Museum Management and Curatorship

ISSN: 0964-7775 (Print) 1872-9185 (Online) Journal homepage: www.tandfonline.com/journals/rmmc20

Museums past and museums present: Some

thoughts on institutional survival

Michael Conforti

To cite this article: Michael Conforti (1995) Museums past and museums present: Some
thoughts on institutional survival, Museum Management and Curatorship, 14:4, 339-355, DOI:
10.1080/09647779509515454

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09647779509515454

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Museums Past and Museums Present

Some Thoughts on Institutional Survival

MICHAEL CONFORTI

Over the last two decades the art historical community, and museum
professionals in particular, have been forced to come to terms with the fact that
the hermetic, object-reverencing institutions which they once innocently
thought to represent both a bastion of education for the public good, and a
retreat for the soul, are now ever more widely being criticized as ideologically
driven simulacral experiences, institutions manifesting in their many narratives
the hegemony of elite bourgeois culture in the West. Critics from outside the
frame of museum practice look at the museum's classification and installation
practices, 'that generate its inarticulate but purposeful recontextualizations', as
strategies of power. Critical writings evoke, in a variety of ways and with
increasing venom, Theodor Adorno's notion of the museum as a 'sepulchre of
works of art', institutional testimony 'to the neutralization of culture'.
In an essay and the Introduction to a recent volume entitled Museum Culture,
the American historian Daniel Sherman casts a historical perspective on the
intellectual origins and continuity of this now-pervasive museum critique.
Focusing on Quatremere de Quincy's sometimes 'strident' criticism of the
nascent museum culture of the late eighteenth century, Sherman finds in
Quatremere's writings on the museum not only one of the first analyses of its
decontextualizing nature, but a prefiguration of Marx's notion of commodity
fetish in capitalism, a concept that drove both Adorno's writings on the
institution as well as Walter Benjamin's observations on collecting practice.
Adorno and Benjamin, while not stridently anti-museum themselves, are the
often referred to touchstone for the most uncompromising recent critical texts.
Foucault is cited by Sherman, too, as he is by many other recent observers as a
further philosophical catalyst, one who has inspired a deeper understanding of
the museum's power through the identification of its classifying and categorizing
systems, as well as its structuring of a viewing self and a collective public.
Here, within Foucault's concept of cultural master narratives in social
organizations, Marx's warnings against the ideological institutions of hegemonic
capitalism and Quatremere's early perception of the museum's decontextualizing
nature, lie the intellectual origins of the contemporary museum critique. As we
know, it is a discourse supporting a virtual publishing industry in 1980s and

This paper is a slightly revised version of a plenary address given at the Association of Art Historians
meeting in London, hosted by the Victoria and Albert Museum, 8 April 1995.
340 Museums Past and Museums Present

1990s academia, one driven not only by the fact that these increasingly popular
social institutions represent the key to a special and as yet little explored cultural
history, but (as Sherman observes) cit is a discourse driven also by the fact that the
museum enterprise seems to entail an attempt to conceal its own history'.
I do not seek, with this talk, to contribute in any significant way to this
museum discourse, now so familiar to us. Nor am I inclined to defend the
museum blindly, its current and past practices. Practitioners, like myself, have to
realize that it is not only too late for programmatic justifications which invoke
the so-called 'uninhibited vision' of the museum visitor or suggest that objects
should 'speak for themselves'; it may be too late for justifications that do not
reference the institution's socio-political nature directly. And this nature has been
more easily observed by those outside the frame of museum practice. Instead, I
would like to consider the effects and current reality of this growing critical
perspective on the museum, considering at the same time the possibility of
programmatic change that might in part be a response to this criticism. My
ultimate purpose, as expressed in the title of this contribution, is to shed light on
issues that museums face in trying to incorporate the different perspectives of so
many critics and scholars today, the problems faced by the museum in adapting
to the changing values of the history of art.
The factors limiting changing programmatic responses to an ever evolving
discipline of art history go beyond the fact that museums are already tied to
objects, often elite objects, at a time when the discipline is assuming a more
theoretical and cross-disciplinary perspective (one also embracing a broader
range of visual culture than in decades past). It also goes beyond the problem the
museum has always confronted, although one that particularly constricts its
relevancy in our more culturally conscious world: the challenge of recontextual-
izing objects within the realm of ideas. Programmatic change in museums is also
limited by the rather simple reality that these institutions are less than perfectly
flexible social entities, constricted as they are by their own history and past
programmatic assumptions. Museums are shaped by the structures and
narratives, the aesthetic values and critical perspectives of art histories past, as
well as by the pedagogical and political goals of societies and regimes which have
now evolved further. And in museums, the values and assumptions of the past
have been structured into stabilizing mechanisms that ultimately constrict
change. Each of these mechanisms must be addressed if total programmatic
redirection is to occur. Faced with the reality that the stabilizing forces of most
established institutions cannot change infinitely, I have had to conclude that the
continuing vitality of the museum rests not only on the potential of new
programmatic initiatives (that is the introduction of new narratives into its
institutional text), but on its ability to understand, better than most museum
institutions have thus far, the realities of its historical nature. I believe the
successful and respected museum of the future will be forced to incorporate
those realities consciously, imaginatively, positively but non-reverentially, into its
institutional message in spite of a critical climate which might at first approach
this initiative with cynicism.
I discuss these issues at a time when practitioners face the reality that the
modern museum's rhetoric, which in many ways began with the notion of a
transcendent aesthetic—in Hegelian terms, a spiritual experience—is being
replaced by a different message regarding the museums' goals and purposes, a
 MICHAEL CONFORTI 341

message being introduced to ever larger audiences. For example, a review

published in March 1995, in the (almost always) conservative art pages of the
New York Times, chose to juxtapose within an account of a seemingly innocent
reverential exhibition devoted to the architectural history of the Metropolitan
Museum another line of thought that linked commodification in museum
displays with that of department stores, taking the history of both institutions
back to their nineteenth century origins. The article echoes, however unwittingly,
the perspectives of the now often voiced materialist critique, but it was here
presented to a much broader audience of potential museum users than had ever
previously experienced the perceptions of the museum's contemporary critics.
This is probably not what the Metropolitan Museum expected from a New York
Times review (especially since its publisher is conveniently the Chairman of the
Metropolitan's Board of Trustees). It is a reality, however, that not only this New
York institution, but many museums, will have to face in the future as the sting
of the intellectual discourse of the last few years is disseminated more broadly.
Recent university graduates, taught very differently about the museum's
assumptions and methods than students in the past, will become the museums'
future primary audience. These institutions will have to address that audience
differently from the way they address their older audiences today: as these future
audiences will be more aware of contemporary perspectives on the museum's
socio-political nature and the theoretical and ideological positions which
historically have supported its educational and aesthetic goals.
What I am suggesting is that the dissemination of the museum critique, coming
as it does accompanied by a fundamental change in the values of our culture, will
affect museums increasingly in subtle but significant ways in the next decades,
and unlike many of our less-than-traditional colleagues, I believe that museums
will not be able to address these issues simply by joining in the universal quest
for better collection management practices, or embarking on new educational
initiatives (whether interactive micro-galleries or virtual museum visits on the
Internet). Nor can museum practitioners feel that they will have done their job
simply by speaking in multiple, less authoritarian voices, with a gender, class and
ethnic consciousness taking into account audiences which have been poorly
served in the past. To be effective as institutions caught in the web of our own
history, we will not only have to incorporate programmatic initiatives that
represent value alternatives, we will not be able to avoid readdressing our
relationship to our own history. Timely manifestos with their sometimes
ambitious prescriptions for programmatic change (e.g. certain essays in the
important English books soon to be a decade old, The Museum Time Machine
and The New Museology) may have to be balanced by a deeper understanding of
what a museum can and cannot achieve given its special conditions, constricting
frames and social environment. In the process decisions that we as a society seem
to have been able to avoid in the past, may be forced on us more often; the
decision not only of whether museums should go on in their present form, but
whether certain institutions (established with values that have no particular
relevance in contemporary society) should remain as part of the archaeology of
culture or, indeed, whether they should continue to exist at all.
From empirical observation I have come to believe that the museum can
change only in the context of, and often in conflict with, its stabilizing
mechanisms. Simply stated I see these as four in number. They begin with the
342 Museums Past and Museums Present

charters and founding mission statements written at the time of the museum's
formation, documents that summarize the institution's intellectual, aesthetic and
social ambitions, the value system it embraced at the time of formation.
The second of the museum's stabilizing mechanisms is its governance and
professional structure. These take the form of boards of trustees or governmental
agencies on the one hand and of professional societies or civil service systems on
the other. Each maintains standards established to support founding principles as
these principles have evolved in both early and later programmatic initiatives,
standards that also include codes for professional practice and ethics.
Permanent collections, the third on my list, are the most unrecognized of the
museum's constricting forces. While the values of the museum can shift slightly
(if often unconsciously) over time through canon realignments and expansions
that are expressed in its growing collections, permanent collections always
mirror the values of the moment when an object was acquired. Often, but not
always, they reflect the values of the present. I seem to believe—unlike Elizabeth
Esteve-Coll, if I heard her correctly last evening—that the canon has shifted
regularly if unconsciously over the entire 200 years of the public museum's
existence. Permanent collections inhibit institutions both by directing pro-
grammatic initiatives toward such collections as well as by requiring special
resources to preserve, research and present these works. Even the slowest
responses to social and intellectual change in university curricula can seem rapid
when compared to the potential for reformulating a permanent collection's
meaning and lending a contemporary relevance to an institution's permanent
collection programming.
Founding ideals and earlier programmatic goals are further stabilized by the
fourth factor restricting museum flexibility: their enclosure within architectural
skins that both announce the institution to the world and create a physical
ordering system for the venerated objects therein. Occasionally these buildings
and new wings try to revise the experience of museum going while accommodat-
ing expanding collections, often with the assumption, but only sometimes with
the reality, that the added architecture incorporates an ideological shift. In fact,
recently we have seen a return to power of certain historical styles of museum
architecture and their accompanying ground plans in symbolizing and reaffirm-
ing traditional rituals. In the 1980s, particularly in the United States of America,
revivalist architects created buildings and renovated gallery spaces that were
testimonies to older ideals (evident in the United Kingdom in the Sainsbury
Wing of London's National Gallery, and in the United States in the revisions to
the Andre Meyer Galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York).
The complex arguments surrounding the proposed revitalization of the Museum
Island in Berlin reflect similar symbolic and ideological positions towards site
and architecture driven by the art historical profession's recognition of the
Island's importance in having established architectural typologies and collecting
programs which have become paradigms in Western museum culture.
Having presented these four stabilizing mechanisms, each of which can
constrict the museums initiatives: founding charters and mission statements,
governance and professional codes, an institution's permanent collection and its
architecture, I will spend the rest of my time this evening demonstrating their
effect on museums by looking more closely at institutions in three cities, Berlin,
New York and London (while making passing reference to Pans in this process).
 MICHAEL CONFORTI 343

I engage you in this transcontinental gloss in order to focus on a fundamental

issue of how and under what conditions change can be made in a museum,
whether that change is suggested by the altered values of art history or any other
aesthetic, intellectual or social discourse. I want to consider this question along
with the black hope that regularly surfaces in the critiquing literature, the
eventual death of the museum or a museum.
In 1992 I examined related issues at the International Art History Congress in
Berlin,2 and I would like to repeat some of my words as I look at this city again.
Given both the historical role of Prussia in museological conceptualization and
realization, and the collection redirection that has been forced on that city over
the years by the disjunctive changes of wartime, decades of political and cultural
division, and now the condition of unification, Berlin can be seen as a city of
museum documents and metaphors, representative of the confluence of social
construction, political need and value assumption that have resulted in the
formation of museums over the last 200 years. Berlin is representative, too, of
what one Western society will alter when the stabilizing factors of earlier
institutional formation have been destroyed or forced to change significantly.
In Berlin there are museums of every imaginable type reflecting a history of
evolving museological ambition, from institutions, nineteenth century in origin,
that seem to have never changed, like the Pergamon museum glorifying ancient
culture and its nationalistically-driven appropriations, to new museums reflect-
ing contemporary social concerns with art as a component, like the proposed
Jewish Museum in the Lindenstrasse. In Berlin there is more than one museum
monument labeled 'Nationalgalerie', and each is an icon of past values: the
nineteenth century Valhalla of Prussian national artistic achievement, and the
now similarly historic Neue Nationalgalerie, with its more subtle national pride
expressed in a modernist 'aesthetic' rather than an explicitly 'patriotic' agenda.
This institution recalls, from my American perspective at least, the 1930s
modernist values implicit in the rhetoric surrounding the formation of New
York's Museum of Modern Art. The Neue Nationalgalerie seems to be one of the
many institutions, both in America and Europe, formed on ideals similar to those
which spawned MOMA in New York.
In Berlin one may not only appreciate the stabilizing force represented by the
founding mission and goals of museums, one can also discern value expressed in
subtle museological evolutions, like the seemingly benign act of segmenting
permanent collections. The Gallery for European Art was recently opened as the
foremost institutional component in the soon-to-be cultural center of the city
around the Tiergarten. Its placement there will leave the non-Western material in
suburban Dahlem, an act that will empower the Western canon as it further
marginalizes the Other. We can look, too, at the emptiness of certain recent
architectural acts, like that employed to bestow a more contemporary purpose
on an older ideal: in this case the nineteenth century belief in social progress and
economic advancement through the technical and material understanding of the
applied arts. While the Berlin's Kunstgewerbe Museum has had many incarna-
tions (it was integrated into the architecture of the Imperial Schloss in the period
between the World Wars when the creation of period-room-like contextual
installations in applied arts museums were at their most popular), the failure of
its latest architecture in revitalizing the institution programmatically3 has
suggested to many that it might with advantage find its home again in the Martin
344 Museums Past and Museums Present

Gropius Bau, installed on the widely imitated functionalist-cum-idealist theories

of Gottfried Semper when it opened in 1881.
Today, however, behind the Martin Gropius Bau's facade, with its handsome
terracotta reliefs paying homage to early craftsmen and designers, is Berlin's
grandest alternative space. It is a building fully deconsecrated from its original
purpose, acting as a kind of metaphor for a shift in museum value as well as
exhibition popularity over the last hundred years. It is Berlin's counterpart to
similar contemporary display spaces in other locales, such as a renovated 18th-
century hospital in Madrid, or a converted factory in Aachen, both of which
stand along with the many 'warehouse' spaces created in major cities that have
been built over the last two decades as counter-humanistic environments for the
a-historical ambitions of contemporary art. It is this new mystique of the de-
idealized a-historical space that is encouraging the establishment and expansion
of so many museums created today, trying to break away as they do from the
ideological boundaries perceived to be represented by stylistic refinement in
architecture, like the Los Angeles Temporary Contemporary and the Tate
Gallery's proposed new center for contemporary art in a former power
station.
There seems to be no going back to the theories and educational goals
represented in the Semper-inspired, material-based installations of the 1880s
Martin Gropius Bau. They have little value to audiences today. In fact one of the
best preserved nineteenth century monuments to the once widely popular ideals
associated with the nineteenth century applied arts movement (and Semper's
theories in particular), the Museum fur angewandte Kunst in Vienna has
dramatically tried to reconceive itself recently. Unlike Berlin's Kunstgewerbe
Museum, which chose architecture alone for its revitalization, Vienna has
introduced the values of contemporary art into its programming by embracing
living artists and architects as installation designers and curatorial voices,
allowing them to select and present objects in a process that sometimes balances
and at other times marginalizes the traditional voice. Vienna's reinstallation deals
with the 'permciousness' of the permanent collection by banishing most of it to
storage, allowing artist and curator teams to create meaning by selecting objects
discreetly from storage to explore themes. One might add that this was the
strategy taken up a few years ago at the Tate Gallery as well, but it is in practical
terms a strategy easier to undertake with paintings than with the applied arts.
Returning to Berlin, we also can study ways in which the museums there have
spawned other institutions in an attempt to accommodate value shifts in culture.
The history leading from the Altes Museum's original mission to its use today as
Berlin's Kunsthalle represents more than simply a metaphor of changing value.
Central to any historical comprehension of the role of the Western art museum,
the Altes Museum, sited significantly opposite the Palace and next to the
Cathedral along the Lustgarten, was conceived in the 1820s to set into stone the
dual principles of Hegelian idealism: aesthetic sanctity and progressive history.
The museum's prototypical displays of pictures, floor-to-ceiling, in top-lit upper
floors, with side-lit sculpture galleries below, was still in place many years later,
as may be seen from later nineteenth century illustrations of the hanging of
paintings along the side walls of Altes Museum galleries. These rooms were once
described by the Altes Museum's first Director, the Hegal student Gustav
Waagen, as reflecting 'the spirit of the times' and it was a spirit in which each
 MICHAEL CONFORTI 345

work lost its individuality to the whole, a spirit in which copies could function
nearly as well as originals.
The Altes Museum's singular eloquence began to shift with the completion of
the Neues Museum and was marginalized later when Hegelian idealism in a
museological setting was reconditioned for modern turn-of-the-century appe-
tites by Wilhelm von Bode, whose new museum, the original Kaiser Friedrich
Museum which now bears his name, opened in 1904. Bode did not alter the
fundamental practice of chronological galleries of progressive history, each
reflecting the geist of an age, but in creating more contextual installations of
painting, sculpture, furniture and other objects he appealed to the applied arts
domesticity of a new bourgeoisie, whom he was so anxious to attract. He also
referenced romantic contextual displays which began to be popular from the
middle decades of the nineteenth century and, in a more earnestly historicizing
form, were increasingly being incorporated into applied arts museums of the
time. These synchronic versions of mixed-media kunstgewerbe installations, like
Justus Brinckmann's rooms in the Hamburg Museum fur Kunst and Gewerbe of
the 1880s, were rooted in the more contextual, more materialist, more kultur
perspectives of Rumohr, Burckhardt and Springer, Hegel's earliest detractors. On
the one hand, Bode's pragmatic integration of the perspectives of Kultur-
geschichte within his fundamentally Hegelian frame are a testament to the
flexibility of museological idealism as the social and aesthetic foundations of the
art museum are adapted to an ever-changing intellectual climate and popular
taste. On the other hand, and not insignificantly for the argument advanced here,
a new museum, the Kaiser Friedrich Museum, had to be created in order to
embrace them. From Bode's perspective the Altes Museum could not be
successfully altered for this purpose.
To summarize briefly then, we see in Berlin the potential of new ideals being
incorporated into museological ventures, but also the frequent necessity of
having to incorporate these ideals within new institutions, as we have seen with
the establishment of the Kaiser Friedrich Museum, the Neue Nationalgalerie and
now the Jewish Museum. We also experience in Berlin the inviolate historical
nature of certain museums, dramatically evident in the Pergamon Museum, but
evident even when contemporaneity is assumed through revised architectural
rituals, as in the new Kunstgewerbemuseum.
Berlin has been forced to change its museological structures because of the
results of war and now unification. These changing texts can reflect strident
swings in notions of nationalism and attitudes towards German artistic
patrimony, swings further driven by shifting intellectual attitudes and theoretical
positions which underlay each museum's art collecting and display practices. In
the United States of America shifts in museological values, as well as the creation
of new museum institutions, often have different causes. Museum change has
been catalyzed by the nation's practical treatment of its social institutions, a
pragmatism driven by a kind of market consciousness which is reflected in its
institutions' attitudes towards both the museum's audience and its collections.
America's institutional pragmatism stems from the fact that the capital resources
of its bourgeois economy funds museums more directly than in Europe, through
private patronage, unlike those in the United Kingdom where a far larger
percentage of support is filtered through the stabilizing force of central and local
government. This difference is expressed most dramatically in attitudes towards
346 Museums Past and Museums Present

the value and use of the museums' 'permanent' collections, attitudes which
regularly outrage Europeans whose own museum collections are more closely
tied to nationalist agendas, where a persistent rhetoric associates a museum's
permanent holdings with national consciousness, and lately national treasure
(given the tourist income potential available from increased citizen or foreign
accessibility). In Europe the ties connecting the museum's social utility and
funding through tourism is expressed in a variety of ways. In France, where the
linking of culture and the state is a continuing legacy of Louis XIV, these goals
have been addressed through ambitious architectural and installation schemes
like the Grand Louvre. In the United Kingdom, where museum administrators
look longingly at the generous funds provided by France's centralized cultural
authority, recent administrative reshufflings and financing schemes are preparing
for an enhancement of income for arts organizations through the creation of a
Department of National Heritage and the establishment of the National Lottery,
with hoped for increases in the resources of the National Heritage Memorial
Fund in the process.
In the United States of America, however, precious few practices suggest the
existence of (let alone support) a national patrimony. There may be a few national
museums in Washington, but there could never be an organization comparable to
the National Art-Collections Fund in the United Kingdom, devoted to assisting
museums and art galleries in purchasing of works of art by raising funds from the
general public, with national patrimony objectives. In the 'every tub on its
bottom' environment, museums in the United States have become accustomed to
a certain freedom to change their institutional posture, at times being forced to
do so in order to survive. The Metropolitan Museum of Art opened in 1870 with
a strong applied arts and artisan training focus, and at its beginning it modeled
itself on the then international museological leader, the South Kensington
Museum, but over the years the Metropolitan Museum has reinvented itself
variously, if rarely radically, and in the process has readdressed many of its past
programmatic assumptions and practices. Since the considerable market and
public access initiatives forced on the institution during Thomas Hoving's
administration in the late 1960s and 1970s, the Metropolitan Museum has
developed a more conservative posture, rarely initiating innovative museum
funding schemes and public programming. Over the years, however, at the
Metropolitan, as at innumerable other institutions of its type in the United States,
decaccessioning has played a significant role in institutional evolution, through
the adoption of goals usually expressed in 'clearing of storage' terms but often
with a co-interest in the extra funds made available for different, more timely
additions to the 'permanent' collection.
Looking at the relatively pragmatic way in which American institutions treat
their permanent collections tells us a great deal not only about their institutional
value system and their ambition to change, but also ways in which traditional
presentation and display attitudes with regard to permanent collections can limit
institutional flexibility. The privately-funded Guggenheim Museum is at present
aggressively challenging traditional notions of museums as storehouses of
cultural artifacts by employing its permanent collection as a kind of trading
capital, offering quantities of objects to institutions in other countries on long-
term loan, receiving in return not only a more widespread institutional
recognition, but also the considerable income generated by such ventures.
 MICHAEL CONFORTI 347

When the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) was established in New York in
the early 1930s, it was a radical act, one which supported the idea that places like
the Metropolitan Museum of Art were too tradition-bound to express the ideals
of modern art and that there should be a separate institution to express these
contemporary goals. Significantly they chose at first not to have a permanent
collection, understanding that programmatic restrictions would soon be forced
on their new museum initiative if they had permanent holdings. Instead it was
proposed that the museum would buy objects and show them over a period of
time, and later transfer them to larger, more historically based institutions,
thereby allowing the Museum of Modern Art to be sufficiently value- and
resource-free to continue to exhibit contemporary works without restraint. As
we know, this philosophy was not maintained and the Museum subsequently
acquired collections far in excess of what anyone had imagined at the time
MOMA was formed. As we also know, over time the Museum became focused
on a past represented by both the objects in its collections and the philosophy of
Modernism on which the Museum had been founded, one that by the 1970s and
1980s was increasingly being perceived as out of date. Original mission,
permanent collection, as well as architecture, along with trustee and senior staff
attitudes, prevented MOMA from easily presenting new art as the Museum was
initially designed to do. The opportunity, indeed the need, to exhibit
contemporary work in New York, was eventually taken up by a host of smaller
institutions which originally operated either as alternative spaces or as more
established, but self-consciously flexible, museum galleries, the DIA Center for
the Arts being the most famous today.
While a permanent collection is not embraced at DIA, the existence of its
charter and mission statement, and the stabilizing force of its board of trustees,
might even make this institution the focus of a reaction in due course. It seems
to me that the values of an earlier age, as expressed in institutions, are regularly
subject to some kind of discontent, once their founding assumptions become
historic and their potential for flexible accommodation of altered critical
perspectives is perceived to have been lost. Sometimes this process happens very
quickly, shortly after an institution is established, and at other times it takes half-
a-century or more before an institution's historical nature chafes enough to
engender criticism or indifference from society.
The United States of America, however, has a way of dealing with such
discontent. Occasionally it has used the principles of its system of private
support, close as it is to the mechanisms of the marketplace, as a catalyst for
institutional renovation. One can see this dramatically expressed in the changes
which were made from the late 1950s at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.
In the late nineteenth century, the lumber entrepreneur, T. B. Walker, established
a museum filled with his modest collection of European paintings, Chinese jades
and other artifacts, along with some quite important works of American
nineteenth century art. In the late 1950s, when the influence of the Museum of
Modern Art formed twenty years before was its height, the Director of the
Walker and his trustees, in an aggressive and ultimately amazingly successful act
of institutional redirection, began the process of totally reconfiguring their
institution. Over the next two decades, in establishing a new mission focusing on
contemporary art, thousands of objects, its entire previous collection, were
slowly sold. Around 1970 a new Modernist building for the museum was created
348 Museums Past and Museums Present

by Edward Larrabee Barnes. Institutional funding, which had previously come as

gifts from the Walker family foundation, was renegotiated by a younger board of
trustees as a separate endowment established by that foundation for this
institution alone. It provided the Art Center with considerable financial
independence, allowing it to create the innovative program of contemporary art
exhibitions which established its international fame without undue regard to
initial local audience reaction.
The new Walker Art Center, like the Museum of Modern Art, also began with
the assumption that it would have no permanent collection. But like the Museum
of Modern Art, the Walker Art Center eventually acquired permanent holdings,
having redirected the money from its deaccessioning into endowments for art
purchases. A major nineteenth century American painting by Frederic Church
was one of the last of the original Walker objects to be sold and it added $8.5
million to the Art Center's acquisitions endowments when it was deaccessioned.
With a Modernist direction, an endowment for acquisitions in the many millions
of dollars, an international acclaim for having exhibited artists early in their
career (artists who are now firmly established in the late-twentieth century
canon) and a local constituency actively committed to its program, the director
who oversaw these changes over a thirty-five year period retired four years ago.
He left the museum and a new staff to face the challenges of the Post-Modern era
with a commitment to a permanent collection and an aesthetic value system
which does not fit ideally into the museum's mission of 'art of the moment'. He
also left a constituency created by him which is having a hard time embracing the
values of the 1990s: aesthetic contingency, ethnic diversity and art serving a
purpose of social critique.
What will happen to this museum is unclear since the situation described above
is still unfolding. What is fascinating for the present discussion, however, is this
example of a museum which decided to redirect itself and did so successfully
having addressed all of the stabilizing mechanisms constricting change: first the
original charter and mission, second the board and staff, third the permanent
collection, and fourth the museum's architecture. But what is even more valuable
to reflect upon is that the Walker Art Center is now beginning to be caught in the
web of its own re-creation by having embraced the values of its era of
reformation, those of the 1960s and 70s when it chose to redefine its institutional
objectives. The values of one time replace the values of another, but ensuring
institutional flexibility in program could not easily accompany this change.
As I have indicated the death of the original mission of the Walker Art Center
was facilitated by the pragmatic charitable institutional environment of the
United States of America, and this national tradition of institutional pragmatism
has had a recent and more public expression in the turmoil experienced at the
New-York Historical Society. In 1994-95 the Society began the long process of
deaccessioning its entire art holdings by means of large and very public
specialized auctions. This institutional change is different in degree from that of
the Walker Art Center, for it represents the death of only part of the institution's
mission and one adopted after the institution was founded. It is revealing,
nonetheless.
The New-York Historical Society was founded in 1809 with the purpose of
maintaining 'original records and authentic documents' and a library 'of research
for all that is curious and valuable'. It struggled during its first decades of
 MICHAEL CONFORTI 349

existence, moving from one part of New York City to another, but enthusiasm
for the organization rose in that surge of patriotic antiquarianism in the mid-
nineteenth century which resulted in historical societies being established in
every state east of the Mississippi River. Because the Metropolitan Museum of
Art was not to be founded until the 1870s, many New Yorkers who wanted
before then to leave their named artistic legacy to the public chose the Historical
Society as the recipient. When its impressive building at 170 2nd Avenue was
completed in the 1850s, the organization began to attract a considerable number
of gifts and bequests of paintings, sculptures, and archeological and ethnographic
specimens from around the world, and during the third quarter of the nineteenth
century, through purchases as well as gifts, the New-York Historical Society was
the most important art repository in New York City.
By the mid-twentieth century, however, with a number of specialist art
museums everywhere else in New York, these collections began to look like an
odd appendage to the Society's original records and documents mission. A few
years ago when the institution's financial state became parlous, the deaccession-
ing of these holdings began to be contemplated. After a much discussed
arrangement with Sotheby's, who seem to have loaned money to the museum to
enable it to operate in preparation for an eventual sale, the museum has now
begun deaccessioning, arousing sharp criticism in the press as to worthiness of
any museological organization that would treat its holdings in such a way. The
criticism is driven not only from the sale itself, but by the fact that the Society
is not directing proceeds to further acquisitions (as is the regularly practiced
ethical rule in the United States of America). It will use that money instead as
operational support to keep the Society itself alive. In essence the institution is
feeding on itself to survive, allowing a partial death of the Society's evolved
mission, in order to keep the rest of the organism as a whole from dying.
The stories of the Walker Art Center and the New-York Historical Society
provide an opportunity for us to contemplate how museums could eventually be
liquidated when some or all of the ideals represented in their history, and still
expressed in their programs, become inconvenient or out of date. Their managed
partial or total death becomes a possibility. For the more extreme voices in the
contemporary critique of the museum, the sale of collections is a logical way of
ridding oneself of the museological monster, utilizing the values and mechanisms
of the market economy that conspired to create these bourgeois organizations in
the first place. For most, however, museum death is an unlikely reality, certainly
in the near term, given the success of the museum's rhetoric over the last two
centuries, its educational mandate and the continuing power of the notion of
public vs. private art, now fully a part of Western culture's belief system. Many
countries, furthermore, have no existing mechanism for this model of total
institutional redirection, collections being considered a national patrimony and
inalienable.
In spite of these realities, at a time of dwindling resources, with an ever
increasing number of new museums, and with future audiences less accepting of
the institution's traditional rhetoric, there is a very real potential of institutional
death, especially in the form of that slow death caused by lack of sufficient
funding. It forces practitioners to face, far more directly than they ever have in
the past, how collections that may be out of step with current values not only can
be reprogrammed to address contemporary issues but how they can otherwise be
350 Museums Past and Museums Present
justified, as a society makes decisions about that part of its collective institutional
history it will preserve. I believe that practitioners will have to justify their
institutions' existence by addressing their public in a more direct and non-
reverential way than they have in the past, clarifying more precisely and more
honestly how collections represent our cultural heritage, considering not only
how institutions can be transformed, but how they represent a nation's cultural
tradition in institutional form. "With this as a prelude, I would like to look now
at the United Kingdom and reference my theme in the light of the host
institution for this conference.
We have learned a great deal from recent writings examining museum
history, and certainly one of the perspectives that continually surfaces is the
relationship between museological history in the nineteenth century and the
international exhibitions that were staged throughout this period. The Great
Exhibition of 1851 was not only one of the first such enterprises, its
reverberations were the richest both in the institutional and intellectual realm.
The German-born Consort of Queen Victoria, Prince Albert, was seeking
ways to bolster museums of art and science as a way of defining and
promoting British culture, and after the Great Exhibition closed he agreed to
use its enormous profits 'to extend the influence of Science and Art upon
Productive Industry'. With this general initiative a series of actions and
reforms were undertaken. Land was bought for the site of a future museum
and school in South Kensington, and the School of Design and its collections
(inspired by design education initiatives begun in the 1830s) were incorpo-
rated into a new museum enterprise headed by Henry Cole under the
government authority of the Board of Trade. The museum, with a special
program of classes, operated at Marlborough House until the new South
Kensington buildings were completed in 1857.
In the five years during which the future Victoria and Albert Museum
operated at Marlborough House, as well as in its earliest period in South
Kensington, the Museum's mission of improving manufactures through teaching
accompanied by first-rate examples was pursued with a special enthusiasm.
Given the great opportunity available and the practical problems which needed
to be overcome to begin operations, the modest theoretical sophistication of
most of the staff could be interpreted positively. Their confident, pragmatic
approach to operations has become something of an Anglo-America museum
tradition, both with common origins in the liberal, civicly-directed social
philosophy of the time. Certainly both South Kensington and the United States's
slightly later museum initiatives were supported by a rising business class,
whether functioning through the government as in England or through the
private sector as in the United States. This tradition was distinctly different from
the nationalist aesthetic objectives expressed in both the purpose and funding of
French museological ventures, and in the more uncompromisingly idealist and
historicist foundations of German art institutions. As has been demonstrated
above, there has been an amazing degree of cross fertilization in these national
museological traditions, but the character of each European and American
museum enterprise still reflects elements of these fundamental national differ-
ences as established by each nation's earliest museum initiatives.
Pragmatically, the most significant problem to be overcome at Marlborough
House was the reality expressed in the title and administration of this
 MICHAEL CONFORTI 351

venture: the Department of Science and Art reporting to the Board of Trade.
From the beginning, the Museum had to justify itself as an arm of industry
while fighting for money to sustain acquisitions against the many in Parlia-
ment who wondered why this new organization existed at all. The applied
arts were but one class of 'curiosities' which were eventually placed on
display and were not already a part of the British Museum, and others
included scientific objects, building materials, ship models and the like. To
these were added machinery and food stuffs. Slowly these collections were
weeded out and new museums created to house some of them, the Science
Museum being the most notable. In addition, the South Kensington Museum
had a more aggressively public posture than any museum venture before.
Simply stated: while the precisely and theoretically arranged painting and
sculpture galleries of the Altes Museum were to transport visitors to a
spiritual realm of romantic aesthetics and the Hegelian ideal of history, South
Kensington operated like the Great Exhibition from which it sprang, a public
entertainment crowded on weekends and one which even foreshadowed the
tradition of public amenities expected by museum visitors today when it
installed the first museum public dining room in 1857.
On the other hand the new Museum was to prove itself a very serious
enterprise artistically, if not always one distinguished by theoretical or
programmatic consistency in achieving those artistic objectives. The combined
science, industry and art objective, the contradiction it presented to Western
aesthetic philosophy, did not daunt earnest, problem-solving Victorians like
Henry Cole. Working with a close circle of artist reformers, headed by Richard
Redgrave, classes were organized to teach materials and techniques (the drawing
sessions with which most art training had been conducted up to that time were
not considered practical enough). Exhibitions were devised to improve national
artistic standards and publications were issued to disseminate the evolving design
philosophies of the staff.
In spite of the pragmatism implicit in the South Kensington Museum's
foundation, the aesthetic ambitions of the new Museum from its earliest period
are evidenced in its installation and accessions practices. In the first years at
Marlborough House a materials-based arrangement was proposed and was
followed to a certain degree. This arrangement by medium had been adopted in
other recent science and industrial arts initiatives like the Institute Minutoli in
Germany and at the Great Exhibition itself, where objects had usually been
arranged by material within each nation's booth. This system seems to have been
abandoned quickly in many galleries, however, in favor of a more evocative
arrangement which combined sculpture, paintings, textiles and smaller objects in
an a-historical, aesthetic manner popular in domestic settings of the time, an
installation mode which had a contemporary museological expression in popular
museums such as the Musee de Cluny in Paris which had opened in the 1840s.
Such arrangements continued to some degree when the museum moved to South
Kensington. Certainly a so-called 'art museum' was separated from the rest of
the display galleries and space was provided to the east and west for sculpture,
with large galleries to the north planned for both permanent collection and
borrowed paintings.
The considerable gallery space allocated to the seemingly inappropriate fields
of sculpture and paintings says much about the extraordinary collecting
352 Museums Past and Museums Present

initiatives undertaken in the early years of the South Kensington Museum by its
Curator, John Charles Robinson, though with Cole's willing encouragement.
Within a few years of its opening, the Museum had moved far beyond the plaster
cast sculptures of its original School of Design collection, and it was already
exhibiting original works by Michelangelo and Giambologna, wax models from
the Gherardini Collection which it now owned. With such a liberal and
historicizing interpretation of contemporary collecting principles for the
teaching of design, the art collections soon became famous in their own right. In
the 1870s, contemporary industrial art objects began to be removed to another
site. In many ways the original contemporary design training purpose of the
Museum had been significantly compromised before the end of the third decade
of the Museum's existence.
The history of the Victoria and Albert Museum descends from these very
special beginnings and what could be seen as inspired opportunism in good times
(the establishment of a fully articulated art and historical design museum grafted
to the core mission of industrial design training) this has periodically been
interpreted as a barometer of institutional confusion and lack of purposeful
direction. On the one hand the Victoria and Albert Museum's art collections
could be taken as an extension of German idealist philosophy into the English
design reform movement, which had begun in 1835 when the Altes Museum's
director, Gustav Waagen, testified to the select committee of Parliament
concerned with providing better public education in the arts. On the other hand
it has been expressed over the years with such a confident and refined Anglo-
antiquarianism, that it has regularly come into conflict with many in the United
Kingdom, particularly the British design and design history professions. The
tradition which has descended from John Charles Robinson's early collecting
initiatives was expressed confidently and uncompromisingly in the turn of the
century directorship of Sir Cecil Harcourt Smith and in the work of many
keepers, both women and men, who followed. By the 1970s and 1980s, many felt
that this curatorial tradition integrated the nineteenth and early twentieth
century contribution of taxonomical connoisseurship in the museum realm with,
on the one hand, increasingly narrow attitudes towards public responsibility,
and, on the other, lifestyles that could be justified only in the context of Anglo-
elite notions of quality. Many, particularly the British design community of
Marxian persuasion, accused the museum, originally intended for design training,
as rarely focused on their needs. This conflict, as we all know, represents one of
the underlying issues which resulted in the controversy highlighted by the
changes of the late 1980s, a controversy too often linked in the popular press to
Thatcherism expressed in the cultural realm, in reality a controversy with far
more subtle and complex origins and opposing goals.
The Victoria and Albert Museum is today at a particular crossroads, and it is
worth recapitulating some of my points in this paper before we focus on this
Museum again.
I have tried to suggest that museums at their moment of foundation constitute
an articulate expression of certain political, social and aesthetic values current at
their time of creation. In ways, from a purely intellectual perspective and from
the standpoint of many outside the frame of museum practice (i.e. the position of
most of the museum's contemporary critics), it is perhaps unfortunate that
museological ambition is ever consolidated into an institutional form at all. From
 MICHAEL CONFORTI 353

the moment a museum is founded, it immediately becomes historic, being forced

to accept narratives which will represent change and will themselves evolve over
time, but narratives that will, in the form of the museum's original mission, color
and shape all future activity.
Only aggressive change addressing all the factors of institutional stability can
come to terms with this reality, and in this context curators (even revisionist
ones) are never as powerful as either the critical or the general public assumes
them to be. The problem of recontextualizing objects in the realm of ideas is the
problem confronting museum practitioners with particular stressfulness given
the non-object-reverencing critical environment of today. It is the problem
represented by questions of which objects? which context? what voice? and for
what audience? This tension is even more daunting when museum professionals
are obliged to initiate new programs using a collection with its own special
historical reality, in a building with a similar historical integrity, and also with a
staff and governance structure that embodies the traditions of the past. The labels
which practitioners write, and the interactive videos and other contemporary
media programs which museum professionals create, may resound with
contemporary clarification of an object's original meaning and context, but
practitioners often have had to go beyond media and words to separate objects
from past institutional practices and the values still present in the organization.
This is certainly a reason why so many museums have been created over time,
and why the changing values represented in the history of art today, like all of
culture's changing belief systems, are not infinitely integratable into the
contemporary programs of existing institutions.
It is hard to speak openly of these issues in the politically motivated
atmosphere of the art world today where on the one hand accusations
referencing the Museum's intransigence emanate from critics, and on the other
the responses engendered can be an institution's empty rhetoric prepared long
ago for audiences now of increasing age. Rather than presenting imaginatively
the nuanced reality and the complex narrative history of museums past and
museums present, we subsume their purpose into contemporary phrases like
'preservation' and 'national treasure', grafting them lately onto current issues of
voice consciousness, audience reception and the quest for original context, while
failing to address in anything other than rhetorical terms the ways in which an
institution and its collections may or may not be bound to earlier perspectives
and assumptions.
What I am suggesting this evening is that the museum profession cannot allow
its critics to be the only force recovering the ideological history of museums.
And that ideological history, non-reverentially understood and clearly presented,
has to be a part of the museum's message if the institution is to engender public
respect in the future. If our society chooses to keep our historic institutions alive,
it will do so encouraged by the practitioner reminding audiences of a museum's
continuing relevance, not only by new programmatic initiatives, important as
they are, but also by the intelligent representation of the museum's historic role
in a society's cultural history. Certainly contemporary audiences would be bored
if this effort were voiced too pedanticly, but future audiences will expect such
initiatives imaginatively integrated into a museum's message, having learned,
unlike audiences of the past, that a museum does strategize as it informs and gives
pleasure. Programmatic revitalization has to occur in the context of all that has
354 Museums Past and Museums Present

gone before, and we can be critical as well as celebratory in our message. If we

do not account for the historical reality of our existence, we will at best be
accused of applying rhetorical formulas for programmatic change to institutions
we seem not to understand. At worst we will be initiating programs that simply
won't work given the museums we are charged with revitalizing.
The opportunities for the Victoria and Albert Museum at this particular
juncture are considerable and the consequences could be disastrous if only the
easy choice is made. There may have been a necessary revolution in the late 1980s
for there were many who felt that scholarship in the form of taxonomical
connoisseurship, as it had evolved over time, had crippled intellectual vitality.
What had begun as a nineteenth century project of object gathering and ordering
had evolved for some into the romantic comfort of a visit to grandmother's attic,
for others into an institutional commitment to object documentation and
classification performed variously by professionals ranging from cataloguers to
aesthetes. All of this activity had the result of leaving many people out as a
potential audience for this institution.
But what for some is Henry Cole's 'great mistake'—having allowed Robinson
to establish an art museum at South Kensington—is from another perspective the
very factor which has kept this institution alive through most of the twentieth
century. Indeed kept from the fate of continental European applied arts museums
whose progressive ossification has recently resulted in Berlin's somewhat failed
architectural answer to a tired program, and Vienna's lately conceived response
of recontextualizing its objects in the realm of contemporary artistic expression,
after decades of institutional inertia. As noted above, Vienna's programmatic
revitalization has resulted in most of its collections being placed in storage, and
while this is functionally as useful in programmatic change as deaccessioning
itself, the latter seems not to be an option in the context of the national
patrimony assumptions which circumscribe the Victoria and Albert Museum's
collections.
The problem with the Victoria and Albert Museum's revolution of the late
1980s, and the problem with any attempt to continue these changes, is that the
conditions of British society and the strongly held values associated with the
Museum's collections could never have allowed for the revolution to be complete
enough. Some staff may have left and a reorganization may have been attempted,
but the permanent collections and the architecture had to remain. They will
continue to have to remain as this Museum's special contribution to British
cultural life and any future management policy has to address this reality.
But while a continuation of the changes as revolution may be impossible, I
would hope that some historical theme park under the new Department of
National Heritage is not the only alternative. Like any public institution of the
1990s, the V and A has to accept, at some level, both the reality of media
attention and the Museum's potential as a tourist attraction, but to do so without
intelligently and imaginatively representing the aspirations and ideological
conditions which are represented in its consolidated collecting traditions,
developed over nearly one and a half centuries, would be a significant mistake.
Admittedly, it is difficult to represent history in the United Kingdom of today,
as the field of history itself is so charged: on the one hand the elitist assumptions
of the powerful positivist flank, on the other the vocal and articulate opposing
voices sensing more in this generation than ever before the achievement of
 MICHAEL CONFORTI 355

acceptance and recognition. But if the Victoria and Albert Museum does not
recognize at some public level the nuanced reality of its history, it will be a
mistake. It is not simply as a purveyor of a new set of absolute values that the
institution will function successfully.
The mis-en-scene represented in an institution's collecting and display policies,
both past and present, is contingent on ideological goals that are rarely expressed.
Audiences, however, will be ready to understand the Victoria and Albert
Museum's past as well as present assumptions far more in the future than they
ever were six or seven years ago.

Editors' Footnotes
1. D. Sherman and I. Rogoff, Museum Culture, Minneapolis, 1994.
2. M. Conforti, 1993, 'History, Value and the 1990s Art Museum', Museum Management and
Curatorship 12 (3), 245-55.
3. P. Cannon-Brookes, 1985, 'Buildings vs. Collections: The Kunstgewerbemuseum in Berlin',
Museum Management and Curatorship, 4 (4), 307-316.