Captive & Committed

“Relevance is a function of the number of
different kinds of worlds that
an idea participates in simultaneously.”

Captive and Committed
A conversation with author Malcolm Gladwell

Small things have a big impact. Go with your gut, but only if you know what you’re talking about. We’re only as good as our circumstances. These are a few of the lessons to be learned from New York Times bestselling author Malcolm Gladwell. A staff writer at the New Yorker magazine, Gladwell is also the author of three books that take social scientific research and look at its—often unexpected—implications.

His first work, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference (2000), talks about the significance of small-scale social events, while his second book, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (2005), explains how the human subconscious interprets events or cues and how past experiences allow people to make informed decisions very rapidly. His latest work, Outliers: The Story of Success, examines how a person’s environment affects his or her possibility and opportunity for success.

Gladwell will deliver a keynote address at the AAM Annual Meeting in Philadelphia on May 3. He recently spoke with Museum Editor in Chief Susan Breitkopf about decisions, relevance and knowing what you don’t know.

What are some of your favorite museum experiences?

My father is a great museumgoer, and so I have very fond memories from way back when of visiting with my father. I’m a history buff. I was just in Berlin and went to the City Museum of Berlin, which gives you this incredible picture of what Berlin was like before the war, and it’s heartbreaking to realize what was lost. There’s almost nowhere else you can find those kinds of experiences where you can enter into a completely different time and, in an afternoon, get transported back to some other experience.

Do you find that important—to have the experience of being transported?

You can watch a documentary, but it’s not as powerful because you’re not being confronted with the kind of physical reality of things. And you’re immersed in it physically in a museum—you’re immersed in whatever experience they’re giving you. It’s just so much more meaningful and powerful. It’s the difference between watching a hockey game on television and watching it live: They’re totally different orders of magnitude in their experience.

What is the disconnect there? Is it the way the brain is processing it or is it that you’re just not hitting all your senses?

Part of it is the three-dimensionality—so many more senses are being hit with it, and you’re immersed in the experience. You can so easily check out when there’s some degree of remove, if you’re watching a movie or watching something [on TV]. It’s very easy to be distracted and to let that kind of presence seep into your experience whereas with a museum, they have deliberately taken you out of your world and put you in a kind of foreign space; they’ve changed the whole nature of your reactions. This is where [museums] link to some of my work. For example, in Blink I talk about how context shapes experience, that experiences are outside in, not inside out. I talk about research that says when you have people put an emotional expression on their face, they will begin to have a genuine feeling of the emotion represented by that expression. So if I make you frown, you’ll feel sadder. The idea that our context is driving our inner emotional reactions is a really powerful one, and it’s the basis in large part for the museum experience. If I take you somewhere and transport you into a place that has a whole set of values, aesthetic values and is designed specifically to facilitate a certain kind of interaction, it will affect you in some very meaningful way. All my books are versions of the argument that our context and environments drive who we are—not the other way around.

And do you think that museums drive context enough? Is there something more that they could do to transform the experience?

There’s not always more you can do. In a museum, you’ve got your audience captive and committed. There’s almost nothing that you can’t do with them if you want. [In a museum] we’ve already got sight, obviously, context and in many cases sound. I’ve often thought that there’s far more room for performance in museums as another way of capturing people’s—particularly kids’—attentions. Since they’re already there and they want to be there, you should be able to do whatever you want with them. There should be some kind of willingness there to be engaged, and I certainly think the envelope could be pushed further.

Can you think of times when you haven’t reached that level of engagement in a museum—when you’ve been let down?

I’m much more words-oriented than visually oriented, and I always feel there’s not enough background on the paintings and the artists. It’s unrealistic, but even when I put on the headphones, I don’t feel I’m getting enough. I want more text, more explanation available to me. In the case of modern artists, I would love to, when I see a painting, also see a video of the artist talking about his or her work. I’m there and I’m committed and I want at least the option to have as deep an experience as I can.

It’s interesting that you say that because there are some in the museum world who feel there’s too much interpretation, and there’s a movement to have no wall text and no context and just let people experience the objects for what they are.

I think that the key is that you have a choice. You can give me all of those options without impairing the experience of someone who wants something that’s pristine. I have a very good friend who goes to [New York’s] Metropolitan Museum of Art twice a week. She’s a hard-core art-lover, and that [level of information and interpretation] would definitely intrude on her experience. The trick is to find a way to give me what I need while not ruining her experience. I think with technology the way it is, that’s completely doable; it just takes some creativity.

The most prominent example of how museums show up in your work is in Blink, where you begin the book by talking about a kouros the Getty museum in Los Angeles purchased that turns out to be a forgery. You talk about how the many experts who examined it all had a gut reaction that it was a fake but ignored it. How did you come across the Getty example?

[Former Metropolitan Museum Director] Thomas Hoving talks about it in his book False Impressions about fakes, and I was reading lots of books on forgers and art forgeries at the time. And so I went to see him and he told me more about it.

I was struck that you had a quote in Blink from former Getty Curator Marion True, who is pending trial in Italy for being involved in illicit antiquities trading. Given that the Getty was central to dialogue about museums acquiring illicit antiquities, which happened after the book was published, I wonder if you would have excluded that example?

Oh, no. I would have been even more likely to include it. I love the fact that the Getty was in the news in the way that it was. But I never thought it was a bad thing. I mean, it was an unfortunate period for the Getty, but the larger ramifications over that whole thing were positive. The biggest problem museums have is the unfair—but nonetheless very real—assumption by members of the public that they are dead institutions. That they aren’t active participants in the real world. The whole thing about the Getty was that they were active participants in the real world. From the standpoint of museums in general, that whole controversy was a plus. It said that museums are working out very up-to-date, modern, real-time problems. They’re active participants in the economy and the marketplace and intellectual life, and that means that they will get involved from time to time in controversies. That’s what you want—that sense that the museum is in the thick of things. What you don’t want is this notion that the museum is dead and irrelevant.

How did you make the connection between the Getty kouros and the whole idea of Blink?

I came across it very, very early on [in writing the book], and it so beautifully summed up every point I wanted to make that it became the kind of template for the book. This idea that instincts are informed by experience, the reason Hoving and those other [experts] could have made that distinction was they had spent a lifetime with art and that those kinds of informed instincts are irreplaceable; there’s no other way to make that kind of judgment. That summed up what I wanted to explore—that there is a specific insight that can only be done in an instinctive way, and that that kind of instinct is the fruit of experience. In absence of that experience, it’s useless or even dangerous.

What was interesting to me was the way in which the people I talked to had divided up their intellectual responsibilities. They weren’t saying that every [decision] ought to be [made based on instinct], but they were saying there is a class of problems for which we need to rely on our judgment and a class of problems that we need to use traditional, rational, deliberate means of analysis. To their minds, the art world called on both those qualities. If they were going to write up a monograph on a work of art, they weren’t going to write it in ten seconds; they were going to do all their homework and talk to everyone and read everything there was to read and be very careful and conscious. If they were called on to evaluate the authenticity of a work of art, they felt that that called for an entirely different mode of cognition, and I liked that idea that they had room for these two very different modes in their line of work. I thought that was a good model for what it means to be a professional.

It’s interesting the way you talk about what kinds of choices should be made in what way. Should we completely gut and renovate our museum building? That may not be one of those decisions that should be made on informed instinct.

It sounds like one that you ought to slow down and consider that very thoughtfully.

In that case, you have to bring your argument to the board, and you have all these stakeholders involved. How do you circumvent that in decision-making?

The thing about dividing up decision-making into two modes is that both have their strengths and weaknesses. The deliberative mode can become overly deliberative and the instinctive mode can become an excuse for irrationality or for irresponsibility. You have to be cautious about the kind of downside of both those ways of making decisions, and each involves some kind of balancing. You have to understand that neither of these ways is perfect. But you can levy an equally cogent set of critiques. With the deliberative way, people can get lost in the data and can fool themselves into thinking that there is greater certainty in their answers than there actually is. Each has its drawbacks, each calls for some degree of skill in implementation.

And you don’t necessarily know when you’ve arrived at that skill, I imagine.

It’s always a kind of work in progress.

Museums grapple with relevance and authenticity. They want to remain relevant to their audiences while maintaining the same degree of authenticity.

The one thing I would say is that relevance is a function of the number of different kinds of worlds that an idea participates in simultaneously. The difference between a trend and a fad, for example, is a fad is limited to one cultural domain and trends are ideas that pop up in many different places—in fashion, in literature, in film, in the business world. An idea becomes relevant when this happens. It is useful in thinking about worlds like the museum world. They have to find a way to forge ties between their activities and other kinds of domains of learning and discovery. In the best-case scenario, museums should never stand alone. They should always be on the campus of some kind of educational institution or should at least be closely tied to some kind of educational institution. Their missions are so similar, and they’re both tackling the same kinds of problems.

What you want is students at a school to see the museum as an extension of the classroom—a kind of permanent classroom they could access and go to at any point in their lives. You could make the same argument from the standpoint of the educational institution, that the educational institution wants ties to the museum. My biggest problem with universities is that when students leave, they assume their education is over. That’s the great folly of the four-year college system is that by calling itself that, it assumes education ends after four years. But in fact it doesn’t. All your four years in school ought to be doing is getting you so excited about learning that you’ll do it for the rest of your life. Museums are an appropriate way to continue your education process.

Do you see that as museums’ primary role, to be educational institutions rather than trying to link to their communities by facilitating healthcare or having singles’ nights or literacy programs? Do you think that that is a mistake to try to be everything to everyone?

You don’t want it to be everything to everyone to the point where you lose your own identity. But I do like the idea of thinking long and hard about who the most appropriate partner is and making that partnership real. A museum is a logical center of public intellectual activity. For example, the New York Public Library has repositioned itself in the last couple of years as a place where a nonspecialist audience goes to hear interesting lectures or discussions, and there is an incredible demand for that kind of activity now. In the ten years that I’ve been kind of doing book tours, the nature of them has changed so dramatically; it’s a whole different ballgame out there now. People are less interested in the book and more interested in the experience; they want to meet the author and engage in a discussion. That kind of stuff is very appropriate for a museum to embrace.

The best book-related activity I was ever involved in was at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. It managed to pull together an incredible crowd, have a really, really great discussion and as a result appropriately positioned themselves as a kind of center of public intellectual activity. Once you think about the Hammer as a center of activity like that, I think that’s your gateway into all the other treasures it has. There’s no distinction between the treasure of having someone come and give a talk and the treasure of having some object in your personal collection—they’re the same thing. I mean, one happens to be alive and one’s dead, but you’re fulfilling the same human need in both cases.

Switching gears a bit, how does your work apply to what’s going on in the world right now? Do you think the current economic situation is the result of bad decision-making?

It’s a very, very hard question to answer, and it also depends on where you put the blame for the crisis. If you think that it was inadequate regulation and irresponsible loosening of rules around leverage, the responsibility lies at the government level. If you think it’s about the greed on Wall Street, then it lies at the private-sector level. So it’s just hard to figure out whose error it is. Maybe everybody made errors simultaneously.

What about Barack Obama? Does he impress you as someone who is able to make decisions based on instinct?

Well, not yet. I think he knows this. I mean, no president has reached that level or ought to have reached that level so early in their first term. The whole argument of Blink is that those kinds of decisions are valuable only with the benefit of experience, and he doesn’t have it. He seems to know that, and he’s tried to surround himself with people who do have some kind of appropriate experience. But no president should be valuing his or her gut so early on. Maybe if there was a succinct way to sum up what was wrong with Obama’s predecessor, it was that he prematurely thought that his instincts were a good guide to public policy before he knew what public policy was. I think Obama is a smart enough guy to know that he doesn’t know enough yet, but hopefully he will soon.

I guess that probably translates to anyone in a new role: They should be smart enough to know what they don’t know.

You know, the whole thing about Thomas Hoving and [antiquities expert] Evelyn Harrison and those people who looked at the kouros is they’ve been around for 30 years; that’s how they knew. But they wouldn’t have known when they were just out of graduate school. I mean, they would have had no more clue than the rest of us. You get that only if you spend a lifetime immersed in that particular field.

[Sidebar]
“In September of 1983, an art dealer by the name of Gianfranco Becchina approached the J. Paul Getty Museum in California. He had in his possession, he said, a marble statue dating from the sixth century BC. It was what is known as a kouros—a sculpture of a nude male youth standing with his left leg forward and his arms at his sides. There are only about two hundred kouroi in existence, and most have been recovered badly damaged or in fragments from grave sites or archeological digs. But this one was almost perfectly preserved. It stood close to seven feet tall. It had a kind of lighter-colored glow that set it apart from other ancient works. It was an extraordinary find. Becchina’s asking price was just under $10 million. …

A geologist from the University of California named Stanley Margolis came to the museum and spent two days examining the surface of the statue with a high-resolution stereomicroscope. … The statue was old. It wasn’t some contemporary fake. …

The kouros, however, had a problem. It didn’t look right. The first to point this out was an Italian art historian named Federico Zeri, who served on the Getty’s board of trustees. When Zeri was taken down to the museum’s restoration studio to see the kouros in December of 1983, he found himself staring at the sculpture’s fingernails. In a way he couldn’t immediately articulate, they seemed wrong to him. Evelyn Harrison was next. She was one of the world’s foremost experts on Greek sculpture. … “Arthur Houghton, who was then the curator, took us down to see it,” Harrison remembers. “He just swished a cloth off the top of it and said, ‘Well, it isn’t ours yet, but it will be in a couple of weeks.’ And I said, ‘I’m sorry to hear that.’” What did Harrison see? She didn’t know. In that very first moment, when Houghton swished off the cloth, all Harrison had was a hunch, an instinctive sense that something was amiss. …

The kouros didn’t come from ancient Greece. It came from a forger’s workshop in Rome in the early 1980s. … When Federico Zeri and Evelyn Harris … —and all others—looked at the kouros and felt an “intuitive repulsion,” they were absolutely right. In the first two seconds of looking—in a single glance—they were able to understand more about the essence of the statue than the team at the Getty was able to understand after fourteen months.“—excerpted from Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell