Book Club Part 8: Time to Change

This is the final installment of the Museum 2.0 book club on Civilizing the Museum; The Collected Writings of Elaine Heumann Gurian. For me, this has been a valuable exercise in attentive reading and exploration; I hope you have enjoyed it as well. I would like to thank Elaine for her generous involvement and contributions over the summer. The whole series will be available soon via its own link if you would like a companion as you read this excellent book. I’d like to do more book clubs in the future; please let me know if there are any particular books on museum theory, design, innovation, etc. that you would recommend for Museum 2.0.

And now, on to discussion. This week, we’re looking at Chapter 8, Turning the Ocean Liner Slowly: About the process of change in larger institutions. Presented in 1990, this essay is one of Elaine’s most impassioned, written from her vantage point of deputy assistant secretary for museums at the Smithsonian, a sort of unwanted helmsman for a wild ship in the eye of what she saw as an international storm. The essay focuses on two points: first, that outside pressures of multi-culturalism, relativism, and global instability are forcing change in museums, and second, that change is very unpleasant for large institutions, which will push back with all their might.

I’m most interested in this second point about the change-adverse culture of museums. There will always be outside forces pushing museums in one direction or another. Where in 1990 the need to diversify staff, to reconsider ownership of cultural objects, to grapple with the end of the Cold War may have been paramount, today we have another, equally long and ponderous list of pressures for change. The need to compete with commercial businesses offering similar services as museums. The need to respond to audience desires not just to be included in the museum experience, but to help create it. The need to set a reasonable tone in a time of fiery wartime rhetoric.

The question is not what pressures currently exist, but what we are going to do about them. As Elaine states in her essay:

Change by itself is so uncomfortable that institutions do not do it voluntarily or for noble reasons alone. They change because they fear the consequences of not doing so, and only then are willing to override the cries of anguish from the discomforted.

But the "cries of anguish" are not always consistent, which exposes an underlying problem with pursuing change out of fear of consequences. In 1990, one of the outside pressures Elaine identified was a rise in global instability, ushering in a new age of uncertainty. How can museum leaders chart a certain path through uncertain waters? When the pressures change, the fears change, and change never comes. In an afterword written in 2005, Elaine comments,

The most striking thing I did not anticipate was losing… I did not predict that the pressure to change museums would waver and die down, even as the conversation would continue. I did not preduct that the changes that were made would be fundamentally small except in a few places. And I certainly did not predict that change could be eroded and stepped back from. I should have anticipated the possibility of failure.

Elaine’s honesty is both arresting and depressing. Can museums change? Perhaps the pressures being felt now—which are more financial than cultural—will spawn greater action. But I think we fundamentally need to remove ourselves from fear-based action to get anywhere meaningful. If change is a response to (changing) outside pressures, as Elaine noted in 2005, it “remains episodic and sporadic.” We need to change without pressure, continually, because it is the best way to move forward. One of the reasons I am so fascinated by the tech world is that it largely comprises institutions, small and large, that promote a culture of change. Tech businesses are constantly reinventing themselves, creating new products, reaching out to new audiences. It’s exhausting and risky and potentially wildly successful.

When I was working as a performance poet, I had a fabulous coach who told me, “The only way to improve is to change.” It was a statement I resisted at the time but have continued to attempt to integrate into my mindset. At the time, I was a successful performer. Why would I change my “signature” style away from the tried and true? Why would any museum abandon its core audience, its core way of presenting content, its signature style? We are under the erroneous (and comfortable) impression that great art comes from consistency rather than experimentation.

Elaine concludes her afterword with a nod to the future, saying, “Perhaps I must look to my younger colleagues with fire in their bellies and a mixture of naivete and idealism to take up the cause. I am ever hopeful that they will succeed, and I am ready to support them wholeheartedly.” I hope that Museum 2.0 can be a place for us to share and explore that fire. Remember that there are museum leaders like Elaine out there ready to support your quest for change.

Book Club Part 7: NMAI and the Challenge of Cultural Storytelling

This is the penultimate installment of Museum 2.0's book club on Elaine Gurian's collection of essays, Civilizing the Museum. Next week, we'll conclude by talking about opportunities for institutional change with chapter 8, "Turning the Ocean Liner Slowly." But today, a conversation about the often sticky world of cultural interpretation with chapter 20, "A Jew Among Indians" How working outside of one's culture works."

This essay, written in 1991, reflects Elaine's experience on the planning staff for the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) on the Mall as an "insider/outsider"--a "hired gun" with museum know-how facilitating the creation of someone else's museum. NMAI opened to the public in fall of 2004, and has endured very mixed reviews for its presentation of the Indian experience largely from the perspective of native communities, not curators or historians. NMAI undertook a fairly radical development process in which they tried, via extensive interviews and community outreach, to create a place that represented the interests of people who, for the most part, felt that "museums are irrelevant institutions... have portrayed Indians inaccurately." The institution of museums was regarded with suspicion, and the interior museum experience was to be reconceived in line with the "multisensory spiritual aspect of the individual Indian cultures," making exhibition design (fire in galleries? active use of artifacts?) an "uncharted adventure."

Add to these challenges the particular challenge of creating a national institution. As Elaine puts it in the essay,

When I was last involved in such an endeavor, it was when the Boston Children's Museum was small, insignificant, and unselfconscious. The National Museum of the American Indian has none of these attributes, and working issues out in the full glare of media and publich funding accountability makes the task much harder.

Once she has explained the nature of the endeavor, Elaine spends the second half of the essay detailing "worries" about the NMAI development process. These worries fall roughly into three categories: the tension between the insider and outsider, the ability of standard Western exhibition and artifact techniques to adapt to a new aesthetic, and the ownership of stories.

I was curious to hear Elaine's thoughts on these worries now, fifteen years after writing the essay and three since the opening of the museum. As a visitor to NMAI, I felt few of these worries--the museum to me seemed like a place that had avoided many of these concerns by presenting something fairly benign. Many of Elaine's worries are passionate in nature; the resulting museum, to me, conveys little passion.

With regard to insider/outsider, Elaine wrote about the challenges of creating a place that is "by" and "for" a specific cultural group, while also intended for a much larger outsider visitor population. How will outsider needs for basic information (internalized by the insiders) be accomodated? When someone says, "you wouldn't understand," are they being realistic or racist? How will the museum serve both a distinct group and a more general one?

From my non-native visitor experience, NMAI felt neither foreign nor inclusionary; it felt stale. It wasn't like the experiences Elaine details being an outsider at a pow wow, where she felt both swept into and outside a unique experience. In recent email correspondence about this issue, Elaine commented:

The other problem is that there is a disconnect between what non-Native
Americans wanted to see and what the Indian people wanted to tell them.
Thia is both where the bravery of the NMAI and their lack of responsiveness
to the audience comes in. I don't know how to fix it but by beginning to
work in a dialogue with disappointed visitors and Indians with a point of
view and see if a new and exciting middle ground can be achieved.

This first issue is about cross-cultural understanding. The second issue, about presentation and care of exhibitions and objects, is about museums. Can museums successfully adapt traditional exhibition formats to subject matter and or visitors who expect or desire something spiritual or emotional? If museums radically change their interpretation styles to match the desires of a particular group, will those styles alienate other current or future visitors? Will those styles just redefine another rigid set of rules for right action? Again and again, the NMAI curatorial staff heard that Indians were not interested in the standard set of museum services. Was it possible to create new ones?

Perhaps not in this attempt. Again, Elaine comments today:

The first, where NMAI suffered, is in repetition. In talking directly with
Indian groups but synthesizing the material through a set of curatorial
eyes, the potential outcomes have a certain sameness and a timidity that
might have been avoided.

The repair for that is quite difficult. It means that when working
directly with folks for whom the museum media is not their natural forum,
the museum folks need to offer a much larger palette of physical outcomes
rather than just words, movies, material in cases, etc. And the palette is
not really invented yet. So the direct voice got straight-jacketed into a
frame of museum methods that did not exactly fit.

It also means that the museum palette needs to be stretched into areas that
the Indian community talked about -- smell, sound, spirit, language,
environments, etc. all of which are not yet comfortable exhibition
processes.

I have always wanted to get a group of Indigenous people together with the
most inventive designers in the world and have them design new museum
systems together.

Finally, the third issue is about storytelling. Who owns the Indian story, which is really the story of people from many independent sovereign nations? How the stories and aesthetics from individual groups be woven together into one coherent museum? How can the museum facilitators avoid becoming "the victims and the perpetuators of re-creationism?" When no one voice is regarded as authoritative or objective, how does the story get told?

The most fascinating commentary I've read on this is Jacki Thompson Rand's excellent article, "Why I Can't Visit the National Museum: Reflections of an accidental privileged insider 1989-1994." In many ways Jacki was Elaine's counterpart--a native member of the team, an insider where Elaine was an outsider. And yet, Jacki came out of the experience feeling like an outsider, stating that the museum and exhibion development was controlled primarily by traditional museum designers (white men) with small roles for native interpretation (Indian men). Most significantly, the story the museum finally chose to tell was not Jacki's story, which was one of history, not material culture. As she puts it:

today, the finished museum stands as a reminder of how the small-but-growing museum staff failed to find, in that tense moment of public scolding, inspiration and encouragement to tell the story that we know and the nation denies.

To Jacki, a museum that refuses to acknowledge and explore the Native past is not one that can properly reflect or illuminate the present or future. She was an intended insider--someone who NMAI was supposedly both "by" and "for." And yet she came out of it feeling that neither was true.

Elaine commented to me that she thinks exhibitions created by a single artistic vision--like the USHMM, Fred Wilson's Mining the Museum, or any number of superstar cultural designs--work better. (See book club part 4 for more.) Perhaps, when one person is telling the story for many, they are free to create a new story that resonates both with its subjects and its visitors. The Holocaust Museum's permanent exhibition is not reflective of every Holocaust victim's story, nor does it claim to be. But the story created by Shaike's vision is a story that many people, Jews and non-Jews alike, connect with deeply. At NMAI, they sought to create a cultural story not just by curatorial consensus, but by mass consensus. Can a crowd tell a story as well as an individual?

Maybe not. But that doesn't mean that NMAI's experiment in museum "by" its subjects is uninteresting or not worth repeating. Most of Elaine's worries in 1991 came in the form of questions: how can we, what will happen when we, how will people...? Even if NMAI failed to answer these questions completely (or authoritatively), their attempts help us understand the answers possible. It's time to start looking at where it succeeds and fails and what we can learn to refine our question-asking and draw up new sets of worries. NMAI is just the beginning of the experiment in culturally-defined museums. I'll give Elaine the last word ("Rick" is Rick West, director of NMAI):

It can be forgiven but will now have to fix it. I think what Rick did is heroic ideologically but not totally successful visually. It will be up to the next team to look the problem straight in the eye and have courage enough to try new and untried display techniques that match its message.

Book Club Part 6: Getting People in the Door

This week, thoughts on Chapter 12 of Elaine Gurian’s book Civilizing the Museum, "Threshold Fear: Architecture program planning." I chose to include this chapter, despite overlaps with Chapter 11 (Function Follows Form) and Chapter 13 (Free At Last), because the term “threshold fear” is an important one—not just for visitors, but for museums as well. In this essay, Elaine discusses the various barriers to entry for non-traditional visitors to museums, that is, the threshold fear that keeps such potential visitors from walking in our doors. But there’s another kind of threshold fear I care about: the one that keeps museums from fully embracing and jumping into new ways of engaging the public, new ways of including visitors. We all have problems getting in the door—they’re just different doors.

Elaine starts by detailing a series of fears and the potential audiences who reject museums because of them. She then says,

My thesis is that when museum management becomes interested in the identification, isolation, and reduction of each of these thresholds, they will be rewarded over time by an increased and broadened pattern of use, though the reduction of these thresholds is not sufficient by itself.

What does this “not sufficient by itself’ bit mean? Later, Elaine comments:

Now, after researching the topic, I am less certain that broadening the audience for museums is achievable in general. … Cultural icons serve many important purposes, but these, I have reluctantly begun to realize, may be quite different from, and perhaps mutually exclusive with, museums focused on community well-being.

Or, as a friend of mine put it as we chatted about this over the weekend, “Do museums really want all kinds of people hanging out there? It seems like they're about objects, not people.”

He, and Elaine, have noticed the trends over the last several decades that hinder inclusion and community development, including:

• pursuance of iconic museum architecture which promotes aesthetic over community design
• lack of access by public transportation and rise in entrance fees, contributing to the perception of the museum as a special destination
• open hours not conducive to times when locals might actually use the museum
• lack of diversity among staff
• increase in security and monitoring

Some museums have done remarkable things to reduce these thresholds and have, as Elaine predicted, been rewarded for it.

• The New York Hall of Science’s Career Ladder successfully recruits and advances neighborhood teens as floor explainers, and their full-time staff includes many people who have come “up through the ranks.” These staff members are true representatives of their community, and help give the museum street cred with their local visitors as an acceptable and positive place to visit.
• The San Jose Museum of Art has drastically changed its approach to security, replacing guards with visitor services staff who provide interpretation and monitor visitor actions in a less threatening manner.
• The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston had a street (and subway) facing entrance that was closed for many years; since reopening, it has increased walk-in traffic as well as relationships with the local community.
• The Brooklyn Museum of Art found that skateboarders were using their entrance plaza and invited them to continue.

All of these examples are indicative of an institution-wide approach to promoting inclusion. They aren’t isolated “first Sunday” programs; they change the face of the museum to visitors. Some are simple design choices—like at the MFA. But many are about personnel. It’s no surprise that positive in-person interactions that support a variety of languages, attitudes, and experience in museums can be the biggest factor in promoting inclusion.

How do we get there? Some of Elaine’s suggestions are highly practical. For example, she recommends that museum folks engage with architects in architecture program planning, sharing with the architects their expectations and desires with regard to how people will use and perceive the space—not just formally, but informally as well.

She encourages looking at other congregant spaces—malls, zoos, parks, mosques—and considering how they approach openness to new and potential visitors. I think the religious institution model is a particularly interesting one. Like museums, many people feel they “ought” to go to church (or synagogue, etc), but rarely set foot inside. How do we turn those curious parties into visitors and users? In religious settings, the formula is part ideology, part community. The emphasis on social experiences and relationships increases comfort and ownership of an experience that, like museum-going, starts out as something foreign and mystical.

But churches do not only seek converts among the non-visiting masses; they also redesign and restructure their services and buildings to meet people halfway. And that gets back to my friend’s question: Do museums really want this? Do they want to drop their Gehry skylines in favor of design that might bring more people in the door?

Which reflects a more basic question: who are museums serving, and how does their design support that customer? If the customer is the collector or the object, then the traditional “temple of the contemplative” model is apt. But if the customer is the everyday person, we have to reconsider our loyalties and actions. Imagine the difference between an architectural planning session for Disneyland and one for a museum. Disneyland doesn’t have big name architects; they essentially have urban planners who design little villages of fun. Imagine mall-builders talking about design goals; they probably talk less about “the presence on the cultural landscape” than the ways that they will support people browsing and buying.

If for no other reason, it's worthwhile to consider how other industries approach architecture for their unique vocabularies (and the inspirations that accompany them). Elaine concludes by mentioning a 2002 competition in which designers in LA submitted plans to fix “dead malls.”

One entrant used the following four categories when contemplating useful spaces: big box cathedral – gathering; global vortex – raving; elastic bazaar – wandering; and smart mobs – swarming. Even the words chosen for the categories intrigue me. Imagine if there were museums that wished for raving and swarming.

Indeed. The threshold fear that we experience around words like inclusion or diversity is at least as great as that felt by non-visitors. Perhaps new words will help us. There are lots of examples out there of spaces that are designed for people, not for objects or ideas. How do train station architects, restaurant designers, and park rangers talk about their designs? What can we steal from their successes crossing thresholds, and what can we learn from their shortcomings?

Next week, discussion about the National Museum of the American Indian in Chapter 20, "A Jew Among Indians."

Book Club Part 5: Museums as Mixed-Used Spaces

This week, we consider Chapter 11 of Elaine Gurian's Civilizing the Museum, "Function Follows Form: How mixed-used spaces in museums build community," but first, a short and relevant note about my writing process. As some of you know, I recently moved to the Santa Cruz mountains and am living an extremely rural lifestyle. We haven't yet solved the internet quandary, so most days, I bike to town to work from the library or cafes. And so, I'm writing this post from my new favorite spot: the Wired Wash Cafe.

This is the ultimate mixed-use space. It's a laundromat. With high-speed internet. And a cafe. And a poetry venue. And an art gallery. And a barbecue out front if you want to grill up some lunch. And couches. It has its own myspace page. The guy behind the counter just offered me a piece of gum.

And it's hardly unique. As Elaine points out in her essay, there are butchers who sell phone cards, barbershops with de facto day care centers, and bookstores that resemble cafes more than libraries. These mixed-use spaces arise organically--out of financial opportunity, spontaneous community use, and high-density interaction--and they contribute to community development. Specifically, Elaine advocates that museums stimulate and support "informal public life" through concious construction for diverse applications. As she puts it,

Public spaces have been regarded as necessary armature but not as catalysts themselves. ... Redressing this oversight, this paper concentrates on three elements largely overlooked by our field - space, space mix, and unexpected use - and attempts to show that if museum planners were to pay overt attention to these, they could enhance the community-building role our institutions increasingly play.

Elaine cites the work of Jane Jacobs, an urban planner who focused on supporting communities in the face of sterile suburban-focused growth trends. Some of Jacob's prescriptions for vibrant streets include:

use of services as many hours as possible, especially at night...
opportunities for loitering and the encouragement of people-watching...
short streets and frequent opportunities to turn corners...
sufficiently dense concentrations of people, including those who live there...
a disparate mix of useful services...

Museums are naturally tuned to some of these but not all. Inside the museum, there are many opportunities to wander and watch in a safe space (no cars, communal monitoring of activities). Elaine points out that children's museums and children's areas in particular are often designed to encourage seemingly unsupervised play opportunities for kids while also providing seating for adults to engage socially while watching the action. And museums have also greatly expanded their mixed-use services--both to daytime visitors through cafes and stores, and to corporations, organizations, and individuals for meeting space, fee-based programs, and special events. There are events where you can bring your dog. There are concerts, pow wows, and holiday bazaars, all kinds of things that stretch the popular ideas of what happens at the museum.

But museums are not as good at encouraging "unexpected use" of the museum, nor are they entirely comfortable with use that appears to be disruptive or disrespectful, even if it is highly enjoyable and attractive to users. More and more, museums are designed to give visitors scripted experiences, and each space conveys its use (and, therefore, its misuse) clearly. Elaine suggests that museums might want to focus on cultivating the concept that the museum is a gathering place by offering more space, seating, and services in the free entry galleries, by providing chess tables and lunchtime seating, by hosting voter registration and blood drives. After all, I could be writing this from a museum right now--if there was one nearby with flexible hours that encouraged my participation as a worker, people-watcher, and occasional facility-user.

Supporting unexpected use can serve the community by providing useful social services that are within the broad strokes of most museum missions. For example, Elaine discusses the ways some museums have dealt with latchkey kids who show up in the afternoon unsupervised. While some museums would perceive such visitors as a disturbance or would not grant admittance without an adult, others have developed services like the Brooklyn Children's Museum's Kids Crew to promote hanging out at the museum as a cool (and safe) activity. In a less structured way, Brooklyn Museum of Art director Arnold Lehman realized that people from the neighborhood were making use of the lit outdoor space in front of the museum entrance at night as a gathering space. The Museum entrance has recently been redesigned to promote this kind of use in a large and attractive outdoor public plaza.

The Getty Center in Los Angeles (shown in the image at a birthday party) stands out as a museum created to truly be a public place. It's free and relatively easy to get to by public transportation (or you can pay to park). There's a mix of indoor and outdoor space, and it's debatable whether the gardens or collection are more valuable. The exhibits are mixed in separate buildings to encourage wandering among them via outdoor plazas. There are places to picnic, watch the scenery, and socialize. There's no pressure to see the galleries; many people treat it as a beautiful public space and use it in diverse ways.

But it doesn't take a huge endowment to encourage mixed-use; it can be profitable as well. The Halal butcher didn't add video rental to his business out of social service; "the motivation was to follow the money." Similarly, museums can capitalize on the mixed-use desires of their clientele by exploring the boundaries of institutional comfort. Is it okay to allow visitors to sleep in the galleries for overnights? Is it okay to serve drinks among artifacts? Is it okay to let breakdancers use your beautifully waxed floors to practice? Is it okay for people to express themselves artistically or musically in the galleries? Is it okay to hold singles nights? Is it okay to host a flea market? Is it okay to allow political organizing in meeting spaces?

The answer need not be yes to all of these. The Halal butcher might blanch at offering videos featuring scantily clad actors, and the museum might say no to some kinds of use that they feel might alienate other visitors, distort the mission, or harm artifacts. But saying yes to many of these can encourage new people to come through the door who might otherwise never come near the museum. Also, providing for and supporting informal interaction loosens up the impression of what can and can't happen at the museum. People might start coming for a greater variety of functions--to get a great cup of coffee, to drop their kids off for school, to hear a DJ or watch the street art and sand castle building. And, hopefully, people will start to feel like the museum is their place and will invent new uses and experiences to have there.

The interactions that happen at farmer's markets, thrift stores, and the Wired Wash Cafe are not uniformly peaceful nor enlightening. They are lively, active, and social. You could put a 2.0 wash on it and say that creating more mixed-use space requires trust in visitors--that their self-designated activities will be acceptable to each other and to the museum. These spaces are more like open platforms than prescribed, designed interactions. Or, you can think of it as an opportunity for museums to increase their value proposition as civic spaces in the face of competition from the Wired Wash Cafes of the world. Or, you can think of it as a way to honestly implement the "town square" model to which so many museums give lip service.

Elaine points out, per John Falk's research, that "[museum] visitors spend fully half their time doing something other than attending to the exhibitions and about one-third of their time interacting with other people." Rather than fighting these findings by trying to force people to spend more time with the museum content, museums might embrace them, supporting and acknowledging that there are lots of valuable ways to engage in museum spaces. Heck, I don't just want a museum that offers me the internet function I'm receiving right now. I want a museum that offers all these functions--couches, coffee, poetry, friendly folks who are also sitting around--maybe even a washing machine. It's no longer crazy to see a laundromat with art on the walls. Why should it be crazy to see a museum with seemingly unrelated services?

Next week, Chapter 12: Threshold Fear.

Book Club Part 4: Teams and Superstars

This week, a look at Chapters 16 and 17 of Elaine Gurian's Civilizing the Museum. These essays are of a pair and represent one of my favorite things about Elaine's personal philosophy: support for contradiction, for ANDing what others might OR.

The first essay, Let's Empower All Those Who Have a Stake in Exhibitions: About the uses, meaning, and failings of the team approach, advocates for a multi-pronged approach to exhibition design involving "three equal advocacy positions - content, design, and audience." By now, this concept of team design is firmly engrained--for better or worse--into most institutions; if it's a tiny museum, everyone is pitching in, and at large museums, there are often formal processes for the assembly of exhibition teams that balance curators, designers, educators, and evaluators.

In some ways, the essay is historical, discussing the erosion of curator control and the rise of the educator as an equal player at the table. But the issues raised and the ideal presented are still highly contested today. Many educators still feel like unequal partners, arguing that exhibition designers dump finished or nearly-finished products on them for interpretation. Contract design and traveling exhibitions add complexity; how are in-house staff involved when creative development and design happen somewhere else?

In many institutions, these questions cause problems that cost both emotionally and economically. Underdeveloped strategies for communication and decision-making among stakeholders--including board members, outside contractors, and in-house staff--often lead to cyclical hand-wringing. There's often little or no thought put into conscious development of professional team strategies, whether training for staff to learn more about the perspectives of other advocates at the table, or clear decision-making processes. Many design firms--from architecture to video games--have structured ways for staff to engage in a variety of projects, teams, and disciplines to learn the business, develop strong working relationships, and understand the stakeholders better. Why don't more museums do this? Many museums, especially large ones, exhibit the worst of the feudal cubicle wars--the Collections Department vs. the Exhibition Department vs. the Education Department. There's a serious need for more cross-department training and teaming--so we can build better experiences AND avoid WWE-style smackdowns (though those might be a good source of ancillary income).

But the staff experience, while important, isn't the key. The real question is how the team approach affects the visitor experience. Dan Spock, commenting on the rise in museum attendance from 1990-2000, offers this hopeful note in Elaine's essay:

...could [the rise] also be related to the fact that museums have become more engaging? And might this be correlated to the increased preponderance of exhibitions developed by teams? Perhaps the inclusion of a wide variety of skills and perspectives in development also generates a more multivalent and attractive visitor experience in the finished product.

Perhaps. It's certainly true that a diversity of voices has changed the way that exhibits are presented, objects labeled, and artifacts interpreted. But what about the soul of the exhibition? As Elaine notes, "It is evident that creative vision is not a collective activity, but it is an essential ingredient for successful exhibitions." So who owns the vision? Kathy Sierra has written brilliantly about the dumbness of crowds and the inability of teams to create anything truly revolutionary. And I've heard many museum professionals bemoan the tepid, shiny, overbuilt exhibits that grace the halls of too many contemporary museums. Where's the balance in a team that allows originality and passion to shine through?

Which leads to Chapter 17, Reluctant Recognition of the Superstar: A paean to individual brilliance, and how it operates, which leads with the refreshing statement: "I was wrong! The team approach to exhibition production is not the only way to go." In this essay, Elaine relates her experience with "superstar" exhibition developers, who have extraordinary talent and force of aesthetic will to create truly special museum experiences. She writes at length about Jeshajahu Weinberg, the founding director and visionary of the US Holocaust Museum, who in many ways defied museum convention to create extraordinary experiences.

I'm enamored of the superstar as well, and wrote about it at length in this post about exhibitions that change your life. Interestingly, Elaine comments that working for or with a superstar does not mean that other staff are "mere serfs acting out the decisions of the master." Instead,

The team members believe that they are in the presence of a rare talent who, like the artist in the atelier, is worth working for, and has final authority. With the voluntary permission of the group, the content of the exhibition is shaped by a single intelligence. The group's acquiescence resembles the eagerness of actors in a repertory company.

So should we turn over all the museums to superstars? Maybe. Like Elaine, I find their exhibitions to be the most memorable. But they may not be a dependable source. I'm glad the Elaine distinguishes the superstar as a truly rare breed. They aren't just the best in the business; often, they are outside the business and drop in infrequently, like comets. And absent that opportunity, we need to develop team approaches that allow the bit of superstar within each team member to be acknowledged and supported. It's not an easy task; what is creative brainstorming for one team member is an overwhelming mess for another.

We also have to find good ways to make the team approach as appealing as following (or being) the superstar. Problems arise when leaders style themselves as superstars to avoid team decision-making (a role typified by the boss on The Office). As Elaine comments, following a superstar is a voluntary thrill, not a bureaucratic trudge. How can we bring the same thrill into teamwork--and allow all members of the team to provide those challenging, exciting, brilliant moments for staff and visitors alike?

Where do you come down on the team approach? Give us your comments, and get ready for next week on Chapter 11 on mixed-use spaces in museums.

Book Club Part 3b: Talking Institutional Change with Elaine Gurian

On Tuesday, I reviewed Elaine Gurian’s essay, Choosing Among the Options, on museum archetypes and self-definition. (Next Tuesday, we'll look at chapters 16 and 17, on the merits and limitations of the team approach to exhibition design.) Today, discussion with Elaine about ways museums choose their direction, how change is possible, and new museum types to be added to the list.

I came out of reading this essay with a lot of what ifs. What if you don’t want to be identified as one type of museum? What if that type is unpopular or unprofitable? How can you change or adopt aspects of other types without losing your focus or mission?

There is a museum that did that--the Strong Museum in Rochester NY. It did that more than once. They were a rich collection museum with some local history—they had many dolls, a famous toy collection. And then about 20 years ago, they became one of the first “study storage” institutions. Which means you figure out a way in which your whole collection and collection information is visible so it becomes an encyclopedic museum. Their storage became visible in glass. Now there are a lot of people very interested in it because it is the closest to a kind of google you can get without damaging the objects. That wasn’t necessarily the point at the time, but even the evolution and relation to Web 2.0 is very interesting.

So Strong did that a long time ago, and a lot of people went to experience the study storage, but still enough people didn’t come, so then they decided to become an interactive children’s museum. [Now, the Strong Museum is the second largest children’s museum in the U.S. There are press releases from their reopening last year here.]

So the point of my paper is about intentionality—it’s about who are you serving and where is your primary focus. And it really came because I tend to be pissed off and I was pissed off that people were talking about community and inclusion but there was no evidence in their structure for it. Everyone was talking about community. And at the same time there were all these community museums, whose intentions were different, that were financially failing. Those institutions, as I talked about in Choosing, were mostly self-directed by the groups who wanted them. When people who are non-museum goers politically talk about museums, they tend to be talking about object-centered museums. And they tend to be talking about preservation first, audience second, or now, equal roles. But now there are museums where people are the only thing that matters—and they don’t even want to be called museums. But then there are folks on the other side of the spectrum who want them to be called museums for legitimacy.

But the point is that there really are museums that take their missions very seriously. You can’t just talk about community or inclusion or anything and expect it.

What about the criticism that some museums have faced when they try to go to a more community- or people-oriented focus? I’m thinking of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, which is trying to be a museum for people, but is also a national and collection-based place.

The question you have to ask is: who are the people who have issues with what they are doing? It’s people who are committed to collections and feel like that is threatened. In Puerto Rico and Chile, there are museums made out of posters so that kids in parks can come and visit real art—well, it’s not real art, but you’re getting access to Picasso for $5. Some art people would say it’s not a museum since it’s not real stuff. But I would argue that it’s a community museum and it’s doing really good service. There are contemporary art museums that come out of a political point of view. They are art museums but they’re not about collection.

In some ways, it seems like art and other object-centered museums have the most opportunity to diversify their modes of interpretation. So many science and children’s museums—client-centered places—feel the same.

The cookie-cutter phenomenon started in the 70s because people have seen Boston [Children’s Museum] and seen the Exploratorium and they want one in their neighborhood. But people who start new institutions with different intentions but with the same philosophy go somewhere very different. Outside the U.S. in particular science and children’s museums look completely different. In Ireland, a children’s museum dealt with what to do about colonialism in a multi-cultural place using a theater-based exhibit format. In Brussels, the children’s museum, which was found by a Boston person, now runs it as a psychological support system—they have one show every two years about things like failure or fear. So while there is the cookie-cutter, there are also chances for museums to take the basic idea and run somewhere else.

Let’s say there's someone—a reader of this blog—an educator or designer or director or whoever—who wants to and is ready to change their museum. Do you have to be a director to do it? How can institutional change happen?

It’s a very good question. It happens two ways—when the place is little enough and the stakes are low enough so the price invested can be done in paper and pencil and scotch tape. And the community and social expectation is low enough that no one will notice. And that what’s happened with the revolution at Boston—everyone else thought we were cute and inconsequential.

And the other way is when you have a director who has so much guts and can charm the pants off the trees and is willing to lose their job. There’s a guy who did this, Emlyn Koster, who is doing this with the Liberty Science Center. He’s invested in social service as an economic driver. He loves publicity. And he’s quite revolutionary—what he’s figured out is that charity from multi-nationals goes to social service more than anything. So if he’s serious about it, he can attract money. So he, for example, does live heart surgery that is broadcast to kids in his theater, and he has a reporter in the hospital broadcasting, and the kids sit in a theater and can ask questions of the reporter via two-way mic in this life-or-death situation.

Emlyn cowrote the Timeliness piece—the Liberty Science Center was one of the ones that reacted immediately to 9/11. It closed during 9/11, became a location for families dislocated in NJ—a third of those who died came from NJ—and what they did is all very straightforward. And then a corporation came forward and covered all the lost revenue.

You know, it works best if the two ways are both combined.

I know you have been thinking a lot about the Web, Web 2.0, and how they affect museums. Now, looking back at the essay, do you think there might be other museum types?

I do think there’s potentially another type, which is about individual quest. Which is really much closer to the library, which is why I know something about study storage, because individual quest is potentially there. I went to the library today and wanted to find pictures of houses to give me some ideas and I’m going to Paris so I wanted a book on that. What are the consequences of individual quest and the ability to google all the time? If you get diagnosed with cancer you’re going home to look it up. I picked a restaurant tonight by looking at reviews online. So museums have stuff, and I want to dip in and out like I do at the library. So how do you have access to a place, not as a visitor in which you are having time-dependent adventure—which is how most people use the museum—but in a way where you can get whatever you want?

The conversation on the blog about Free at Last touched on that. One person commented about how he loved growing up in DC as a teen and generally using the Smithsonian as a playground.

Sure—and he probably liked to go back to things he’d seen before because he knew they would be there and he could see them again. But take it one step further and what if he went to see that picture and he really wanted to know the answer to a question about the boats or the hats or the time period or whatever—there are now easy ways to do that. Put the internet inside the museum next to the picture and leave you alone. And not think that we need to control the content but also your attention. No one tells me what I’m supposed to learn at the library. It’s none of your business why I’m showing up.

So I think the facilitation of that makes for a new museum. Addressing this lack of answering of questions and allowing you to do what you want to do next—whatever it is—is the next museum.

Book Club Part 3: Museums Seeking Definition

This week, we look at Chapter 5 of Elaine Gurian's book Civilizing Museums, Choosing Among the Options: An opinion about museum definitions in two parts. (This post is a summary of the essay; on Thursday, an interview with Elaine expanding on some of these concepts.) First published in Curator magazine in 2002, this essay presents five different museum "types" and their distinct opportunities and challenges. Elaine believes that "know thyself" isn't just for self-help manuals--it's an adage museums need to remember as they move forward to make decisions intelligently. The "taxonomy of archetypes" both allows museums to be judged fairly and appropriately, and allows institutions to grow in their unique abilities, rather than by cobbling together a bit of this and a bit of that, becoming wayward and watered-down.

The five types Elaine defines are:

1. object-centered (focus on STUFF)
   
2. narrative (focus on STORY)
   
3. client-centered (focus on AUDIENCE, children's and science museums fall here)
   
4. community (focus on SELF-EXPRESSION, community and cultural centers fall here)
   
5. national (government-sponsored)
   

Each of these types has its strengths and challenges. Object-centered museums have fabulous artifacts but are thought of as stuffy and hard to access. Narrative museums are gripping and evocative but are criticized as subjective and overly dramatic. Client-centered museums offer a wide variety of active educational experiences but may be called out as "Disneyesque" playgrounds in boxes. Community museums develop strong programming and local relationships but may be cited as irrelevant to folks not in that community. National museums have huge reach and ability to represent and celebrate a nation but are decried as tightly-controlled beauracratic machines.

So how can museums confront their typological challenges? One obvious path is to look at the range of museums out there and try to pick and choose "the best" from each. But no one becomes best at one thing by messing with all things. When museums grow by adopting conventions presented by the others, they do so--somewhat--at the expense of a focused mission.

Elaine discusses, for example, the evolution of object-centered museums, the "treasure troves" to include more diverse interpretation and presentation styles to promote contextual, multi-sensory understanding of the artifacts. But by repackaging object-centered museums for appreciation by non-experts, they may lose the essential spooky wonder that made the objects so captivating to the original audience. An over-emphasis on interpretation can distort the power of contemplative exploration of objects; instead of offering a distinct experience from other kinds of museums, the new interpretative museum just offers the same packaging of distinct stuff.

Elaine suggests that we celebrate the distinctions and evaluate museums based on the limitations of their type. She compares different kinds of museums to different universities; no one expects my engineering school to have the same characteristics and clientele as your liberal arts school. Elaine makes the example of five different art museums (the Met, the Picasso Museum, Zoom, the art gallery in Soweto, and the National Gallery of Canada) as examples of the five types (object, narrative, client, community, national), and discusses the way that each of these has taken their own unique slant on sharing art with visitors.

Can a museum integrate elements from each of these? Absolutely; many of the largest museums combine local community programming with world-class collections with narrative galleries with hands-on centers. But this combination requires a multi-faceted, potentially schizophrenic focus, and may be confusing to some. I remember when I first went to work at a large museum. I was literally flabbergasted to learn that there was an "education department"--a whole class of individuals I never knew existed as a visitor! When I talk to museum-going friends about the range of museum programs and initiatives out there, invariably they are amazed to hear about the diversity. Some people think of museums as camp providers, others as exhibit displayers, others as storytellers. It's hard to imagine or understand services outside of the scope of your own experience as a visitor. It's one thing to change your mission statement; it's quite another to change "who you are" in the eyes of the public.

The key isn't schizophrenia: it's personal honesty. Elaine argues that when a museum is clear and serious about its mission, the direction staff will take--in writing labels, designing programs, managing marketing campaigns--will follow. Embodying a type is not an excuse to avoid growth; it's an opportunity to grow in special ways based on core competencies.

But it's not always that easy. There's enormous pressure on museums to pursue models that are economically and socially viable. The research on the use and value of collections, programming, and different forms of interpretation is constantly evolving. Add to these the constant pressures from a changing cultural landscape. The growth of the Web and Web 2.0 have forced other industries--news media, music and film production--to rethink the way they engage with customers. Generational reinvention isn't just an option; it's a survival mechanism. What happens when your "type" is not in fashion? How can museums grow without losing sight of core mission or focus? And if your museum truly wants to change course, how can that happen?

For answers to these and other tough questions, write a comment. And then tune in Thursday to hear Elaine's thoughts.

Book Club Part 2: Timeliness

Quick. A local fire has devastated 200 local homes. A Russian spy has been poisoned in London. Tuberculosis is traveling business class. Pluto just got demoted. What does your museum have to say about it?

What do visitors expect of museums, and what do museums expect of themselves, when it comes to timeliness? What's more important, timelessness or timeliness? In chapter 6 of Civilizing the Museum, Elaine Gurian, Joy Davis, and Emlyn Koster share the process and conclusions of a three day conversation about timeliness in museums held at the University of Victoria in 2003.

The basic conclusion of the conversation is that timeliness in museums is "societally useful," especially in an era when museums are shifting away from being "refuge[s] of authority and stability" to "resource[s] for the public good." This is partially driven by museums, which want to be seen as "forums" for discourse, but also by the expectations of a media-saturated public. One of the things that most confounds non-museum folks about museums is the glacial pace of exhibit and program development; I've heard many friends (and some museum execs from other fields) ask why we aren't showing something immediately after a news event related to museum content occurs. In a world where everything is available up to the minute, museums' resistance to involvement doesn't communicate thoughtfulness or solidity--it communicates out of dateness. In the public eye, museums aren't compared to timeless entities like the ocean. They're called dinosaurs instead.

Of course, there's a basic tension for museums that feel both "the obligation to be reflective and considerate, and the seeming imperative to react to emergent issues." The good news about timeliness is that when it comes to news, the public doesn't expect fancy exhibitry; they expect recognition, exposition, and flexible interpretation. I'm always amazed to see visitors pouring over "SCIENCE IN THE NEWS" and similar clipping bulletin boards in museums. The authors share several examples of museums responding to current events, such as the National Air and Space Museum, which responded to the 2003 Columbia Shuttle explosion "by bringing a television set on the floor and stationing an expert to interpret the information for the public in real time." There are also other museums, such as the Monterey Bay Aquarium and Holocaust Museum discussed yesterday, that incorporate ongoing advocacy for content-related issues (conservation and genocide prevention, respectively) into their exhibits and programs, connecting the timeless to the right now. In the Aquarium example, staff found that giving visitors an opportunity for advocacy with a specific (and well-displayed) deadline encouraged greater participation than non-time specific advocacy; the chance for visitors to affect something "right now" is appealing.

More interestingly, the authors higlighted several museums that have attempted to work timeliness into their mission and ongoing operations. The Royal British Columbia Museum launched a (now defunct) Quick Response Team (QRT) initiative in which team members created exhibits and programs with the goal of being public-ready within one month of an event of concern. The Boston Museum of Science includes the Current Science and Technology center (CS&T), which puts up modular exhibits and revolving programs on contemporary science issues. As the authors comment,

Perhaps the most significant dilemma that confronts museums seeking to be timely is the capacity and willingness of staff to sustain such a commitment. While many staff embrace the notion that museums must be relevant, and therefore timely, their professional education and training, skill sets, disciplinary specialization, commitment to thorough, well-researched exhibitions and programs, and lengthy work processes all mitigate against rapid responses to emergent concerns.

To be timely, the authors argue, requires an institutional mindset that supports fast decision-making, engagement with controversial issues, exposition of works in progress, and time and training for rapid gathering and dissemination of content. The authors also suggest that maintaining strong relationships with external organizations and community groups as collaborators promotes both the development and successful deployment of such programming.

Perhaps most of all, to respond to contemprary events, museum staff need to be light on their feet, to have interest and ability to work flexibly and quickly. In the Royal British Columbia Museum's case, the QRT program was canceled "due to lack of curatorial resources and issue-related expertise." Many museum blogs have disappeared for the same reason; museum staff were unwilling or unable to create and manage content on an ongoing basis. It doesn't matter how much visitors love it if it's too hard for an institution to sustain based on fundamental priorities and abilities.

There's also a branding issue here. I was a visitor and employee of the Boston Museum of Science for several years without "getting" that CS&T was doing something fundamentally different and more timely than what was going on in the rest of the museum. To me as a visitor, it appeared to be just another area where I could interact with content and programs about science. I didn't differentiate that this was "the place" for fast-breaking news, and sometimes I was confused that the exhibits didn't seem as "developed" as those in other areas. Now that I know more about CS&T and some of the very cool forums and programs they produce, I understand that there's a fundamental difference. But as a visitor, how do you make the connection that your museum is now offering something more timely?

To some extent, timeliness is in the eye of the beholder. As the authors put it,

museum staff who are interested in the choice of relevant and timely topics need to ask: 'Relevant to whom?' For some participants, this very question of timeliness and relevance had to do with shared authority among partners, creating a standing relationship with members of the community, and breaking the traditional relationship between staff as authority and visitors as recipients.

Sound familiar? Ultimately, from the visitor perspective, timeliness and personal relevance may be intrinsically linked. Perhaps the best way to create an experience that visitors perceive as timely is to ask them for their ideas. Global warming is nothing new, but it's hot right now--so people perceive related exhibits and programs as timely. Similarly, content that expresses contemporary visitors' perspectives and reactions can breathe "now" into "then."

One of the striking things about Web 2.0 is the way that the connections feel immediate, evolving, and energized--even when the content is the same recycled junk about relationships or politics. In many cases, it's not the content but the attitudes with which content is presented that marks whether you are riding the crest of a new wave or adding to the fossil record. What do you think of as "now" experiences? Where's the "now" in your museum? Where do you want to see it, and where doesn't it belong?

Next week, Chapter 5, Choosing Among the Options: an opinion about museum definitions. Hopefully a timely choice considering the recent discussion on the ASTC listserv about the differences (semantic? real?) between science museums and science centers.

Book Club Part 1: Free at Last

Welcome to the first installment of the Museum 2.0 virtual book club. While every post at Museum 2.0 solicits (directly or indirectly) your comments and response, this one is special. I hope these book club posts can serve as invitations for lively discussion in the comment section. I’m going to try to write less and spend more of my energy reading and reacting to your thoughts. Elaine Gurian, author of this summer’s book, Civilizing the Museum, will also be popping into the conversation as her time and interest permits. And if you're planning ahead, next week we'll look at chapter 6, Timeliness: A discussion for museums.


Today we’re looking at Free at Last, chapter 13 of Elaine’s book, an essay originally published in 2005 in AAM’s Museum News (issue 84). Elaine doesn’t waste time mincing words about free admission. The essay starts as follows:

I have reluctantly, but unequivocally, come to the conclusion that general admission charges are the single greatest impediment to making our museums fully accessible.

And ends:

The major and undeniable problem with charging is that it is a means test. In the current situation only those who can afford the cost, and think the experience is valuable enough to pay for, can have access to the patrimony that belongs to us all. We cannot continue to discuss inclusion if we continue to charge for general admission.

Most arguments for free admission center around the idea that the cultural artifacts collected by museums should be available for free use by all. (See, for example, this timely article about museum admission in the UK.) Elaine starts there, arguing that “[museums] cannot argue that they are a resource for those impelled to learn something if the learner must first determine if they can afford to learn.” But she acknowledges that removing admissions fees doesn’t mean instant inclusion; transitioning to free admission has been shown to result in higher attendance, but most of the new visitors fit the traditional museum-going profile.

Instead, Elaine goes to a more interesting place, arguing that charging admission fundamentally affects the nature of the museum experience. She argues that charging admission promotes treatment of the museum visit as an occasional, special event rather than “an easily repeatable one.” The cost of the experience means people want to “urgently cover as much ground as possible” instead of dropping in, doing a bit, and coming back again (as they do in libraries). This special event requires visit planning (How much does it cost? When can my family get a reduced entrance? Where are there passes available? How long will I be there? Do I need to bring food?).

Even if a person does approach a museum on a whim, he or she cannot browse through the museum before making an assessment as to its value. As Elaine puts it, “One cannot enter a museum unobtrusively.” Locating the admission desk “at the door” forces visitors to make an immediate decision about whether the experience they are about to receive—and cannot sample—is worth the asking price. Given peoples’ (including museum professionals!) hazy ideas about “value” of a museum visit, this entry experience can be bewildering and off-putting. Not convinced? I remember visiting the excellent Muhammed Ali Center last year in Louisville during the ASTC conference. As a huge Ali fan, there was no question that I would pay whatever they asked to enter. But I saw other museum people who heard the price ($9), scanned the lobby, and walked out. Even for these professionals, who believe in the value of museums and had taken the time to walk over to the place, the value assessment at entry was not convincing enough to overcome the admission barrier. Perhaps if they had, as Elaine considers, moved the admissions desk later in the experience, they might have hooked more paying guests.

But Elaine’s interest goes beyond more guests, beyond making museum resources available to all potential users. She is promoting fundamentally different patterns of museum use, ones that more closely mirror the ways other civic spaces, like libraries, malls, and parks, are used. As long as admission is in place, she contends, museums cannot be treated as amenities to be used for different purposes at different times by different people. They will be treated as attractions with specific purposes, and “will never become the forum, the meeting ground, the crossroads, the town square that we are all fond of talking about.”

***

From my perspective, there are two basic arguments concerning museum admission:

1. Museums should be free. Museums provide access to content and experiences that should be available to all regardless of ability to pay.
2. Museums should charge admission. Museums provide leisure activities and experiences and should be valued/priced commensurate with the “experience” market. When museums are free, visitors are encouraged to undervalue the experience offered. When museums are priced “at market rate,” people judge the experience relative to others and make their decisions accordingly.

There are many museum people who believe in the principles of both #1 and #2, who cheered when MOMA went to $20 but still want to sneak over to the Smithsonian for a free moment. The problem often lies in the question of what to do about visitors who can pay but prefer not to. Do they grumble about admission fees because they undervalue the museum experience? Or because they want to treat museums as a free resource but are being forced to change their patterns of use to adapt to the new system? I doubt there are many people who would consciously consider the latter. And yet, people who value museum experiences enough to buy memberships are opting to buy a new pattern of use—one that makes them a more comfortable part of the museum.

Elaine’s argument shifts this debate by adding a third option to this list:
Museums (should) provide services that are broad and applicable to everyday life, whose value is variable, and to which entrance (though not necessarily all services) should be free.

Note the should. Current museum structure and design rarely supports the kinds of museum experience for which Elaine advocates. Blockbuster exhibitions, omnipresent audio and light effects, and many of the other recent museum innovations that have created more compelling alternatives in the attraction market also make museums less open to flexible, self-directed, browserly visits. As Elaine puts it, “Museums, if they remain oriented toward their paying customers, will not, I contend, organize themselves as the more general resource they can become.”

Consider this: I’m writing this post from a public library right now. Next to me, there’s a guy painting with watercolors. There’s a woman reading a magazine. There are other people using the internet. There are people sleeping. How many of these functions could be served at the average museum? I remember visiting the Indianapolis Children’s Museum, where I was delighted to discover both a museum and a library. But how strange it must be for some kids to realize they can go into the library whenever they want and play around, but they need to have money or a membership card to enter the museum.

So, what’s a museum to do? A lot of this has to do with mission. When I was at the Spy Museum, a for-profit institution, there was no hair-pulling over this. SPY is a museum that operates like an attraction. It charges what the market will bear. The marketing (both formal and word-of-mouth) supports the price value and keeps people coming in the door. Some people are turned off by the high price and choose not to come, but that is considered a marketing problem, not an inclusion problem.

So that’s one option: to embrace and organize as a full member of the attraction market. But that supports the “special occasion” view of the museum, and it won’t get us any closer to creating spaces for discourse and variable use. If you buy into Elaine’s vision of museums as places for all kinds of interactions, what should happen to admission fees? Should we reorganize our institutions to offer both free, flexible spaces and market rate attractions (IMAX, blockbusters, simulators)? Do we need to change the kinds of exhibitions and programs offered to create a more sustainable model? Is it reasonable to think of museums as providing flexible civic services, or do those services belong in other institutions—like libraries—that already support variable patterns of use?

I’ve written far too much. Please, overtake me and discuss.