We last wrote about museums in connection to public access to digital images and information on museum collections. We were curious about museum collections and how these can be accessed by a larger audience, particularly since access to information enriches the arts and cultural narrative.
Why do museums collect?
We naturally assume that museums collect, preserve, document and exhibit artworks and cultural objects as repositories of learning, and knowledge dissemination, as well as act as cultural storehouses for current and future generations. The focus then primarily becomes amassing works which have an artistic, cultural, historic and / or civilizational significance. In addition, there is also an underlying presupposition that museums are neutral and objective in the manner in which they go about achieving this. [In this article the primary subject is international public institutions and not private museums. Furthermore, we are not delving into the question of ‘who’ the museum is, and how they access these collections.]
Within this framework, the desire of museums to acquire and catalogue more works seems largely justifiable. It is important to highlight, however, that storing, documenting, and preserving works comes at a considerable cost, and museums are constantly in a ‘fund raising’ mode, relying mainly on benefactors and donors, with some measure of revenues from ticket sales, and retail.
Perceived aura of a museum
The landscape become more complex when we consider that museums are no longer just repositories of art but have also assumed an aura of ‘gatekeepers’ of all that is ‘worthy’, and by corollary excluding what may be considered ‘unworthy’.
The exhibition of any artist by the well-known museum hence provides the ultimate credentials for that artist / artwork/ period to be a deserving entrant in the annals of cultural history. Just look at the recent rush by the museums in north America to include artist of colour or women artists, highlighting also the biases of the very institutions thus far.
Collectors, art insiders vie for artworks / artists to be showcased in major museum exhibitions, in turn fuelling the market demand (and of course prices) for these artists.
Responsible collecting?
This makes the responsibility of museums manifold, and coming back to where we started this conversation, the questions regarding how museum decide as to what artworks are being included in their respective collections.
The push and pull between funding requirements and donor stipulations impact the acquisition decisions of museums. We noticed this while reading an article about the Metropolitan Museum of Art (the Met) accepting 220 works from the American artist Philip Guston from the Phillip Guston Endowment Fund, which contributed $10 million to support a scholarship in the name of the artist, as well as stipulation that the Met will have a dozen of the artist’s works on view at all times, for the next 50 years. Sometimes the donor stipulations are specific to the room and what works should hang next to their work!
Another example is the case of Samsung Family collection, which donated thousands of artworks and cultural objects to its national museum, in order to avoid hefty inheritance taxes. Did the museum or the nation need all these works? Were these works part of the cultural or historic stories that required preservation, cataloguing, storage?
In another curious tale, works by a relatively unknown Indian artist, Y.G. Shrimati were donated to the Met by her family. What makes this tale strange is that the artist’s works are not represented in any major Indian art collections, gallery endorsements or auction catalogues. Shrimati travelled to the United States of America in 1961 on an art scholarship and never returned to India. Though she lived and worked in New York till 2007, her work were caught in a time warp, where she painted in the style of Bengal Revivalist school in the 1980s. What does her work reflect? It is not reflective of the land she came from, nor the land she made her home. Does this adequately reflect the critical analysis of the museum accepting artworks?
The objective is not to be harsh towards any artist or artworks, but to pose questions about the role of museums in acquiring, accepting, and taking responsibility for artworks in perpetuity, if they do not add to a long-term cultural or civilisational narrative.
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