Prescriptions for Art Museums in the Decade Ahead

Abstract

The landscape of art museums has been altered since the AAM's 1992 publication Excellence and Equity. Rather than following a path towards community service or an educational mandate, the field has been led astray by a corporate mindset. The author identifies the primary challenges facing art museums in rebalancing their mission, and suggests a series of remedies to the unrealistic economic model that threatens to exclude education as museums' primary mandate. • • • • • I. The Changed Landscape of Art Museumsjust as corporate culture is being altered by new requirements for due diligence and transparency, similarly, the non-profit community has discovered that it is no longer insulated from tough love and investigative zeal. Art museums, long the preserve of affluent patrons, began to move towards an ideal of community service in the 1980s. More recently, they have been subject to national and personal claims for the return of objects with debatable ownership histories, along with unfiltered attention from bloggers, who don't observe the politesse habitual to newspaper editors. The result is greater scrutiny by the mainstream press-and by Congress-in a variety of ways. Lawmakers' intense (if highly selective) search for abuse, special interests, and questionable carve-outs has reached the heretofore unscalable steps of art museums. UBIT (unrelated business income tax), PILOT (payment in lieu of taxes), and other incremental reductions of the tax-exempt �i�t� �ears o� �urato� Maxwell L. Anderson (manderson@ima.museum) is director and CEO of the Indianapolis Museum of Art, 4000 Michigan Road, Indianapolis, IN 46208-3326.

The Temple and the Bazaar: Wikipedia as a Platform for Open Authority in Museums

“…Cameron explains that while museums should maintain their role as temples, “there must be concurrent creation of forums for confrontation, experimentation, and debate” (1971, 68). Although Cameron's article is over 40 years old, the museum field is far from upholding the ideal that museums need not be a temple or a forum, but should be both (Falk ; Anderson ).…”

“…In the 1992 report Excellence and Equity , the American Association of Museums placed Cameron's model of temple and forum squarely within an educational context. Museum theorists urge museums to abandon top‐down approaches of interpretation (Falk ; Adair et al ) and instead focus on debate, dialogue, and equity of diverse perspectives (Anderson ; Chung ). Many museums have been slow to deliberately embrace this mandate.…”

“…While Wikipedia itself is a prime example of the “temple and the bazaar,” it was not until recently that museum professionals began to engage more fully with the community and seriously consider it as a platform for contributing expertise and resources (Anderson ; McCoy ; Simon 2011; Center for the Future of Museums ). Beginning in 2010, institutions from around the world have collaborated with the Wikipedia community through a variety of projects.…”