My wife, Barbara Beitch, and I are museum junkies, frustrated by (among other things) the inability to visit local and distant museums, large and small (we have been known to enjoy tiny museums in small towns) during the pandemic.[1] In retirement, we have been docents for several years at the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History. As much as we love to learn, view and breathe in the atmosphere of museums, we also love to teach others about Peabody exhibits in which we’re versed.

So I read with considerable interest a NY Times article (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/06/arts/what-is-a-museum.html?referringSource=articleShare) about an organization I didn’t know existed (https://icom.museum/en/) that coordinates (if that’s the right term) museum issues around the world and is currently struggling with composing an up-to-date definition of the very idea of “museum.” Not to my surprise, this has had significant political ramifications.

The most recent definition[2], from 2007 and apparently little different from one in 1970:

A museum is a non-profit, permanent institution in the service of society and its development, open to the public, which acquires, conserves, researches, communicates and exhibits the tangible and intangible heritage of humanity and its environment for the purposes of education, study and enjoyment.

Pretty nice as it stands, though it avoids addressing major controversial issues such as “who owns antiquity” (ancient objects that museums display) and, in a related context, “what social justice issues are embedded in what museums do.”

When I initially encountered the first question, I assumed the answer was simple: relics should belong to the current country where they were found. When I read scholarly commentaries on the subject, however, I found the issues more complex. But I’m not going to discuss that here.

The second question, however, underscores the social justice issues in which we’re immersed today (and have been in various forms for our entire history).

In January, 2019, after a few years of gathering ideas from a significant subset of the group’s members, an ICOM committee proposed this definition,[3] with a vote planned for that June:

Museums are democratising,[sic] inclusive and polyphonic[4] spaces for critical dialogue about the pasts and the futures. Acknowledging and addressing the conflicts and challenges of the present, they hold artefacts and specimens in trust for society, safeguard diverse memories for future generations and guarantee equal rights and equal access to heritage for all people. Museums are not for profit. They are participatory and transparent, and work in active partnership with and for diverse communities to collect, preserve, research, interpret, exhibit, and enhance understandings of the world, aiming to contribute to human dignity and social justice, global equality and planetary wellbeing.

From my point of view, this is a great and exciting improvement. But as you might suspect, it doesn’t go down well with some. Here are a few arguments cited in the Times:

• “In June of last year, François Mairesse, a museology professor at the Sorbonne in Paris, resigned from the committee. ‘This is not a definition but a statement of fashionable values,’ he told The Art Newspaper. Juliette Raoul-Duval, the chair of the Council’s French branch, called the definition an ‘ideological’ manifesto, the article added.

“Mr. Mairesse said in a telephone interview that he did not object to the values in the proposed definition. But he said he felt they instead belonged in a mission statement. ‘You couldn’t find this in a dictionary,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t explain what a museum does.’”

• “Burcak Madran, a representative from Turkey, told the meeting that the political terms in the proposed definition could cause problems for museums in authoritarian countries, and that even the term ‘polyphonic spaces’ was an issue.

“’Five years ago, I opened a very polyphonic museum with Turks, Armenians, Kurds and Greeks in the same space’” she said. ‘Three months later, the museum was closed.’”

• “George Abungu, a former director of Kenya’s National Museum who was among those to resign from the committee, said in a telephone interview that the proposed definition had widespread support among museums in Africa, which have been working for decades on issues like human rights.

“He said he had stepped down after realizing that the definition ‘was not convenient for Westerners who want to continue like they live in the past, in the 19th century.’”

Other officers besides Abungu have resigned in frustration over this issue. You may guess that I especially resonate with the spirit of what Abungu says, though I suspect it is too sweeping. Regardless, the issue of First World vs. other Worlds is neither surprising nor trivial.[5]

I will now invoke a few basic principles that I often find myself repeating and have even saved for easy insertion:

• As a graduate professor[6] of mine once noted, “All criticism is autobiography”—a reminder that all thought is filtered through our experience, so that traditional objectivity is impossible, but that we should try to be conscious of our prejudices and factor them into what we think and write. As Barbara puts it: we can only asymptotically approach being objective.
• Nothing is not political. That is, if your politics are like mine, they’re based on your important (and maybe subsidiary) moral values. Virtually everything (probably everything) we do in life has a “should” or other judgment embedded in it; even encouraging (or demanding) someone be “apolitical” or “non-political” is a judgment that favors NOT talking about a disputed issue. Indeed, it is typically self-serving and hypocritical for a politician to call for, say, rising above partisanship and “politics” (whatever that actually means).
• The previous two bullets mean that all communication—spoken, visual, even tactile—intends to manipulate its audience to a viewpoint the communicator seeks. (That, of course, includes this essay.) This starts when we learn to talk: we gradually absorb connotations that users embed in their tone, mannerisms (which tots often imitate) and behavior. It continues with the social graces drilled into us as children: saying (or not saying) “thank you” or “you’re welcome,” for example, curries favor or disfavor from our audience. And it permeates the rest of our lives, including (but certainly not limited to) political speeches, sermons, advertising, paintings, news, romantic wooing, social media posts, and outright lies.

No public institution can be a morally or intellectually neutral place. A museum’s very existence says something about cultural values. Here, I’ll stick to major museums. When you approach them in the street, the architecture sends a message, typically about grandeur, importance, solidity, durability, dignity, decorum, and affluence. When you walk in, the entry is talking to you. If, when you have barely left the outside world behind, guards demand to check your belongings, you’re being reminded that alleged “terrorist” can be anywhere, and that the museum wants to ward them off (at least as much for its own sake as yours); and you’re also reassured that you’ll (probably) be safe during what you may hope will be an idyllic escape from troubling realities beyond the museum.

Once you’re past any guards, the entry is designed to awe you. Ceilings may be high and vast. Large sculptures may be in sight—and what they are portraying sends messages about what and/or whom you should pay attention to. Separate desks for such purposes as tickets or questions or information about special exhibits all prompt feelings about how your presence fits into the intellectual and economic context of the museum. Free admission is different from recommending a “donation,” which is different from outright payment. The options hint at how dependent the museum may be on independent (usually government) support, and how much the museum managers care about poorer people for whom an admission fee, and especially a relatively high one (as seems to be getting more common), might eliminate or severely curtail visits, depriving themselves and their families of significant and potentially personal cultural benefits. Lists of donors, often assembled by amount donated, reinforce a class tone—and the fact that the donors may want to advertise their wealth and generosity. If paying members get special privileges, your brain may have a flicker of thought about financial favoritism.

Ticket-takers and guards, especially if in uniform, can suggest that some visitors (and maybe even you yourself) can’t be trusted and that you haven’t totally left the controlling world that you may be trying to escape by your visit.

You soon leave those feelings behind—to encounter exhibits that are inevitably biased (quite possibly in ways with which you agree, which might be part of the reason you’re there). Both by what they say and what they don’t, summaries of museum sections and explanations for individual items help shape your thinking as you roam. Specific word choices may trigger comfortable or uncomfortable reactions (e.g., agreement or frustration) in different people.  Organization of exhibits chronologically or by topic or by “civilization” (or any other rubric) seeks to shape how you internalize what the museum displays.[7]

This problem is most obvious for an exhibit about what, according to your government and much of your culture, is officially a rival polity. Signage will contain judgmental text and subtext that most viewers will probably take for granted as accurate.

Like the phoniness of a politician’s call to rise above partisanship, the call for “neutrality” in a museum is itself prejudicial. “Neutrality” is a sister-term to “objectivity” in its judgmental connotations and inability to be defined the same by everyone.

All of the foregoing colors a response to a concern like François Mairesse’s about a dictionary definition. Indeed, his concern underscores how constrained dictionaries are. If they’re honest, the creators of a dictionary will qualify their work by acknowledging up front that the search for accurate definitions (and legitimate entries) is an ongoing and sometimes contentious task. But for most users, a dictionary nonetheless projects a pretense of universal, unambiguous, non-controversial—in short, objective—agreement on the definitions as presented. In defining “museum” itself, dictionary “decorum” wouldn’t even allow inclusion of a statement that controversy exists over exactly what a museum is and should be.

Burcak Madran’s disturbing example and George Abungu’s indictment of Western culture underscore the unavoidable reality that “political” concerns (here, broadly referring to the experiences and interests of peoples all over the world, ranging from small tribes to densely settled nations) easily pop up when defining and organizing a museum. Abungu’s statement, indeed, points us back to the cultural underpinning of Mairesse’s complaint.

I love museums, and I think that when managed well, they are indeed cultural repositories for future generations as well as our own.[8] And like the public museums in Washington, DC, I think they should be open to all without a fee.

But I don’t love the pretentiousness and often self-interest of those who demand certain conditions for them. Of course, at some level I’m one of those people: everything in this essay is demanding a particular way of looking at what museums can and can’t be, which quickly slides into what they should or shouldn’t be. And if it’s not obvious, I believe that museums should include the sordid histories of what they display (though of course those details are open to argument).[9]

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[1] We are quite aware that others have far more important needs, and I often write about those, but for the moment I want to focus on the political implications of philosophies of museums.

[2] https://icom.museum/en/resources/standards-guidelines/museum-definition/

[3] Ibid.

[4] I hadn’t previously encountered this context for “polyphonic.” A quick internet survey suggests it may not be precisely defined but generally concerns languages or dialects (reduced here to differences in the sounds they produce) that may compete within a particular geographical area, like bi- (or poly-) lingual cultures where one language or dialect is officially rejected. (Grammar purists like me contribute to such unfairness by insisting on certain traditional usage and pronunciation over others that may be widespread—consider, for example, “the Queen’s English” vs. Cockney, or American “standard” vs. the ridicule poured on promulgation of “ebonics” some years back.) So in this ICOM context, I take “polyphonic” to refer to geographical areas (presumably mostly countries) with subcultures where language differences conflict to one extent or another.

[5] One aspect of that history is the argument about who owns antiquity, which in turn is related to the history of colonialism.

[6] Paul Alpers, around 1972, at the University of California, Berkeley. Alpers died in 2014, and I remember him with fondness. I’m sure he would be happy to know that he could provide lessons that helped guide a student for a lifetime.

[7] The common use of “civilization” to describe and sort exhibits is question-begging. I have loved to quote Gandhi who, when asked by a reporter what he thought of Western civilization, replied, “I think it would be a good idea.” Alas, some months ago I read that this never really happened. So I now have to tell that story and add, “It SHOULD be true.”

[8] My bias is that they should weigh demands to present a particular agenda but not cave to questionable agendas (which you and I might define differently—and so the “political” cycle keeps rolling along).

[9] It’s been a while, but memory is that the African-American museum in DC does a pretty good job of this. Indeed, what value would the museum have if it prettied up the history of slavery and its aftermath?

I would love to prescribe the job description for people who put together museum exhibits, which would, minus tenure requirements, likely be little different from the critical thinking and analytical qualifications demanded of academics. But that would get us into a discussion about universities that parallels the one about museums. There are plenty of academics, like François Mairesse (at least in the context quoted here), with whom I have sharp disagreements related to social justice.