Two critical essays published in The New Criterion, “What’s a museum?” by James Panero (March 2012) and “Notes on the postmodern museum” by Eric Gibson (December 2016) lament the intrusion of the desires and needs of the visitor into the museum space and culture. 

Panero refers to comments made by Phillipe de Montebello, former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, complaining that museums have become “social spaces” and have gone from “being about something” to “being for somebody.” Panero goes on: “Museums have traditionally been focused on their permanent collections. By emphasizing the visitor, museums now risk forsaking the visited and their own cultural importance. Museums were once the arks of culture.” 

Panero waxes poetic about the foundings of the great museums and the significance of their permanent collections: The Louvre: “treasures seized from the monarchy, the church, and later colonial conquest”; The Prado: “the last sparkles of beauty from the fading Spanish Crown”; The Hermitage Museum: “represented Russian imperial power through its ability to import great art from the West.” 

So the purpose of museums is the perpetuation of patriotic national flexing?

Panero writes many words about London’s National Gallery’s heroic wartime efforts to save artwork, admittedly inspiring, and calls them the “visual bonds of a nation.” He quotes its director from 1987 to 2002, Neil McGregor, who said that the works “exist to enable the public to explore through them their own personal and shared experience, as generations have done before us and will do in the future.” 

My brain broke at this point because, don’t McGregor’s words argue for social spaces, new works of art, and inventive ways of curating and displaying said works? If the point is to allow visitors to bring their personal and shared experiences into the museum, shouldn’t at least some of the works reflect the present moment? 

Gibson, for his part, will acknowledge that “there is nothing wrong with museums showing the art of our time,” but only if it is understood in relation to the past, hard to do, he argues, if contemporary art “is promoted as an end in itself.” He goes on to complain that museums such as Tate Modern, the new Whitney, and MOMA are furthering missions such as this from Glenn Lowry of MOMA: “Our goal is to provide visitors with the pleasure of finding their own meaning within a singularly inclusive constellation of twentieth and twenty-first century artistic practices.” That sounds terrific to me, but no, it’s not, it’s horrible. He goes on: “This [approach] is value-free and as such a perfect reflection of our relativistic, postmodern zeitgeist…To get a sense of just what it implies imagine walking into a museum’s Renaissance galleries and instead of starting with Giotto, the first work you saw was by a Mannerist, then Mantegna, the Gentile da Fabriano, the Raphael, the Sasetta, and so on. You wouldn’t know any more about Renaissance art when you left than when you walked in.” This obsession with chronology strikes me as perhaps related to old white guys’ phobia of replacement. 

Panero’s essay continues with an ode to virtue, noting that “As manifestations of private wealth transferred to the public trust, American museums were founded, in part, to represent virtue. The visual education offered to the public by these museums through their permanent collections is not just an education in art history but also an education in how individual hard work (emphasis mine) can become an expression of virtue by giving over objects of beauty to the public trust.” He refers to the founding fathers’ words on this particular kind of virtue, implying that rich white men donating their riches, apparently all accumulated through bootstrap activity, as the very definition of John Adams’s “positive Passion for the public good.” 

I don’t mean to downplay philanthropy as a virtue – it certainly is one. The Metropolitan Museum of Art itself was founded out of the ashes of the Civil War. He cites William E. Howe’s history of the Met as noting that the Met’s philanthropic founders “directly connected their new museum with the ideals of a reunited nation.” That’s lovely. In theory.

What bothers me about Panero and Gibson’s conservative viewpoint is that the value of a museum seems to stop with chronological history, money, and patriotism. What about the artists, many of whom created art that was sharply critical of their own historical moment? What about the visitor, who is surely sensitive and intelligent enough to be transformed by the experience of looking? 

Jerry Saltz, the senior art critic for New York magazine, in his book Art is Life (Penguin Random House, 2022) makes the point that all art was contemporary in its time. That seems like an obvious point, but, again, supports the “relativistic, postmodern” way of viewing art as a useful practice. I would like to think that the average visitor to an art museum is capable of more than learning about historical moments or art movements in isolation. How much more interesting, and transformative to be invited to make connections across time and space, to imagine how the works speak to each other and to us. 

Even Saltz, who is far from conservative elevates the museum in this gorgeous passage:

Maybe it’s naive and romantic, but, beyond the implications of colonialism, princely privilege, the enforcement of taste, and worse, I do still see the museum’s Platonic ideal: a centuries-long group effort to preserve, interpret, and commune with artistic ancestors, archetypes, traditions, genres, and methods. Sumerian kings collected antiquities (one scholar has interpreted a tablet from the second millennium as a “museum label”). The practice of collecting and displaying precious objects surfaced in China 3,500 years ago. In the fifth century BCE, the Greeks created a pinakotheke to honor the gods. Museums have been with us as long as memory has been with us – “quiet cars,” in the words of the New York Times critic Holland Cotter, where the act of looking becomes a way of knowing the world and ourselves. And here the past is always alive, sometimes even more vividly than the contemporary moment, the two coalesce into the out-of-body grace of eternal presentness.

“The out of body grace of eternal presentness.” That. 

A book that I love (found at random in the used art books section of Powell’s) is Move Closer: An Intimate Philosophy of Art by John Armstrong, where he writes about all the ways of looking that we bring into a museum or gallery. Arguing against the idea of entering a museum expecting to be edified by knowledge, he writes, “We should not think that we become more sensitive to the pleasure art and beauty afford by becoming more informed or better conceptually equipped. On the contrary, what we must do is give ourselves over to the free play of our native capacities for finding affinities and non-conceptual order in the objects we contemplate. Kant’s position is radically egalitarian with respect to beauty. The enjoyment of beauty is equally open to everyone. For what is required to enjoy beauty is no more than the capacities we already possess and which we make use of (although in a different way) in our most ordinary perceptions” (147).

This resonates. Isn’t this the very ideal, the virtue, if you will, of the museum? It is a place where every person, any person, can enter in and allow themselves the gift of being present and open to receiving whatever it is that the displayed works have to give. Armstrong centers the seer in his book, elevating the potential engagement with art can bring: “Reverie and imagination are not idle play – they provide a route by which our intimate concerns become engaged by what we see. And while they do not require that we bring prior learning to bear, they rely upon our willingness to pass time in a special way with the objects we encounter” (79). The question becomes, then, how much time?

In 2001 the American Psychological Association published a study of visitors to the Metropolitan Museum of Art that found that the mean amount of time spent viewing a great work of art was 27.2 seconds, the median amount of time being 17.0 seconds, and the mode being 10.0 seconds. (J.K Smith & Smith, 2001).  In 2016, Pablo P.L. Tinio sought to replicate that study and extend the work in a study conducted at the Art Institute of Chicago. Their results were quite similar to the earlier study, finding the mean time looking at art to be 28.63 seconds. I will be very interested to see if my observations at the Met corroborate these findings. 

The new study found a significant change from 2001 to 2016: the advent of smartphones. This  added a new metric to the study, that of people taking selfies (which the article dubs “arties”). Fully 35% of participants took selfies with the art, often posing similarly to the art being viewed. Tinio concluded that this is a way to “consume” or “scarf” the art without particularly engaging with it. (L.F. Smith, Smith & Tinio, 2017). Can one achieve Saltz’s “out of body grace of eternal presentness” while snapping selfies and thinking about how one might caption it?

I’ll end this section with more words from Saltz’s book, words that drew a resounding yes from my depths and give me hope for the longevity of museums and uplifting of the human spirit:

“To encounter a work of art for the first time is to confront, for an instant, something you’ve never seen in your life. You are reminded that what you’re looking at was once (or perhaps still is) contemporary art, in direct conversation with its own time. All art is a kind of exorcism. That is what gives art its power to change the conditions of our life” (7).