This Week in Art (FYA)

Originally published on ForYourArt on January 29, 2009

Brandeis University announced its intention this week to close the Rose Art Museum and sell its collection. The institution is financially autonomous from the University, and, according to its Director, Michael Rush, financially sound. This has drawn expected rage from all sides. Rush spoke to the issue of re-evaluating “success” in an interview with Tyler Green yesterday. “The point of the greatness of this place is not the hundreds of thousands of people who come here in one day. But that there are hundreds of thousands of people around the world who see Rose artworks, clearly marked form as being from here, at the Louvre, the Tate, the Art Institute of Chicago, and so on. At any given time, hundreds of thousands of people are seeing work from Brandeis, from the Rose Art Museum.”

It is the role of institutions to preserve and present objects for the common good. In this way, institutions make up a much larger web; each individual artwork borrowed from another institution, like the Rose, in an exhibition is a hyper-link to the collective culture.

Over the past month I’ve been thinking and talking a lot (like many others) about how systems are changing. Of course, some of these shifts are the result of the constricting economy, but still, the familiar patterns and value systems are deeply ingrained.

We should know by now that we can’t evaluate the contribution of our cultural institutions merely by head counts and ticket sales. The freedom of a great institution is that the primary reason for an exhibition does not have to be how many people go through the door. As Rush said in his interview, some of the most significant and incredibly influential works at the Rose were originally performed for an audience of three or four people — Merce Cunningham, John Cage and The Wooster Group to cite a few examples. While these artists may have eventually drawn large crowds, that was never really the impulse for making or supporting the work. And that is an understanding that we need to bring if our cultural institutions are to survive and to flourish.

It is important to look at the struggles of other creative industries that are also facing questions on how to monetize the intangible. Wired’s Kevin Kelly (Futurismic) addresses fundamental questions of ownership and media in his recent posting Better Than Owning:

Very likely, in the near future, I won't 'own' any music, or books, or movies. Instead I will have immediate access to all music, all books, all movies using an always-on service, via a subscription fee or tax…The request to enjoy a work is thus separated from the more complicated choice of whether I want to 'own' it.…An idea can't be owned in the way gold can; in fact an idea has little value unless it is shared or used to some extent. Its value paradoxically can increase the less it is owned privately. But if no one owns it, who gains the benefit of that increase in value? In the new regime users will often assume many of the chores that owners once had to do. And so in a way, usage becomes ownership.

I would argue that our entire system of evaluating “worth” is shifting. Metrics for success on the Internet are determined not only by the agility of the interfaces we use, but also by the accessiblity and viral share-ability. It’s interesting how technology has brought our culture to these conclusions, yet museums have been expert on access and lending to other institutions for ages; that is what they do. But in the last decade, the focus on blockbuster exhibitions and ticket sales has heightened the pressure on museums to deliver numbers. Perhaps as ideas like those of Kelly and Lawrence Lessig’s Creative Commons are more widely understood, museums will hopefully have less to prove. Museum collections are arsenals of content. One thing is for certain, content is king.