There’s No Such Thing as an Ethical Museum

September 23, 2023 5:59 PM

How can any institution be ethical when it’s an obsequious representation of the values of its extraordinarily rich funders?
posted by Etrigan (17 comments total)

I admit I didn't really FEEL the ick (as the kids say) fully until I toured the Jewish quarter of Prague. It was gorgeous and dead and fucked up and I was silently screaming that we're still here. And finally viscerally understood the complaints of Native Americans about their sacred items on display in museums. (Although the Smithsonian one is curated and alive, etc by plenty of native communities). I'm embarrassed it took that for me to really get it, but at least I do now. I really do.
posted by atomicstone at 6:23 PM on September 23, 2023 [3 favorites]

Rich criminals don't only compromise museums in their pursuit of reputation laundering. Even institutions at the pinnacle of academia enjoy a bit of complicity for that sweet money and its coolness-halo effect. Look no further than the MIT Media Lab's knowing disregard of Jeffrey Epstein as the canonical example.
posted by tclark at 6:24 PM on September 23, 2023 [3 favorites]

I mean, I’m still going to like museums and visit them, sorry.
posted by Going To Maine at 6:50 PM on September 23, 2023 [17 favorites]

The article is fine. The headline, used as the title here, is clickbait, a built-in derail, and ought to be burned with fire.

I reiterate my demand that the Computer History Museum release their microcomputers back into their natural habitat
posted by phooky at 7:07 PM on September 23, 2023 [15 favorites]

As a museum professional who devours a lot of internal critique, this reads like a freshman paper and is badly behind the times in terms of the level of literacy around the issues of empire and colonialism in larger, older, richer museums. The author is correct about the corrupt intentions of the founders of late 19th century major American museums, but suffers from NYC solipsism in painting any enterprise named “museum” with a very wide brush. The vast majority of museums in the US are not the well-funded status projects of major cities. New York’s major museums are absolute unicorns.

Then, too, the task of those running museums today is to take these highly problematic - but highly meaningful - found objects (by which I mean the museums themselves) and find some way of righting their wrongs and shaping them to serve the society we have. She’ll need to think harder and do more than parrot other writers to make a useful contribution to that effort.

The article also erases the well-documented efforts of decades of people within museums who have developed ethics practices, applied rigor, conducted institutional critique internally, participated in review, consulted on improvements, introduced constructs from liberatory theories, and led transformative change.

It also acts as though tribal and cultural specific museums don’t exist at all,

It’s a level one think piece for someone coming at it from a side seat in the art and lit world.

Also, it’s “stock in trade.”
posted by Miko at 7:12 PM on September 23, 2023 [56 favorites]

I’ll let Yad Vashem know.
posted by Galvanic at 7:17 PM on September 23, 2023 [6 favorites]

Any consequentialists in the house with an estimate of how much good museums have done, despite hosting plundered artifacts and being funded by wealthy people? There's a huge variance among museums, so I imagine it's a wide range.
posted by Mr. Gunn at 7:18 PM on September 23, 2023

Yeah, this article suffers from making too many broad/grand pronouncements about museums, when really it seems to be talking about a couple of museums.
posted by coffeecat at 7:27 PM on September 23, 2023 [5 favorites]

(Also, I'll take any opportunity to talk up the V&A's cast collection, which serves the dual purpose of bringing art to another part of the world without removing the original and providing an excellent archival copy. The AMNH has a plaster reproduction of an Olmec colossal head. Just scan the fucking marbles and ship them back to Greece! This is the way to do it, people.)
posted by phooky at 7:52 PM on September 23, 2023 [4 favorites]

Sigh…as someone who has been to Yad Vashem and LA’s Museum of Tolerance…there is an effort to understand how some of this goes vastly awry…in a museum context. That being said, after the Deep Dive at Yad Vashem, we went to an Elvis diner to laugh after mourning and remembering. Years before I went to the US museum of the Holocaust with my infant kiddo strapped onto me before entering, just to remind me that hope and love abide.
posted by childofTethys at 7:53 PM on September 23, 2023 [1 favorite]

I’ve been struggling not to be annoyed by the reach this piece is getting for days. On one hand, as Miko writes beautifully above, these critiques are jejune as all get out, and many fall apart under the scrutiny of a thoughtful reader. But on the other, and this is the point that bothers me more, they do contain basic truths about the issue that the written then just throws up her hands about, ending the essay like this:

“Maybe seeing museums as deeply flawed but instructive monuments to that attempt at understanding, rather than as definitive catalogs, is the best way to allow them to teach us about ourselves. Sometimes, we need the reminder not to believe something just because it’s written on the wall.”

I mean! Yeah! That’s the whole idea that the field has been pursuing for decades now!

Sigh. I fully admit that I have a lot of feelings about this as a person for whom weekly museum-going is 1) an integral part of my artistic practice, and 2) one of the big ways I have fun. So I think maybe I’m feeling defensive, too, about a hot take like this going viral.
posted by minervous at 8:03 PM on September 23, 2023 [4 favorites]

List of museums in Kansas, as one example from this list.
posted by Brian B. at 8:08 PM on September 23, 2023 [1 favorite]

So this is going viral? So weird what stuff gets traction and doesn’t. I feel somewhat inspired to post some
of the deeper discourse around this stuff, and might do.
posted by Miko at 8:45 PM on September 23, 2023 [5 favorites]

There’s No Such Thing as an Ethical Museum

Kind of a broad statement there.

I worked on the design of the Oregon Film Museum, and that was built inside the converted Clatsop County Jail (as seen in The Goonies) and that seemed to be a pretty ethical move to me.
posted by Relay at 8:59 PM on September 23, 2023 [3 favorites]

I'll take any opportunity to talk up the V&A's cast collection, which serves the dual purpose of bringing art to another part of the world without removing the original and providing an excellent archival copy. The AMNH has a plaster reproduction of an Olmec colossal head. Just scan the fucking marbles and ship them back to Greece! This is the way to do it, people.

I love the V&A's Cast Court and with modern tech we could do even better than plaster casts when it comes to reproductions. We have the technology! (VR and other digital reproductions leave me cold; build a full-size copy of the Parthenon and I'll be all over it though)

(I've also gotten up close with high-quality reproductions of medieval manuscripts, and I think those should be much more available, too. Nothing like holding a literal scroll to give you some sense of what the object really is like)
posted by BungaDunga at 9:25 PM on September 23, 2023 [3 favorites]

it took Laura Poitras’s 2022 documentary about Nan Goldin’s crusade against the Sackler family getting all the way to Oscar season for their misdeeds to actually come to light

This is an unbelievably, bizarrely wrong claim, so much so that I'm wondering if I misunderstood it. I mean, just factually. The Met, for example, took the Sackler name off its galleries in 2021. Multiple states have been investigating/suing Purdue and the Sacklers for approximately the last five. Empire of Pain was published in spring 2021.
posted by praemunire at 10:15 PM on September 23, 2023 [7 favorites]

Using the Met on 5th Avenue and West Central Park's Natural History Museum to make a statement on the idea of museums is akin to making a judgement on the entirety of fiction based on Lolita and Bukowski's Women. No thanks.
posted by midmarch snowman at 10:33 PM on September 23, 2023 [5 favorites]