The way we were ...

Need not be the way we stay

Do we go to art museums to see how art has changed, or how we can change ourselves?

There was a time when people went to museums of art to see how art has changed through the ages. Their purpose was to see and be seen there. Much like the way some people go to church or the nearest Wal-Mart for a mix of social, cultural, and commercial experiences. But now that museum-going has become something of a participatory rather than spectator sport, the consumer of art who once took his ticket and waited for a place in line may feel duty-bound to become part of the show. Whereas most of us were once cultivated members of the audience, or hoped to be, we now feel duty-bound to be part of the show. And we're all on, just waiting for the curtain to go up on our talent or obvious lack of same.

Instead of seeking enlightenment, we may be expected to enlighten others or at least confuse them on a higher level. It's not easy to tell the difference these days between old-fashioned show-and-tell and new-fangled exhibitionism. For who does not have a vast store of misinformation or opinionation to draw on when such occasions arise? Nothing may be so fascinating to us as our own opinions, and here's our chance to show them off to an audience bored beyond tears or any other sign of genuine emotion. But now we can be the star of our own production. Broadway calling!

One student of the ever-changing history of art notes that museums have been steadily moving from being about something to being for somebody. But this latest wave of reformers isn't content to have museums stick with offering the "old-fashioned satisfaction," "aesthetic refreshment," and "pleasure and delight" of its permanent collection of artifacts--or what one museum director, Barbara Franco, derided as the "salvage and warehouse business." Once upon a time everybody wanted to get into the act, but now it becomes increasingly difficult to stay out of it.

Or as one up-to-date museum director put it, times have changed. As they always do. Back then, "a museum's fundamental role was about taking care of and protecting the art, but this century, it's much more about the visitor experience," whatever that phrase may or may not mean. But meaning has become optional in today's museum-talk, a language of its own that may go 'round and 'round without any visible destination. Like a toy train that can be pulled off its tracks by some willful child who just wants to see how it works, or maybe just how it can be wrecked. It scarcely matters; the result is the same--wanton destruction. Maybe destruction of the past, maybe of the present, but surely of the future. For a society that has no regard for its past or present has no future worthy of regard, either.

To quote James Panero in the New Criterion: "The museum of the past focused on its permanent collection. The museum of the present forsakes the visited, and its own cultural importance, to focus on the visitor. From offering an unmediated window onto the real and astonishing objects of history, the contemporary museum increasingly looks to reify our own socially mediated self-reflections. This it does not learn from history but to show the superiority of our present time over past relics. The result is a museum that succeeds, by every possible measure, in its own destruction--a museum that is no longer an ark of culture, but one where the artifact at greatest risk is the museum itself."

The typical American art museum may have been created by private benefactors to represent this society's civic virtues. See the history of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art of Kansas City, which was begun by the publisher of the Kansas City Star, but has since deteriorated as it expanded into a museum for every popular taste, and the more populist the better. Populist may have become a word of praise in these Trumped-up times, but there is no real culture without an elite first to establish and then maintain it.

Far from its original vision, the history of the Nelson-Atkins Museum now presents a case study in how not to preserve Western civilization, a term that itself offends the all too easily offended avant-garde of today's pseudo-liberal establishment. Which is how, according to James Panero, American society contracted today's museum culture of "ever larger crowds, greater publicity, expanding spaces, ballooning budgets, and bloated bureaucracy--a circular system that feeds on itself." Sound familiar? It will to anyone who's tried to keep up with the nearest university in their region. The whole country seems to have come down with a case of creeping, then galloping, elephantiasis.

What ever happened to ideas like simpler is better, or small is beautiful? They seem to have gone with the ever shifting winds of change. Let's return to the past, for that would be real progress, not the Progressivism that offers little but disillusionment. Instead of just rolling over and hitting the Snooze button, why not wake up and try to see what's really happening in what was once the land of the free and home of the brave, and, God willing and Inshallah, can be again? For there is no end to America's story, only new beginnings.

Editorial on 01/13/2017

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