In last Sunday's New York Times Arts & Leisure section, Holland Cotter gave the big shove-off to overwrought blockbuster exhibitions in favor of--and I nearly fell off my chair--university museum exhibitions. Well, hello Mr. Cotter! We have heard, read, and discussed how the recession has provided museums a much needed kick in the pants to think about core values and permanent collections. As extensions of their parent institutions, university museums serve an educational function that offers a template for large municipal museums. Of course, they can also rely on the Academy for part of their budget and are less beholden to the magical "gate" by which so much success is measured. Cotter mentions some university museum exhibitions that sound...well...academic. I would have mentioned the Museum at FIT which always has something new to tell me about the history of fashion and does it in a way that makes me look really closely at details I would have otherwise ignored. And they seem to have fun in thinking about new ways of presenting designers, couture history, and exhibition design. Fun: an element largely missing from most exhibitions I visit.
Blockbusters were conceived less to honor the entire oeuvre of an artist than to prove institutional prowess: we can spend years, salaries, dollars to round up more works than necessary or desireable to bring in visitors, press, and earned income that will boost internal numbers. Sorry to be a cynic but I have never liked blockbuster exhibitions nor understood the point of them, as the experience of navigating crowds and the extreme pressure to view all the works obliterated any pleasurable experience. As a graduate student in art history I increasingly tightened my own thumb screws "you WILL see every work in this exhibition, remember it, and understand how it differs from the other ten examples on the same wall." Forget it! I want to have a visceral connection or reaction to works of art which simply cannot happen when my brain is firing off directives to see as much as possible and ... hey how many more galleries are there in this exhibition? Blockbusters: no fun.
I very much like Cotter's respectful acknowledgement of the good curatorial work that practicing artists have achieved. They are usually less predictable than museum people because they do not work in museums! Or as the old artists' adage goes, a museum is where art goes to die. I do not think that all artists possess the capability of detaching themselves enough to organize a meaningful exhibition, but certainly those who do, encourage visitors to adopt the artist's eye. Real Clear Arts sees the success of the Morgan Library's current exhibitions in the visitors' engagement. She gives them extra credit for the ample time that people spend looking at Blake's hallucinogenic drawings and those mind-blowing medieval illuminations.
If only museums could cash in on extra credit! And fun.
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I actually have quite a similar exasperation with blockbusters! My first long-term relantionship with a museum was the Birmingham Museum of Art. To give the museum it's due props, it really has a fantastic collection to be only in the periphery of the major US art centers. However, the exhibitions brought in are always the big sellers: Pompeii, Masters of Printmaking, and recently an American colonial art exhibit. None, in my own humble opinion, really allow visitors to have that "experience" so many of the curators in our readings seem to advocate. Sure, we can go to these blockbusters and reflect on cultural, militaristic, or aesthetic history, but they seem to leave little room for inward reflection. To be sure, there is really a lack of "presentism" (Is there such a word? If not, there should be!). I also do not want to negate the obvious educational value of these exhibits; however, I also think creativity and novelty have been a bit overlooked.
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