Role Play: Museums

This week, The Rubin Museum of Art Teen Program took a trip to a Hindu temple in Flushing, Queens. This temple is situated in a vast American Indian community, and we observed the worshipers feeding, anointing, and speaking with their deities. It was an amazing sight to see the statues we have at the Rubin in their original and everyday context. It is important to let viewers understand the context of the art.

Museums have historically come into play within a community as an informative institution enlightening its audience on their own culture, as well as other outside cultures. This idea of museums has changed a bit, allowing for a more commercial look, but, I think that it is still the museums main role to educate. To educate, the museum must be open to making its art accessible and informative to all.

I once read in an article on colonialism, that colonizers wanted to impose a sense of community among the people to ensure revolts would not happen. One of the ways in which the colonizers imposed a sense of false community, was by creating museums for those who were colonized. This insured the colonizers safety by showing the colonized, in false pretenses how wonderful their own culture was. Though this particular instance shows the museum as a forced institution, this is not always the case. Museums help us understand the context of art in our society in a very real way.

The one thing I have noticed while working at the Rubin Museum of Art is that it is not enough to simply view the art as it stands in the museum. This is especially because of the museums quality of art and its roots in the world. People really want to understand what the deities and tapestries meant to the people who created them and the people who still use them in ceremonies. Some of the historical context can be provided by the wall text, but at some point the simple use of words as an explanation fails us. I think that it is extremely relevant to keep art in museums grounded in some sort of real world context, or the museum will lose its audience.

As for the larger museums of the city and world, it is astonishing, to think about the money and power that are poured into these institutions. It is an amazing thing, but only if the main purpose of the museum as an intuition of education is being honored. If the museums exist only to complete business transactions, something is amiss. I understand the need to generate money, but it would be an amazing thing if museums could do this, while still upholding their main purpose. This was my problem with the Tim Burton exhibit, for example. As I was walking through it, I felt the industry lurking very thinly beneath the surface. I love Tim Burton as a moviemaker; having grown up with many of his animations I cherish his work. However, the exhibit was far too gimmicky and aimed at simply selling tickets.

It is hard to distinguish what constitutes cultural context and how a museum should display this work. Because my two main problems with museums seem to be that some are inaccessible, while others, like the Tim Burton exhibition are aimed at tourist marketability and irk me. However by aiming at this general crowd isn’t that keeping a museums art within the context of society today? I think that there must be some happy medium in between highly sensationalized art, and that of the lofty and inaccessible art, which requires extensive research to comprehend.