museum may have been stolen from her family during the Nazi era. The survivor's attorney informs the museum. The painting, however, is part of a wealthy donor's collection, and the museum has been promised the whole collection within the year. The director and the board are split about how to respond to the survivor's claim, which may implicate the wealthy donor in an illegal purchase or worse,and will certainly compromise the expected donation.
Ethically, what do museums owe to their visitors? I think it is a pair of inextricable things: responsible museums first owe their visitors intellectual respect, including situations and stimuli for thought and speech, without manipulation or exploitation. Second, museums owe their visitors a whole record of uncompromised evidence,consistent with the limits of mission, constructed fairly and articulated with an impartial and original voice.
THERE ARE CULTURAL DIMENSIONS OF TRUST, AND THESE AFFECT THE WILL OF THE VISITOR TO BECOME ENGAGED BY, OR SUBJECT TO, THE AUTHORITY OF THE MUSEUM. Institutions are not always easy to trust. As our array of ethical codes demonstrates, the fabric of trust is complex and requires a step backward to grasp its full scope. A situation of trust implies power, authority, ownership; the museum is invariably in control of the entire situation, including its objects, employees, and physical setting. Trust implies stewardship, the giving of care, the holding of treasures for others, and an agency for the common good, for posterity, and for the use of learners. This implies conservation, preservation, and limited access, meeting the responsibility of the museum to keep objects safe from physical damage. But the object, if it is to be kept at all, must hold something more, and that, too, is protected and preserved by the stewardship of the museum.
Trust implies aspects of the invisible and the unspoken surrounding the object: memory, sacredness, continuity, legacy, and belief, depending on the object's meaning in its original world. We might think of these contexts as the collected strands of place, authorship, discovery, use, rarity, exquisiteness, or value-information derived from research, observation, and scholarship. We trust that the museum has fabricated nothing to mislead us. Trust also implies the impulse to think and act for the good of another, the common good, and the good of the institution. It also means trust for the institution's independence of action and judgment: for example, we are likely to value a public library in part because it is guided by a pervasive ethos of access to information and dedication to a community of users. It existsonly for us, and only for our use. Finally, the idea of trust also implies the presence of conscience,of rigorous processesof review and attention to trust itself. The trustworthy institution monitors its processes to assure compliance with law, mission, and the professional ethics of the field.
The director of a prestigious museum suddenly resigns. In the interim, the board chair takes over the daily tasks of the director. The search for a replacement extends over many months. One day the staff is shocked to read in the press that the board chair has paid himself a generous, six-figure salary for the period that he has served as acting director, despite the fact that the board chairmanship is a voluntary position.
The museum professional is also the owner of significant autonomy in selection, design, construction, display, narration, and evaluation in the institution's work. No principled museum professional will easily accept a donor's strings, or other controlling attachments, no matter how grand the gift. The professional's fiduciary responsibilityis the essentialelement in the construction of trust and obligation for the museum. The ethical museum professional rigorously observes the institution's obligatory trust to objects and living collections, to the development of knowledge, and the exercise of values. But beyond this, trust also entails providing direct service to the culture of museum users, in whose collective name the institution's treasures are kept.
A MUSEUM IS A WAY OF MAKING AND CONNECTING KNOWLEDGE. An invisible structure of testimony stands behind its evidence:a record of inquiry, research, scholarship, insight, exploration, documentation, and reflection. In her work on social trust, Trudy Govier writes that "Knowledge based on testimony is absolutely fundamental." Again, we need each other for knowledge: "Our constructed view of the world depends on many other people, and we can discover what these other people have experienced and what they judge to be the case only because we generally believe their testimony." 7
The crafting of truth depends on trusting the testimony of many others, and by extension, it entails an assumption of trust in what others have crafted for themselves. "We place our trust in that intersubjective account, thereby presuming honesty, competence, and reliability on the part of the people and social institutions who define it," Govier writes. "Truth presumes trust."8
Standing often on the shoulders of giants, the museum constructs objective order, expresses informed perceptions, specifies differences among details, and asserts the best knowledge it can in the public space it occupies. More than in any other institution, the construction of knowledge in the museum depends on collaborative trust; in some ways, the testimony of the museum is incomplete until it is heard by its audience.
The museum is an incomparable setting for the construction of knowledge based on what Govier calls "reflective trust," a process that follows not from innocence or automatic acceptance, but from comparisons with the knowledge we carry, the sorting of complexities, and the use of critical thinking skills: "From another person we gain vicarious access - to the world; we can acquire beliefs or knowledge based on experience we do not have ourselves. Reflective trust is likely to be qualified, partial, and context- dependent. But it is still trust.'9
In the processes of independent learning, dependence on the testimony and evidence of others is entirely fitting, and entirely necessary. For an inquirer of integrity, the critical processes of thought involved in the discovery and taking-in of evidence are difficult to compromise. The learner in the museum is driven by questions, by steady judgments of relevance and coherence, by attention to discrepancy and variation. The great museum is constructed exactly for this process. Rigorous reflective thinking in the museum is likely to be proportionate to the level of reflective trust the institution evokes.
But, as our ethical codes make clear, none of this can happen by accident. As a living public trust, the museum must be vigilant to preserve its integrity from arrogance, censorship, fanaticism, and exploitation. Toward this, I suggest that four ethical aims should be considered, debated, and perhaps embraced; they will be familiar to any ethically sensitive observer of cultural institutions.
* Transparency of processes. Every museum should strive to make the elements of its work clearer by accompanying an exhibition with statements about its origins and intentions, its challenges and surprises, and its relationship to mission and the transmission of knowledge. Beyond intellect and scholarship, particularly when its objects are potentially controversial or provocative, an exhibition is the product of genius and courage. These dimensions deserve display and debate. Any reduction in mystery helps to illuminate the invisible structure and institutional energy that brings brilliant objects and ideas into place.
* Multiple approaches to evidence. Any scholarly arena will readily acknowledge that there are multiple intellectual ways to contemplate evidence and that our truths are crafted privately by combining and recombining our experiences with the experiences of others. Therefore it is an evidence of ethical respect for the user to provide multiple models of response to an object or an entire exhibition and the problems it responds to. It is useful, in fact, to present the museum and its collections as a response to a problem of knowledge; a gathering of evidence and a presentation of testimony that continues to be constructed. Acknowledgethat cultural institutions address unfinished issues in human culture and individual lives.
* Authorship and an author's voice. The idea of testimony implies a specific source of expert opinion, an individual approach to the relevant matter at hand. And so it is useful for the museum to overcome the anonymous museum voice by citing the authors of its scholarship, noting collaborators, and presenting the museum's work as a model of human inquiry, conducted for public display. Present the exhibition as a synthesis of previous scholarship and new insights based on the assembled objects. The institution cannot easily be a model of thought; the individual human being thinking can be such a model.
* Models for independent critical thinking. Every museum owes its users an opportunity to think beyond the museum, to make judgments of their own. Toward this, every museum should pose and illuminate questions that are inherently difficult to address. Such questions may be taken back to the galleriesto provoke new observations or as easily carried into the everyday spaces that follow the museum experience.
The adjective "living"-as in "living trust" -suggests that the pertinent attributes of the museum should be analogous to those of an ideal user, a person who is driven equally by curiosity, fair vision, and engagement with knowledge. As a living public trust, the bold museum will enact a public contract with its communWes and funders, ensurjng active principles of fairness, multiple approaches to knowledge, and attention to the reflective trust of learners. Critical thinking on the part of all stakeholders is pertinent to enacting this public contract. Media, politics, violence, and abuse may over time have compromised or deeply damaged the public's ability to trust in altruism and assume institutional good will. In a culture of cascading change and altered boundaries, what are the needs and purposes of trust? What causes an evolution of trustworthy practice? What defines or alters an ethical code? How much should ethical values evolve, and how do they change?
In this new millennium, pervasive tensions and constraints may mean that our cultural institutions operate under new and potentially compromising circumstances. From my perspective, I wonder about the effects of these things on our cultural and intellectual lives:
* Information is widely accessjble, but has no boundaries, variable authority, and few opportunities for control.
* Entertainment tends to drive content.
* Economics and politics can hold cultural institutions hostages, compromising their independence.
* Leadership and fund raising are not simply coincidental but integral and easily confounded.
* Learning and testing have become synonymous, and other forms of reductive accountability have become appealing forms of evidence.
The changes wrought on information, social and educational accountability, the situation of youth, the shallow realm of public entertainment, and the coherence of communities are themselves likely topics for all museums to consider in their work; none of them is immune to these factors. An ethical museum in a future of tensions recognizes that, in the words of the Dalaj Lama, "tbe interests of a particular community can no longer be considered to lie within the confines of its own boundaries." 10
In this world, the great and ethically sensitive museum will present itself thinking, making choices, expressing reasons for its content and what it collects, asking questions about the processes of understanding, describing museum practices and contexts. This institution will address the intellectual and situational complexities of experiencing and using a museum; it will recognize the challenges it presents to visitors and help them become active learners. The voices of the public will be heard in the museum; the museum will examine its patterns of use, conduct empirical research with its audiences, and involve observations of previous patterns in future planning, content, and design.
I believe that we act ethically in our professions because ethical acts move us forward, toward others, to create together a fabric of effects on the world we have individually crafted as our own. The rigor of our scholarship and the depth of our good intentions may be far less important to the credibility of the museum as an institution than the depth of our altruism. We find an essential integrity when we build a collection that becomes more than its parts; when we conduct deep research toward the very best information possible; when we exhibit works of knowledge, genius, and art; and when we educate a public so that it might think in new ways. But we should recognize as well that all of our effects on other human beings will depend on the authenticity of our words and acts, on our respect for others, and on our disciplined adherence to our mission. These are promises made, to be lived out in our lives and the lives of our institutions.
REFERENCES
1.Trudy Govier, Social Trust and Human Communities. Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1997, p. 56.
2. L. S. Vygotsky, Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968, p. 86.
3. Codes of Ethics and Practice of Interest to Museums. Jackie Weisz, compiler. Washington, D.C.: American Association of Museums, 2000. All quotations from codes of ethics are taken from this compilation.
4. Ibid, p. 204.
5. Code of Ethics for Museums, Washington, D.C.: American Association of Museums, 2000, p. 2.
6. Ibid, pp. 3-4.
7. Govier, pp. 59, 61.
8. Ibid, p. 62.
9. Ibid, p. 69.
10. His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Ethics for a New Millennium, New York: Riverhead Books, 1999,p. 165.
David Carr is associate professor, School of Information and Library Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
