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Museums: Leisure between State and Distinction
These are, indeed, the very tensions that characterize the museum today as it
grapples with the historical dilemmas of double-coding: whether to be shrines for
the few or educators for the many, to appeal to the popular (often attacked as
“dumbing down”) or connoisseurial (charged as “elitism”), to be arenas for secular
research or churches for the auratic object. In fact, it is testament to the museum’s
resilience that it has dealt with the fabric of ambiguity and paradox which lies
behind its history, accommodating these tensions into its very being. Hence, most
of the European examples mentioned – the National Gallery in London, the
Rijksmuseum, the Altes Museum, the Louvre – continue to flourish as national
but, also, respectable, middle-class institutions of fine art, coping with various
modes of social assembly and political directives. Thinking the museum, then,
involves the acknowledgment of the ambivalent nature of modernity, the ability
to conceive of paradox as an essence of modern life. This has been the historical
double-bind of the museum.
Notes
1. Marshall Berman, All that is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity
(London: Verso, 1982), p. 13.
2. Or, as Nochlin condenses it: “As the shrine of an elitist religion and at the same time
a utilitarian instrument of democratic education, the museum may be said to have suffered
schizophrenia from the start”: Linda Nochlin, “Museums and Radicals: A History of
Emergencies,” Art in America 54, 4 (1971), p. 646.
3. See, for example, Carol Duncan, Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums
(London: Routledge, 1995); Andrew McLellan, Inventing the Louvre: Art, Politics and the
Origins of the Modern Museum in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1994); Marcia Pointon (ed.), Art Apart: Museums in North America and
Britain since 1800 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994); Nick Prior, Museums
and Modernity: Art Galleries and the Making of Modern Culture (Oxford and New York:
Berg, 2002); Gordon Fyfe, The Social Construction of British Art Institutions, 1750–1950
(Leicester: Cassell, 1998); Vera Zolberg, “American Art Museums: Sanctuary of Free-for-
All?” Social Forces 63, 2 (1984), pp. 377–92; Jesus Pedro Lorente, Cathedrals of Urban
Modernity: The First Museums of Contemporary Art, 1800–1930 (Aldershot: Ashgate,
1998).
4. Paul Valéry, “The Problem of Museums,” in Degas, Manet, Morisot, collected works
vol. 12 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1960), p. 205.
5. Ibid., pp. 202, 203.
6. Johann Wolfgang Goethe, quoted in Germain Bazin, The Museum Age (New York:
Universal Press, 1967), p. 160, n. 4.
7. On the ritual quality of various museums see, for example, Duncan, Civilizing Rituals;
Cesar Graña, “The Private Lives of Public Museums,” Trans-Action 4, 5 (1967), pp. 20–5;
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