Making Museums Moral Again; New York Times, 3/17/16

Holland Cotter, New York Times; Making Museums Moral Again:

"“From the first moment of contact with Europe,” she writes, “exploitation of its wealth ushered in foreign intervention on a massive scale that has continued unabated into the present.”

I’ve rarely read a text so forthrightly polemical in an exhibition organized by the Met. I don’t remember ever reading anything like it in any of the permanent galleries. But it is a model for the kind of truth-telling approach that museums could, and should, be taking to art: factual, incisive, politically astute, connecting the past to the present and inviting argument.

My sense is that such a tactic could encourage viewer “engagement,” to invoke a term that buzzes around the fraught subject of audience-building. It could wake people up; compel them to stop, look and read when they might have passed by; and prompt them to see that art isn’t just about objects — it’s about ideas, histories and ethical philosophies that they may have a stake in, and an opinion about. It seems to me that one point of museum programming is to get people to think, as opposed to endlessly snapping selfies.

Of course, the “truth” brings risks. There are truths we don’t want to know, and so-called truths can be applied damagingly to one person or culture, but not another. What about beauty? Will magnificent objects suffer if they are found to have unbeautiful back stories? Many objects in museums fall into this category.

If museum officials begin to sense that visitors are becoming more involved in what the curators are saying and thinking, not just what they’re showing, maybe they will come to feel a more immediate stake in the preoccupations of audiences."