Visiting the Art Museum: A Journey Toward Participation 3031120884, 9783031120886

Table of contents :
Preface and Acknowledgements
Contents
Notes on Contributors
List of Figures
List of Tables
Chapter 1: Introduction
References
Chapter 2: The Visitor Experience and Disciplines: An Epistemological Journey
1 Introduction
2 The Visitor Experience
3 The Thought of the Practices
4 The Museum Visit as an Interdisciplinary Experience
5 The Visitor Experience and Academic Disciplines: An Epistemological Journey
6 Conclusions
References
Chapter 3: Cities and Urban Studies: Four Perspectives on Art Museums
1 Introduction
2 Museums as Bearers of Civic and Cultural Values
3 Museums as Anchors in Cultural Districts
4 Museums as Landmarks in the City Fabric
5 Flagship Museums in Urban Regeneration
6 Conclusions
References
Chapter 4: Buildings and Architecture: Typologies That Defy Definition
1 Introduction
2 The Evolving Typologies of Art Museums
3 Existing Structures as Art Museums
4 Newly Created Structures as Art Museums
5 Hybrid Structures as Art Museums
6 Conclusions
References
Chapter 5: Exhibitions and Design: A Perspective on the Project of Museum Display
1 Introduction
2 Museography and Museum Studies: Two Perspectives on Display
3 Exhibition Design as an Aspect of Display
4 Exhibition Design as Artistic Practice
5 Exhibition Design as an Immersive Interface
6 Conclusions
References
Chapter 6: Artworks and Art History: Toward a Deeper Engagement with Art Exhibition and/as Art
1 Introduction
2 Art History and Its Approaches
3 A Statue of Peace as Physical Object and Visual Experience
4 FRP Peace as a Cultural Artifact
5 After “Freedom of Expression?” as an Artwork
6 Conclusions
Appendix: Glossary of East Asian Characters
References
Chapter 7: Programs and Art Education: Becoming Socially Responsive
1 Introduction
2 Early Art Education and Museum Programs in the United States
3 Evolving Theoretical Frameworks in Museums
4 Addressing Structural Inequalities Through Educational Programs
5 Socially Responsive Programs: The Columbus Museum of Art and the Wexner Center for the Arts
6 Conclusions
References
Chapter 8: Participation and Nonprofit Management: Toward Inclusive Governance
1 Introduction
2 Museum and Participation
3 Managerialization of Museums
4 Nonprofit Governance
5 Inclusive Governance and Participation
6 Conclusions
References
Chapter 9: Conclusion
References
Chapter 10: Postface: From Visitors to Users—COVID-19 Accelerating Change
1 A Bit of Autobiography
2 COVID-19 and the Brera Proposal
3 The Key to the Transformation: Offering a Museum Experience Online That Is Not Possible in Person
4 From Visitors to Users: From Tickets to Membership
5 Membership and the Board: Putting the Museum Back at the Heart of the Community
References
Index

Citation preview

SOCIOLOGY OF THE ARTS

Visiting the Art Museum A Journey Toward Participation Edited by  Eleonora Redaelli

Sociology of the Arts Series Editors

Katherine Appleford Kingston University London, UK Anna Goulding University of Newcastle Newcastle, UK Dave O’Brien University of Edinburgh Edinburgh, UK Mark Taylor University of Sheffield Sheffield, UK

This series brings together academic work which considers the production and consumption of the arts, the social value of the arts, and analyses and critiques the impact and role of cultural policy and arts management. By exploring the ways in which the arts are produced and consumed, the series offers further understandings of social inequalities, power relationships and opportunities for social resistance and agency. It highlights the important relationship between individual, social and political attitudes, and offers significant insights into the ways in which the arts are developing and changing. Moreover, in a globalised society, the nature of arts production, consumption and policy making is increasingly cosmopolitan, and arts are an important means for building social networks, challenging political regimes, and reaffirming and subverting social values across the globe.

Eleonora Redaelli Editor

Visiting the Art Museum A Journey Toward Participation

Editor Eleonora Redaelli University of Oregon Eugene, OR, USA

ISSN 2569-1414     ISSN 2569-1406 (electronic) Sociology of the Arts ISBN 978-3-031-12088-6    ISBN 978-3-031-12089-3 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12089-3 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the ­publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and ­institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

In ricordo della primavera 2020

Preface and Acknowledgements

I love traveling. I love art museums. And I love academia. My mind is always on a journey to discover and wander. When I arrived at the University of Oregon (UO) in 2013, I joined an arts administration program housed in the School of Architecture and Allied Arts. I was coming from the University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point from an arts management program housed in the Division of Communication; that was a very different academic environment. Upon arrival at UO, I engaged in conversations with my new colleagues throughout the school and wandered the hallways, where I could read the descriptions of their classes. I started seeing the connections among the different disciplines, especially as they connected to the art museum and the issues I would address in my classes and my research. I reached out to professors in the different departments, and I obtained the support of Dean Frances Bronet, who provided a small token to these professors to identify some foundational works that illustrate their respective disciplines and to present them to my newly designed class: “In and Out of the Museum.” Since then, I have taught the class a few other times in different formats and traveled to Portland, Oregon, taking students to the Portland Art Museum (PAM) as a case study that would bring together what they learned in the class and from each discipline. During my sabbatical year in 2020, I returned to my native Italy, at the Politecnico di Milano at the kind invitation of Davide Ponzini. I had several projects aiming to connect with the academic world in Europe. However, COVID-19 changed my plans. Sadly, the initial few months of interesting exchanges were abruptly interrupted. I found myself in vii

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lockdown at my childhood home, forced to slow down and rethink my academic journey. These months of lockdown became a reflection on my research, and the design of the class became a book proposal. I had graduated in philosophy from the Università degli Studi di Milano with Carlo Sini as my advisor. Before the lockdown, I attended a few of his lectures and read the book he wrote with Gabriele Pasqui, Perché gli Alberi non Rispondono: Lo Spazio Urbano e I Destini dell’Abitare. Pasqui had also studied under Sini before continuing his studies in urban planning. This book reminded me of the work by Sini I read in my formative years. I then realized that the way I thought about the class “In and Out of the Museum” was based on Sini’s philosophy. After the lockdown lifted, I met with Davide Ponzini and Zach Jones sharing the idea of writing a book using Sini’s philosophy and the class’ trajectory and the idea of this volume started taking shape. I then met with Gabriele Pasqui and Jacopo Leveratto—so incredible to be able to meet in-person again—and finalized several invitations for contributions. Also, the joy of being able to travel again and visit art museums took me to the Pinacoteca Braidense di Milano and brought me in touch with James Bradburne, the director of this renowned Italian museum. With him, I had a powerful conversation intersecting art, COVID-19, Black Lives Matter, Milan, and the changing world of museums. His enthusiastic acceptance to contribute to the volume completed the draft of the proposal to be sent to the publisher. In short, this volume started as a pedagogical project, but took shape as a result of a very long intellectual journey started during my undergraduate studies. I am grateful to so many people who made this journey rich and fascinating. To all those who contributed chapters to this volume, my deepest thank you for their expertise, their patience, and their collaborative spirit. The main effort of this volume has been to create an organic journey; therefore, I am quite appreciative of how committed everybody has been to my vision, gracefully engaging in multiple edits. A special thank you to Akiko Walley, who took the extra time to help me reply to three very insightful external reviewers, and to Gabriele Pasqui and Dyana P. Mason, with whom I truly enjoyed co-authoring a chapter. Many thanks go to Amanda G. Ziegler, the author of the Portland Art Museum (PAM) illustrations included before each chapter, whose creativity made me happy at each meeting and to Jennifer Yankopolus, the scrupulous copyeditor whose help made me pay attention to detail and think more clearly.

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I am also thankful to colleagues, friends, and family for multiple conversations and continuous support. I would especially like to thank Timothy Halkowski, Mark Eisheid, Doug Blandy, Ann and Eric Singsass, Anne van de Nouweland, Michael Geffel, Sarah Wyer, Megan Kohli, Timothy Johnson, Erika Patterson, Luigi Redaelli, Miwako Okamura, Sara Redaelli, Luca Redaelli, Mia, and, of course, my dear mom. Many thanks to my writing buddies Audrey Lucero, Ilana Umansky, and Gina Biancarosa for the constant support during COVID-19 when the writing retreat morphed into regular Sunday walks. A heartfelt thank you to all the Burlando-Graboyes—Melissa, Alfredo, Giovanna, Silvia, and Gage—for wonderful family dinners that turned into book conversations and exciting brainstorming. On so many occasions, Melissa’s sharpness led me to unforeseen clarity. Finally, I acknowledge the support of two generous awards from the University of Oregon: the Jerry and Gunilla Finrow Research & Creative Work Award from the College of Design and the OHC Publication Subvention from the Oregon Humanities Center. Eugene, OR March 2022

Eleonora Redaelli

Contents

1 Introduction  1 Eleonora Redaelli 2 The  Visitor Experience and Disciplines: An Epistemological Journey  9 Eleonora Redaelli and Gabriele Pasqui 3 Cities  and Urban Studies: Four Perspectives on Art Museums 27 Massimiliano Nuccio and Davide Ponzini 4 Buildings  and Architecture: Typologies That Defy Definition 47 Zachary M. Jones and Marzia Loddo 5 Exhibitions  and Design: A Perspective on the Project of Museum Display 67 Francesca Lanz and Jacopo Leveratto 6 Artworks  and Art History: Toward a Deeper Engagement with Art Exhibition and/as Art 87 Akiko Walley

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Contents

7 Programs  and Art Education: Becoming Socially Responsive109 Dana Carlisle Kletchka 8 Participation  and Nonprofit Management: Toward Inclusive Governance129 Eleonora Redaelli and Dyana P. Mason 9 Conclusion149 Eleonora Redaelli 10 Postface:  From Visitors to Users—COVID-­19 Accelerating Change155 James M. Bradburne Index169

Notes on Contributors

James M. Bradburne  is Director General of the Pinacoteca di Brera and the Biblioteca Braidense in Milan. He is an Anglo-Canadian architect, designer and museologist, and has designed world expo pavilions, science parks and international art exhibitions. He was educated in Canada and in England, graduating in architecture at the Architectural Association and receiving his doctorate in museology from the University of Amsterdam. Over the past thirty years he has produced exhibitions and organized research projects and conferences for UNESCO, national governments, private foundations and museums in many parts of the world. From 2006 until March 2015 was the director general of the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi. He is also one of the founders of Circles Squared, an American non-profit foundation dedicated to educational innovation as a means of transforming museum management. Zachary  M.  Jones is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow and Adjunct Professor at the Politecnico di Milano. His teaching and research activities span architectural and urban design, planning, built heritage, cultural mega-events and cultural policy. After studying in the US, he has spent a number of years expanding his research interests across Europe where, in addition to completing his PhD in Italy, he was a Fulbright Student in Croatia, a Visiting Research Fellow at Kadir Has University in Turkey and a Visiting Researcher at the Institute of Cultural Capital in the UK.  In addition to a number of published journal articles, he is also the author of the recent book Cultural Mega-Events: Opportunities and Risks for Heritage Cities by Routledge. xiii

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Dana  Carlisle  Kletchka is an Assistant Professor of Art Museum Education in the Department of Arts Administration, Education and Policy at The Ohio State University. Her research areas include post-­ critical art museum education theory; professional development for PreK–12 teachers in art museum contex]ts; the use of social media and digital technologies on interpretation and engagement in the art museum; and the professional positionality of art museum educators within the profound paradigmatic shift of art museums over the last 40 years. In 2015, she was awarded Art Educator of the Year for the Museum Education Division of the National Art Education Association. Francesca  Lanz is Assistant Professor of Interior Architecture at Northumbria University, UK. Her academic expertise lies at the intersection of interior architecture, museum and exhibition design, to museum and heritage studies, with a particular interest on the potential intertwinements between their different disciplinary approaches, theories and practices. She has a rich track-record of publications and funded research projects across these areas, revolving around the role of the built environment and museums in contemporary societies, with key attention to neglected heritages and difficult memories and stories. Jacopo  Leveratto  is a Lecturer of Interior Architecture and Exhibition Design at Politecnico di Milano, and he is national Principal Investigator of the HERA research project En/counter/points: (re)negotiating belonging through culture and contact in public space and place, which will run from 2019 to 2022. He has authored numerous publications in peer-­ reviewed international journals and edited volumes. He is also a Correspondent for Op.Cit., the Italian Review of Art Criticism, and the Associate Editor of the peer-reviewed journals International Journal of Interior Architecture and Spatial Design, and ARK. Marzia  Loddo  has worked as an expert in applied arts conservation in several Italian museums. She holds the European title of Doctor of Preservation of Architectural Heritage (2019, Politecnico di Milano). In 2020, she published her first monograph, Storage Facilities for the Collections of Art Museums. A Focus on the Italian Context, on the topic of art collections storage. She is currently an Affiliated Researcher with the Centre for Global Heritage and Development with the Art, Heritage and Science group; and the International Council Of Museums (ICOM). In September 2021, she finished her postdoctoral research at the Delft

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University of Technology, with the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment as part of the Marie-Sklodowska-Curie, Horizon 2020 Project. Marzia is currently based in the Netherlands, where she works as a consultant and researcher in the field of collections management. Dyana  P.  Mason is an Associate Professor in the School of Planning Public Policy and Management at the University of Oregon, where she also serves as the Director of the Master’s in Nonprofit Management degree program. Her research interests include nonprofit management and governance, the advocacy efforts of nonprofit organizations, and diversity and inclusion efforts in organizations. In 2022 she was recognized with the Best Paper Award by the Journal of Public and Nonprofit Affairs for her paper titled, “Diversity and Inclusion Practices in Nonprofit Associations: A Resource-Dependent and Institutional Analysis.” Before entering academia, Prof. Mason worked for nearly 15 years in the nonprofit sector in a variety of front-line and executive roles in California, Arizona, New Mexico, Virginia and Washington, DC. Massimiliano Nuccio  is Assistant Professor of Business Economics and Management at Ca’Foscari University of Venice. He has also been a visiting professor at Leuphana University Lueneburg and he’s currently Honorary Research Fellow at the Birmingham Business School. His research activity focuses on urban and regional studies, digital economy, cultural and creative industries. He has published different papers on cultural districts and more recently on the digital transformation of cultural organizations. Gabriele  Pasqui is Full Professor of Urban Planning and Policies at Politecnico di Milano. He was the Director of the Department of Architecture and Urban Studies (DAStU) from 2013 to 2019. He is Scientific Coordinator of the Excellence Program “Territorial fragilities” at DAStU. Among his recent publications: L’Italia al futuro. Città e paesaggi, economie e società, Franco Angeli, Milano 2011 (with A. Lanzani) and Strategic Planning for Contemporary Urban Regions, Ashgate, London 2011 (with A.  Balducci and V.  Fedeli); Le agende urbane delle città italiane, il Mulino, Bologna 2016 (editor); Urbanistica oggi. Piccolo lessico critico, Donzelli, Roma 2017; La città, i saperi, le pratiche, Donzelli, Roma 2018; Raccontare Milano. Politiche, progetti, immaginari, Franco Angeli, Milano 2018; Perché gli alberi non rispondono. Lo

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spazio urbano e i destini dell’abitare, Jaca Book, Milano 2020 (with C. Sini). Davide Ponzini  is Associate Professor of Urban Planning at Politecnico di Milano. He has also been a visiting scholar at Yale, Johns Hopkins, Columbia University, and Sciences Po Paris and Visiting Professor at TU Munich. His research activity focuses on planning theory, urban and cultural policy, and contemporary architecture. He is co-author (with the photographer Michele Nastasi) of Starchitecture, and co-editor (with Harvey Molotch) of The New Arab Urban: Gulf Cities of Wealth, Ambition, and Distress. His latest authored book is titled Transnational Architecture and Urbanism: Rethinking How Cities Plan, Transform, and Learn. Eleonora  Redaelli is Associate Professor in the School of Planning, Public Policy and Management, at University of Oregon. Her research explores issues of cultural policy linked to the arts, humanities, and historic preservation. Her work appears in prestigious journals such as the Journal of American Planning Association, City, Culture and Society, Urban Affairs Review, Cultural Trends, Journal of Planning Education and Research, Urban Geography, Journal of Urban Affairs, and Cities. With Palgrave she has published two books: Arts Management and Cultural Policy Research (2016), co-authored with Jonathan Paquette, and Connecting Arts and Place. Cultural Policy and American Cities (2019). Akiko Walley  is the Maude I. Kerns Associate Professor of Japanese Art in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture, University of Oregon. In 2022, she is also serving as the director of the department’s Graduate Certificate in Museum Studies. Walley offers courses on diverse aspects of Japanese art history, from early Buddhist art (her main research focus) to medieval warrior culture, calligraphy, and print culture of the early modern into contemporary period. In her teaching, Walley collaborates extensively with University of Oregon’s Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art to provide students opportunity for a first-hand experience of works of art. Walley is the author of Constructing the Dharma King: The Hōryūji Shaka Triad and the Birth of the Prince Shōtoku Cult (Japanese Visual Culture Series, vol. 15; Leiden: Brill, 2015). Her work has been published in journals including Ars Orientalis, Archives of Asian Art, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, Artibus Asiae, and International Journal of Comic Art.

List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Fig. 2.2 Fig. 2.3 Fig. 3.1 Fig. 4.1 Fig. 4.2 Fig. 5.1 Fig. 5.2 Fig. 6.1

Fig. 6.2

Fig. 7.1

Practice: meaning, objects, and subjects 15 Practice as discipline 20 The visitor experience as an epistemological journey 20 Guggenheim Bilbao Museum, Spain and the waterfront. (Source: Michele Nastasi) 39 The Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam. (Source: Marzia Loddo, 2020) 58 The Mucem in Marseille. (Source: Marzia Loddo, 2019) 60 Michelangelo’s Rondanini Pietà by BBPR.(Source: Jacopo Leveratto)76 Librocielo by Attilio Stocchi. (Source: Jacopo Leveratto) 81 Kim Seo-kyung and Kim Eun-sung. A Statue of Peace. 2011 (as exhibited at the Aichi Triennale, 2019). Acrylic on fiberglassreinforced plastic. Retrieved January 8, 2022, from https:// censorship.social/artists/kim-­seo-­kyung-­kim-­eun-­sung/. (Copyright: Kim Seo-kyung and Kim Eun-sung) 92 Kim Seo-kyung and Kim Eun-sung. A Statue of Peace. 2011 (created to commemorate the 1000th weekly demonstration by the Korean women). Bronze. Seoul, South Korea. Photograph Jeong Yanghee. (Courtesy: Kim Seo-kyung and Kim Eun-sung) 94 Wonder Room at Columbus Museum of Art. (Source: Dana Carlisle Kletchka) 123

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List of Tables

Table 2.1  The thought of the practices: an ontology and an epistemology Table 2.2  The thought of the practices and the art museum

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction Eleonora Redaelli

Visiting the Art Museum is a book about the visitor experience. I have written the book as a companion for visitors to and inside the art museum. It transforms the steps of their journey into an exploration of how different academic disciplines frame their study of the art museum. In this way, the volume engages readers in transforming a common experience, the museum visit, into a sophisticated epistemological inquiry. The epistemological transformation contributes to learning about how knowledge around the art museum is constructed, creating an epistemological awareness that empowers visitors to potentially become active participants in the life of the museum. This journey follows a transformative bottom-up trajectory from experiential to epistemological, and, finally, reveals itself as empowering. In addition, this volume demonstrates the ways in which the visitor experience extends beyond what occurs within the walls of the museum and underscores that the museum is situated in a particular place and time. Art museums, and museums in general, have been developing a growing awareness of the complex societal and cultural responsibility they hold

E. Redaelli (*) University of Oregon, Eugene, OR, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 E. Redaelli (ed.), Visiting the Art Museum, Sociology of the Arts, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12089-3_1

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and what those responsibilities mean for their relationship with the publics (Hein, 2006). The leadership of museums is a contentious issue in the field at the moment (Szántó, 2020). If the global conversation calls for a dismantling of moral preconceptions (Raicovich, 2021) and the history of rapacious colonialism (Hicks, 2021), I invite the readers to acknowledge the cognitive assumptions of the visitor experience. By taking the time to unpack the complex dynamics of the art museum, reader can become visitors who participate and take action. I do not think that the response to the social responsibility of the art museum should be left solely in the hands of the museum staff. I hope that after reading this book visitors will feel knowledgeable and empowered and will step up to shape the future of museums together with the museum staff and boards of directors. I believe that the future of the museum, to be successful in a democratic society, needs to become a wide-ranging collaborative endeavor. It has been noticed and studied that the visitor experience is not limited anymore to the actual, physical visit to a museum (Oberhardt, 2001). In our daily life, we encounter museums not only when we enter their brick-­ and-­mortar walls but also on television, in movies, and in virtual spaces. In 2011, Google launched the Google Art Project, putting online high-­ resolution images and videos of artworks in museums around the world and simulating visits to rooms in their buildings. Lately, during the years of COVID-19 travel limitations, each museum made tremendous efforts to be reachable online and re-create the visitor experience in a virtual space, making it available everywhere the visitor is. The museum has traveled to the walls inside the house of the visitors, instead of the other way around. All this opens multiple lines of research and reflection on how the art museum relates with its visitors today. However, the real visit, which entails exploring the city, approaching the building, and standing in the exhibit surrounded by artwork and people, remains a sophisticated reality worth further investigation. This book transforms the visitor experience into an epistemological journey. The visitor experience does not refer to a real person or an actual visit (Ayala et al., 2021). Just like visitors are not an “undifferentiated mass public” (Bennett, 1995, p. 7). The term is used as a universal category— like we would say “the state” or “the government,”—like it is used in philosophy. The visitor experience in itself is interdisciplinary (an ontological claim that states how things exist), and the study of the experience is the untangling of the disciplines (an epistemological claim that states how we build knowledge). As an epistemological journey, this volume

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highlights how each individual academic discipline—including the fields of knowledge labeled as “studies”—is a process of abstraction that isolates elements of the complex interdisciplinary experience that is the visit to the museum. Each chapter is a disciplinary answer to the question, What can museum visitors learn about a specific aspect of their experience from this discipline? Each aspect of their experience refers to what they encounter and discover at each step of their journey: cities, buildings, exhibits, artworks, programs, and participation. The study of the visitor experience through an epistemological approach consists of the untangling of the academic disciplines that study and inform each aspect of this experience. This book can be used as a methodological example to analyze any other type of museum and even other cities’ amenities. The art museum is an example, but this epistemological inquiry is applicable to other contexts. An epistemological inquiry could accompany the visitor experience and untangle the academic disciplines that are related to each specific empirical example. For instance, stadiums would be particularly interesting to study given their prominent role in cities. Other examples of possible amenities that could be studied through an epistemological inquiry include performing arts centers, festivals, and convention centers. For each case, the epistemological journey would be a trajectory toward empowerment—an important goal for any democratic society. The book unfolds as an edited volume, with chapters by different authors who are enthusiastic scholars in each discipline. I framed and directed the contributions addressing, first and foremost, undergraduate students as citizens. The volume developed from an undergraduate class I designed and taught several times at the University of Oregon. This experience shaped my questions and guidelines for the contributing authors. Undergraduate programs in American universities require students to take classes in general education in different broad academic areas, including classes in the arts and humanities. This book is an ideal text for this type of class as it can speak to students by connecting to their experience of going to an art museum and from this experience helping them understand the perspectives of different disciplines. The purpose of general education classes is to inform students of current relevant issues, expose them to an understanding of different disciplines in a specific academic area—such as the arts and humanities—and, ultimately, educate well-rounded citizens. This volume fulfills all these goals if used in this type of class.

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Even though undergraduate students—in any major—are the main readers that the contributors and I have been writing for, two other groups can benefit from reading this volume: master’s students as professionals and scholars as teachers and researchers. First, master’s students in museums studies can learn about the situated nature of a museum that requires understanding its multiple links with the city and the community. Approaching the visitor experience as an epistemological journey toward inclusive participation trains professionals to be sophisticated critical thinkers and to understand the subtle, but crucial, nuances of their job. Given that the global conversation is requiring museums professionals to engage more and more with their community, this volume provides invaluable professional background knowledge. Second, scholars in museums studies—but also in urban studies, architecture, design, art history, art education, and nonprofit management— can benefit from approaching the connections among these disciplines through an everyday experience. This brief journey across disciplines tracing the visitor experience offers them an understanding of cogent fields through a presentation of a few fundamental concepts and selected foundational literature. This can spark connections and ideas for collaborative research. Moreover, scholars as teachers can transform this journey in a rationale for curriculum design, using each chapter as a unit of a course. This possible read of the volume is an encouragement to scholars to connect their research with teaching, a valuable tool for any academic job. The contributors for each chapter are scholars who explain and reflect on the latest approaches in their discipline. As the editor of the book, I appreciated their insights, and I also noticed how each discipline is broader than its ideas and values and how has different focuses and styles of writing. The chapters unfold, displaying a kaleidoscopic world made of ideas, values, and writing styles. The common thread is the question mentioned above: What can museum visitors learn about a specific aspect of their experience from this discipline? The book starts with an explanation of its theoretical foundation. In Chap. 2, Gabriele Pasqui and I illustrate how the visitor experience is transformed into an epistemological journey through the thought of practices by Italian philosopher Carlo Sini. This chapter reviews the literature on visitors in museum studies and shows how visitors gained a prominent role since the 1970s with the new museology’s turn. The thought of the practice reveals that the museum visit is an interdisciplinary experience and that it calls for an epistemological investigation that can deconstruct its complexity. The following chapters are the steps of this

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investigation that untangle each discipline from that interdisciplinary experience, which is the visit to the art museum. Coming to the museum, visitors move through the city toward the museum and stumble upon its building. In Chap. 3, Massimiliano Nuccio and Davide Ponzini present four perspectives used by urban studies to describe the relationship between cities and art museums: museums as bearers of civic and cultural values, museums and cultural districts, museums and the city fabric, and the role of flagship museums in urban generation. Framing the discussion within the larger conversation about museums in general, Nuccio and Ponzini highlight how these perspectives follow a conceptualization of the role of the art museums in cities from values to economies and from existing built environments to future transformations. In Chap. 4, Zachary Jones and Marzia Loddo highlight how architecture can help to analyze the building that hosts the museum, showing how there is not a specific typology or commonly shared attributes among art museums. Jones and Loddo present three categories of museum buildings: existing structures converted into museums, newly created structures designed to be museums, and hybrids that contain elements of both. Entering the museum, visitors start navigating its interior, its rooms, and its displays. In Chap. 5, Francesca Lanz and Jacopo Leveratto focus on display and show the role of design in art exhibits. Display brings together the spaces of the museum interior, the artwork, and all the other visual elements of an exhibit. Lanz and Leveratto illustrate two fundamental approaches to display: one defines exhibition design as an artistic practice, and the other as an immersive interface. In Chap. 6, Akiko Walley provides an overview of art history and its approaches and examines After “Freedom of Expression?” (AFE), an exhibit presented at the 2019 Aichi Triennale in Japan. Walley explains how an art historical approach can help visitors engage with an artwork and an exhibit more deeply, like a mirror of changing sizes, and analyzes an artwork exhibited at AFE as a physical object, a visual experience, and a cultural artifact. Finally, she concludes by analyzing the exhibit AFE as an artwork itself. Getting acquainted with the museum, visitors discover activities, such as educational programs, and mechanisms of involvement, such as recruitment for the board of directors, that create bridges between the museum and its community. In Chap. 7, Dana Carlise Kletchka introduces how art education informs program design in art museums. Kletchka discusses early education in museum programs in the United States and presents three museological paradigms that have guided museums in their

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interactions with the community. She continues by illustrating how the shift toward socially responsive programs addresses structural inequalities and provides examples from the Columbus Museum of Art and the Wexner Center for the Arts on the Ohio State University Campus. In Chap. 8, Dyana P. Mason and I argue that a democratic museum needs to include the public in governance. Mason and I provide an overview of the different trends about participation in museums and the impact of managerialization on these processes. After articulating the specificities of governance for nonprofit management, we illustrate strategies utilized and suggested by nonprofit management literature to develop inclusive governance. Chapter 9 brings together the common threads in the chapters, highlighting the contributions to the visitor-­centered literature: the emergence of an international debate, acknowledging that the main examples are from United States, Italy, and Japan; the ways museums are developing to address structural inequalities; and the importance of thinking about museums as situated. Chapter 10 follows the epistemological journey of the book, introducing a voice from the field. Using a different tone from the previous chapters, James M. Bradburne, director-general of the Pinacoteca di Brera and the Biblioteca Braidense in Milan, offers a reflection on how the art museum needs to rethink its approach to visitors. While all the chapters in the volume are academic approaches to visiting the museum, the Postface is a biographical reflection, that invites to go beyond the idea of visitors: from visitors to users. Bradburne raises pressing questions that have become urgent during the challenging years of COVID-19: Is the museum experience limited to one visit? Who pays for the museum? How is the voice of the community heard by the museum governance? Echoing several of the themes that emerged in the chapters, this reflection shows the energy and passion of a cultural leader dealing on a daily basis with the fascinating complexity of the art museum. * * * A note about the illustrations next to each chapter: They take the readers on a visit to Portland Art Museum (PAM), offering a relatable empirical experience that leads them into the book’s epistemological exploration. Each illustration depicts an aspect of the visitor experience studied by the discipline of the chapter: the city, the building, an exhibit, an artwork, a program, and governance. While the chapter explains this aspect providing the conceptualizations constructed by the academic discipline, a short

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paragraph describes the illustration. I chose PAM as it is a local museum I often visited with students. PAM is the oldest art museum in the Pacific Northwest, founded in 1892 as the Portland Art Association (Portland Art Museum, n.d.). The first collection consisted of approximately 100 plaster casts of Greek and Roman sculptures. In 1908, the museum acquired its first original piece, Afternoon Sky, Harney Desert by American painter Childe Hassam. The museum kept growing its collection, especially during the years after World War I, and continued hosting successful exhibits. In 1932, the museum inaugurated the current main building, a project of the modernist Italian architect Pietro Brunelleschi; in 1994, the museum purchased the adjacent masonic temple, now known as the Mark building, to expand its exhibit and administrative space. Today the museum’s collection consists of some 42,000 objects and hosts a range of programs engaging with a variety of groups in the community.

References Ayala, I., Cuenca-Amigo, M., & Cuenca, J. (2021). The Future of Museums. An Analysis from the Visitors’ Perspective in the Spanish Context. The Journal of Arts Management, Law, and Society, 51(3), 171–187. https://doi.org/10.108 0/10632921.2021.1901813 Bennett, T. (1995). The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics. Routledge. Hein, H. (2006). Public Art: Thinking Museuums Differently. Altamira Press. Hicks, D. (2021). The Brutish Museum: The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Restituion. Pluto Press. Oberhardt, S. (2001). Frames within Frames: The Art Museum as Cultural Artifact. Peter Lang. Portland Art Museum. (n.d.). A Brief History of the Museum. Retrieved February 9, 2022, from https://portlandartmuseum.org/about/brief-­history-­museum/ Raicovich, L. (2021). Culture Strike: Art and Museums in an Age of Protest. Verso Books. Szántó, A. (2020). The Future of the Museums. Hatje Cantz.

The visitor experience and disciplines Visiting an art musuem includes several steps: visitors arrive in a city, enter a museum, move within the building according to the suggestions of the exhibit design, look at the artwork, join education programs, and wonder how to participate in decision-making. By exploring how different disciplines frame these steps, this volume transforms the visitor experience into an epistemological journey

CHAPTER 2

The Visitor Experience and Disciplines: An Epistemological Journey Eleonora Redaelli and Gabriele Pasqui

1   Introduction Visiting an art museum today is a very different experience from what it was just a generation ago. For instance, in recent decades art museums have dramatically changed how they welcome visitors and how visitors move around the artworks and are invited to engage with what they see. In the art museum of today, visitors encounter and connect with multiple stratified activities and meanings, and the relationship between the museum and visitors is layered, dynamic, and everchanging. At the same time, growing attention is being focused on understanding and constructing the visitor experience. An increasing body of literature has been focusing on understanding and shaping the visitor experience both taking into consideration the multifaceted complexity of the art museum and the myriad aspects that can inform and improve this experience.

E. Redaelli (*) University of Oregon, Eugene, OR, USA e-mail: [email protected] G. Pasqui Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 E. Redaelli (ed.), Visiting the Art Museum, Sociology of the Arts, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12089-3_2

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This volume examines the visitor experience—in particular, lingering on the different steps of the visit—and transforms this experience into an epistemological journey. This chapter introduces the theoretical framework that enables this transformation. Here we explain how both the complexity of the art museum and the epistemological meaning of the visit can be grounded in the the thought of the practices developed by the Italian philosopher Carlo Sini (2004, 2009). The thought of the practices provides a foundation for understanding the visitor experience through an epistemological exercise: it explains how something exists (the visitor experience) and at the same time provides a lens to unravel how knowledge is produced (the disciplines). In Sects. 2 and 3 we articulate the thought of the practice. These two sections contain dense philosophical material that requires extra effort, patience, and time for reflection. However, few schematics support the reader in this moment of reflection by organizing in a visual manner the thought of practices, especially as it applies to the visit to the art museum. This chapter positions the argument developed in the overall volume by providing an overview of the existing literature about the visitor experience, introducing the theoretical framework that grounds its investigation, and laying out its overall structure. We start by synthesizing the literature on the visitor experience and explaining our contribution. We continue by illustrating the thought of the practices and describing how, according to this thought, the visitor experience embodies interdisciplinarity. We then show how this volume transforms the visitor journey into an epistemological quest where each chapter is a disciplinary answer to the question, What can museum visitors learn about a specific aspect of their experience from this discipline?

2  The Visitor Experience How visitors experience an art museum has dramatically changed since the late twentieth century. Museum studies have shown that museums are paying increasing attention to their publics using a series of classification schemes to understand the demographics, learning styles, and predilections of visitors (Macleod, 2001). Museum studies have also tracked who the visitors are and observed how understanding their identity provides insights into why they come to the museum. Seen through the disciplinary lens of museum studies, the art museum becomes a dynamic entity that changes with historical movements, essentially reshaping itself over time as internal and external pressures revise both the mission of the museum and

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the viability of that mission. This chapter looks at the visitor experience precisely from this dynamic approach to the study of art museums and considers that museums have become chiefly concerned with serving their publics. In fact, the visitor experience has become one of the chief metrics by which museum personnel, funders, researchers, and policymakers gauge the cultural significance of museums. In addition, the visitor experience has become increasingly nuanced as a measurement broken into classification schemes by visitor demographics, learning styles, predilections, and other particularities. The close tracking and analysis of the visitor experience also leads to complex and hybrid notions of what the visitors mean to the museum—subjects to be educated, enlightened consumers, clients, co-creators of meaning, or all the preceding. Seph Rodney (2012, 2019) has investigated how the museum visit has changed in modern and contemporary art museums in the United Kingdom and the United States, focusing on the shift that has occurred in the last generation. Rodney considers the visit as a discursive object and shows how a discursive ideal of a “personally customizable visit” (p.  9) emerges from institutional development over time and under specific social and historical contexts. While explaining his perspective on these changes, he states “Ultimately, I am trying to explain why the experience you have in a contemporary museum of art is likely very different from the kinds of experiences your parents had” (p. 1). At the heart of this difference is the fact that today museums are oriented toward the needs and preferences of the visitors, whereas in the past they were committed to transferring the knowledge of the curator to the supposedly uneducated visitor. The conceptual transformation of the visitor experience aims at public engagement and is influenced by the logics of marketing. Rodney’s main argument relies on the idea that the visitor experience is shaped by the museum’s philosophy, which changes over time. He illustrates this change by examining the conceptual, administrative, and intellectual development of the Tate Modern in London. Rodney’s monograph The Personalization of the Museum Visit: Art Museums, Discourse, and Visitors (2019) arose in the context of the new museology, an intellectual movement that emerged in museums in the 1970s and 1980s. Known as a “turn to meaning” or a “turn to understanding,” this perspective moves away from a focus on the inner workings of the museum and its collection toward a visitor-centered perspective. The book The New Museology (1989) by Peter Vergo directed the focus of museum research on the visitor, presenting a series of essays from various

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scholars. The attention on the visitors considers not only their demographics but also their life experiences, feelings, values, and attitudes, recognizing them as learning subjects who synthesize information—not merely receiving it passively—and produce meaning. Visitor studies, a new area of research dedicated to understanding learning experiences in informal settings, emerged from this development, and in the United States was anchored to the Visitor Studies Association founded in 1990. The essays in the volume Museum Visitor Studies in the 90s (Bicknell & Farmelo, 1993) collected emblematic work that represents this shift. The successful development of the new museology did not happen without criticism. For instance, Deidre Stam (1993) criticized the new museology as a movement that reconfigures the museum in a way that it can become almost anything. The overall debate around the role of museums in the twenty-first century is well illustrated by Gail Anderson’s edited book Reinventing the Museum: The Evolving Conversation on the Paradigm Shift (Anderson, 2012), which includes contributions from key scholars such as Nina Simon, George E. Hein, and John Falk. The anthology shows how many museums are positioning themselves to be central players in their communities, while others are trying to find alliances to be able to survive. It illustrates pivotal moments of the twentieth-century dialogue—the museum transforming from a temple to a forum, in other words, from being about something to being for anyone—and the emerging twenty-first-century ideology that is increasingly focused on public engagement to the point of becoming the “exploded museum” (p. 303). Pierre Bourdieu and Alain Darbel wrote a pioneering work investigating who the museum visitors are from a sociological perspective titled The Love of Art: European Art Museums and Their Public (1990) and originally published in French in 1969. The French scholars conducted surveys of visitors to art museums in five countries and observed the prevalence of upper- and middle-class visitors and an absence of working-class visitors. They concluded that visitor agency is determined by social class and that the museum enacts symbolic violence by perpetuating social hierarchies. Scholars have criticized this perspective as it does not allow for a conception of the museum as a place of leisure that provides excitement. Moreover, even though many of their findings are still considered relevant today, a contemporary assessment of who the visitors are takes into consideration how the expansion of the access and production to the visual

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arts has opened to the possibility of cultivation of knowledge beyond the elites (Prior, 2005). Therefore, visitors to museums are more likely to be from a wider group of people. Next to Bourdieu and Darbel’s (1990) survey, two other foundational works about the new museology are the monographs by Tony Bennett and Carol Duncan. Bennett’s investigation of the museum visit focuses on uncovering power relations, especially those between citizens and the state. In his book The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (1995), Bennett examines the discursive context of the origin of the nineteenth-­ century European museum, which was focused on the idea of public order. He argues that the state uses culture through the museum to control and civilize the population. For instance, the museum presents itself as a place of emulation where civilized conduct may be learned. A major critique of this perspective comes from Louise Purbrick (1996), who points out that Bennett’s visitor is the “undifferentiated mass public” (p. 70) of the late nineteenth century, whereas the new museology makes a point of recognizing the individual characteristics of visitors. Carol Duncan examines the display, building, landscaping, and interior design of the museum to explain how the experience of the visitor is framed as a ritual. In Civilizing Rituals (1995), Duncan highlights how the museum space is constructed in a way that brings the visitor into a dimension that is totally different from everyday life. When visitors enter the museum, they participate in a ritual, “a moment of moral and rational disengagement that leads to or produces some kind of revelation or transformation” (p. 14). Participation produces a sense of renewal and a perpetual reliving of the past; however, it perpetuates the values of bourgeois society. Overall, Duncan considers visitors as passive and their experience completely controlled by the curator. Drawing on scholars who identify choice as the main characteristic of contemporary society, Rodney (2019) highlights the limitation of Duncan’s description of the visitor experience as she does not include the exercise of choice. In this section, we have provided a selected overview of the museum debate that argues for a visitor-centered perspective. This volume contributes to this debate by unpacking each step: Visitors arrive in a city, enter a museum, move within the building according to the suggestions of the exhibition, look at the artworks, join educational programs, and wonder how to participate in decision-making. By exploring how different disciplines frame these steps, this volume transforms the visitor experience into

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an epistemological journey. In the next section, we present the theoretical framework—the thought of the practices—that grounds the volume’s approach as an epistemological investigation.

3  The Thought of the Practices In the fields of philosophy and social sciences, the theme of practices became central during the twentieth century, both with reference to the American pragmatist tradition (Goodman, 2005) and within the sphere of reflective sociology (Bourdieu, 1977; Schatzki, 1996). The practical turn in social sciences, philosophy, and epistemology (Galison, 1987; Latour, 1987; Stern, 2003) started from the assumption of the plural nature of practices. In this perspective, the practice is not a distinct field of experiences that is separate and opposite to theory. Theories, knowledge, and concepts are produced inside practices. And disciplines, with their specific objects and methodologies, are complex interactions between different practices understood as what everyone does, intentionally or unintentionally, within what Pierre Bourdieu (1993) calls champs, structured fields defined by knowledge and power relations. For the last 30 years, the theme of practices has been at the center of the work of the Italian philosopher Carlo Sini, who has elaborated a complex reflection of the pragmatic nature of human experience and culture as a field of cognitive and non-cognitive practices (Benso, 2017). In a converstion with Silvia Benso, Sini explains how human beings are “constantly subject to the intertwinings of living practices” (Benso, 2017, p.  55) caught in complex relations among themselves and the natural world. Practices are “transient figures” (p.  55) that constitute meaning in its “infinite happening” (p. 55) through the changing relationship between material and intellectual doing. A practice is characterized by duplicity: It is transcendental as it opens a meaning that does not pre-exit it, and it is empirical as it emerges from previous practices. These powerful aspects of Sini’s philosophy are referred to as the thought of the practices (il pensiero delle pratiche). Praxis as distinguished from theory is not what is described by the thought of the practices. In this sense, practices are not variants of the Aristotelian praxis, such as activities in contraposition to theory (Anscombe, 1965). What is described is not the opposition between theory and practice but rather a pluralization of practices. According to a line of thought rooted in American pragmatism (Knorr-Cetina, 1981; Rorty, 1982), theory itself

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is a field of practices of a different nature in which knowledge is inextricably intertwined. Intellectual knowledge and material experience are constantly intertwined within a practice. Therefore, according to Sini, a practice transcends the common dichotomy between theory and practice. For instance, as we mentioned before and will explain in more detail later in the chapter, even each academic discipline is considered a form of practice. Sini explains that practices are actions that produce meaning and constitute subjects and objects (Fig. 2.1). Subjects, objects, and meaning do not exist before a practice but are constructed by a specific action. They emerge as part of a relationship in the performance of the practice. Sini says, “We have eyes to see, hands to grasp, ears to hear, feet to walk: it is in this determined ‘to’ that we have such things and the relative objects: colors, bodies, sounds, pavements, and so on. We do not have them separately and ‘before’” (Sini, 2009, p. 105). For instance, hands are “‘abstract’ elements” (p.  105) constructed within a specific action. One does not have hands if one does not grasp. The hands exist in the act of grasping. And that act, Sini further explains, will determine the kind of hands one has, for instance, hands like a pianist (to play), like a woodsman (to log), or like a goldsmith (to forge). Everything discloses itself through an action by virtue of a practice. We, as subjects, are constituted by the practices of our actions. We exercise the practices, but at the same time, we emerge from the practices. The practices are the way we come to be and exist. As Sini claims, “We are, Fig. 2.1  Practice: meaning, objects, and subjects

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however, the practices that we exercise” (Sini, 2009, p. 103). The subjects are immersed in the practices because they can concretely inhabit the situations and contexts in which they find themselves. When we act, we are often not acting as rational subjects; we act unintentionally, dependent on the practices in which we are immersed. The relevance of the action and, at the same time, attention to the dimension of passivity are understood not in a psychological sense but as belonging to life practices. In this way, practices are connected with the processes of sense making. For instance, our routines are immersed in a universe of meaning that is a form of knowledge, “a know-how-to-do” (p. 122) what we do. It is only within practices that both the object and the subject happen. The “things” (p. 105) the subject must do are always internal objects of the specific practice. The subject and objects do not exist prior to a practice but happen in and with it. The action of the practices creates a relationship where A and B emerge. Sini (2009) explains, “The action names a polarized involvement, the consequences (and not the premises) of which are the subject and the object: points of solidification that are determined time after time” (p. 104). In short, there are no things outside the practices but only things passing through them in a continuous transformation of meaning and according to an ever-changing interweaving of practices. This is the lens we will use to analyze the complexity of the experience of visiting the art museum. Sini’s description of the thought of the practices entails three main elements. First, each practice is characterized by its goal (the telos; fine). The goal of the practice is the reason why we start acting, often unintentionally. This claim illustrates how the thought of the practices is a philosophy of effects, not of intentions, and of outcomes, not of choices. The goal creates the intersection between subject and object as they both emerge in the practice. Sini (2009) clarifies, “For example, a musical performance in a concert is the goal of the orchestra, and therefore also of the conductor’s and instrumental players’ movements, of the light disposition, of the chairs, of the room and its acoustic devices, of the microphones, and so on” (Sini, 2009, p. 107). Second, every practice is social, even when it is apparently isolated and even as it is inherited and learned through imitation and example. It is social because meaning occurs only in relation to a horizon that is socially constructed. This horizon, in turn, should be understood as a framework of meaning within which we can say and do certain things and not others. The practice happens in this horizon together with its meaning,

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redefining, even imperceptibly, the framework of meaning. The previous example of the orchestra well illustrates this aspect, emphasizing how it is the final goal of a practice (concert) that organizes multiple practices in a synthesis, giving them new meaning (conductor’s movements, the chairs disposition in a room, etc.). Sini explains how the conductor “lifts his or her arm to signal the beginning, but this is not equivalent to saying ‘Yo!’ to catch the waitress’s attention” (Sini, p. 107). Third, there is no pure practice: Each practice is an infinite intertwining of multiple practices. Practices never happen in isolation from one other; they cooperate in a synesthesia that only an analytical gaze can unravel. Within a particular analytical practice, one practice can be isolated from another. Ultimately, there is only the flow of life experience, which interweaves knowing how to do, knowing how to say, and knowing how to write in an infinite number of possible ways. Sini holds up an orchestra concert as an example of an infinite intertwining of practices. And remarks how it is impossible to evaluate how many practices are intertwined in the performance. He states, “Now, think about this whole, exciting experience, and see how many practices it is made of. It is actually an impossible, because infinite, evaluation” (Sini, 2009, p. 106).

4  The Museum Visit as an Interdisciplinary Experience The thought of the practices combines ontological claims—“Nothing is presence, nothing discloses itself if not by virtue of a practice” (Sini, 2009, p.  105)—and epistemological directions—“Each practice culminates in some form of knowledge, that is, in a know-how-to-do that is determined by its opening” (Sini, 2009, p. 122). In other words, the thought of the practices is an ontology (the description of how something exists) that intertwines epistemology (the investigation of how knowledge is produced). As an ontology, the thought of the practices reveals that the art museum visit is an interdisciplinary experience that exists as the result of a complex web of practices. As an epistemology, the thought of the practices is an invitation to untangle the different forms of knowledge intertwined in the study of the visitor experience (Table 2.1). The thought of the practices reveals the museum visit as an interdisciplinary experience (ontology) which is an invitation to deconstruct its complexity (epistemology). In other words, the thought of the practices

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Table 2.1  The thought of the practices: an ontology and an epistemology Thought of the practices Ontology

Epistemology

“Nothing is presence, nothing discloses itself if not by virtue of a practice. […] One should always keep in mind that each practice is linked to other practices and is an indefinite and nuanced set of many practices” (Sini, 2009, p. 105). The art museum visit does not exist apart from a complex web of practices = interdisciplinary experience

“Each practice culminates in some form of knowledge, that is, in know-how-to-do that is determined by its opening” (Sini, 2009, p. 122) Each practice translates into a form of knowledge = discipline. Each discipline provides a way to learn about one aspect of the museum visitors experience in their journey

Table 2.2  The thought of the practices and the art museum The art museum visit is an interdisciplinary experience: It happens at the intersection of multiple disciplines. An epistemological exercise can untangle them and disclose their individual perspective.

has two consequences for the study of the visitor experience to and through the art museum (Table  2.2). First, we cannot think that the museum visit exists before and apart from a web of practices. It constitutes itself as an experience in practices without which, literally, it would not exist or happen. The museum visit is as an interdisciplinary experience. Second, the different practices, and in particular the different disciplines that study the art museum, are related to each other, but they function on the basis of different and, in some cases, conflicting principles, logics, and forms of rationality. Through a process of epistemological analysis, each discipline can be isolated, uncovering how multiple disciplinary discourses are intertwined in the way the museum visit happens. Precisely because it is a web of practices, the art museum visit is a space of constitutive interdisciplinarity. Traditionally, interdisciplinarity refers to a way of knowing that addresses complex topics by bringing together different disciplines and integrating them in a single study (Lyall et al., 2011). Within the thought of the practices, the perspective is reversed. Interdisciplinarity is the experience of the museum visit itself, which is intrinsically connected to different social practices, including multiple disciplines. When taken singularly, each discipline is an abstract construct

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with a specific body of knowledge that reveals a particular aspect of the museum. Stating that the museum visit is an interdisciplinary experience makes an ontological claim. Such a claim calls for an epistemological investigation to untangle the disciplines to better understand their production of knowledge and how object, subject, and meaning emerge from different disciplinary horizons. The thought of the practices uncovers how the numerous practices that constitute the museum visit translates into different forms of knowledge that in academia are called disciplines. A discipline consists of an intellectual identity built around specific ideas, theories, and methodologies. These are organized and communicated according to specific practices learned during training in the discipline (Hyland, 2012). By discipline we do not mean a codified science but a set of discourses that define a field of cognitive practices that, in turn, are linked to economic, social, institutional, and symbolic practices (Rizvi, 2012). Since the 1960s, the efforts to move away from disciplines and develop cross-disciplinary work has been supported by the “studies” revolution in academia, the growing number of interdisciplinarity fields of knowledge that revolve around a specific subject, such as environmental studies, cultural studies, gender studies, and museum studies. Scholars have traced the development of modern disciplines through a history of the institutionalization of knowledge (Monteil & Romerio, 2017). This history highlights how the cognitive aspects of disciplines are tied to social ones, with particular importance given to the support provided by public authorities and how the emergence of “studies” aimed to overcome a growing division and segmentation of knowledge. This volume acknowledges “the tacit or explicit opposition between ‘studies’ and ‘disciplines’ (Monteil & Romerio, 2017, p. a), including the critique raised to both approaches; however, it goes beyond these binary opposition and uses the term “disciplines” to embrace both approaches. The next section will explain how the thought of the practices can transform the visitor experience into an epistemological journey, untangling the different disciplines that study the visit.

5  The Visitor Experience and Academic Disciplines: An Epistemological Journey Grounded in the thought of the practices, this book carries out an epistemological exercise aimed at understanding the meaning of the visitor experience and revealing how each discipline frames an aspect of the visitor

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Fig. 2.2  Practice as discipline

Fig. 2.3  The visitor experience as an epistemological journey

experience (see Fig. 2.2). The following chapters offer a set of answers. Each chapter explains what can be learned about the visitor experience through the lens of the respective academic discipline. In particular, the chapters investigate what visitors can learn about their relationship with the art museum considering that, according to Sini, it is only within a specific practice that the subject (visitor), the object (one step of the visit), and their meaning (visitor experience) emerge: “The action names a polarized involvement, the consequences (and not the premises) of which are the subject and the object” (Sini, 2009, p. 104). The visitor experience is the focus of the volume. By observing the visitor experience as a practice of everyday life through the lens of the thought of the practices, we untangle the disciplines that provide insights into one aspect of the journey (Fig.  2.3): urban studies, architecture, design, art history, art education, and nonprofit management. Visitors start planning

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for their visit by familiarizing themselves with the city, determining where the museum is located, and figuring out how to get there. This process requires becoming familiar with public transit or access roads and parking. Urban studies, in particular, city planning, provides insights into how a city is organized and designed, including elements such as roads, traffic flows, public transportation, and parking. Planning has impacted the urban form of a metropolis through the prioritization of specific modes of transportation (Muller, 2004). Moreover, the planning process recognizes museums as bearers of civic and community values, centers of cultural production and consumption in urban systems, and recognizable landmarks in the business of the urban space (Grodach, 2011). The building itself provides the first welcome and impression of the museum. Is the structure recognizable as a museum? What are the characteristics that will attract people and help them understand the social role of the museum? What kinds of stories do buildings tell to link the physical space to the mission of the museum (MacLeod, 2013)? Architecture deals with all these questions, bringing the expertise and vision of the designer to meet the needs of the audience. The designer of the building must consider the surroundings, light, space, and art that will be shown, as well as the community, including neighbors and visitors (Giebelhausen, 2003). As visitors walk into the building, the spatial organization provides the setting for encounters with the artworks and helps visitors connect with and understand the messages of the exhibitions. How can the visitors recognize how to move in the space? What are the features that suggest a feeling or draw the attention? Design trains experts in exhibition design to create narratives through a space. It enhances and develops the physical relationship between artworks and their reception (Dean, 2002; Roppola, 2012). Over the years, interior architecture has developed different strategies, tactics, and tools. These continue to evolve considerably and to adapt to the emergence of relational and performative art, as well as to other new art forms. Looking at the artworks presented in the rooms of a museum, visitors could start wondering. What is the idea conveyed by this artwork? Why is it presented here next to these other ones? Are they connected? Usually, those choices are made by curators, who use their expertise to select meaningful pieces and provide a logic to the order of their exhibitions. Art history is the discipline that has prepared curators for such expertise, making the visible legible through interpretive material (Preziosi, 2009). In the twenty-first century, however, those engaged in art history have been

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confronted with the task of decolonizing the discipline and they have expanded its scope of inquiry from studying works of art to determining the institutional impact on presenting an artwork (Grant & Price, 2020). Visitors can see traces of these operations in the way artworks are presented. But once visitors move around the museum, they can also discover the different programs organized around artworks and exhibitions. How can I interact with the artwork? Can I also come to the museum to make new friends? Art museums have been very active in creating programs that cater to different groups in the community, and art education informs how to meaningfully develop these links with the community by employing the latest pedagogical approaches merged with cutting-edge strategies for community outreach and development. The learning experience in the arts is enhanced by taking into account issues of social responsibility, such as institutional inequalities, gender roles, and community values (Dewhurst, 2014; Sandell & Nightingale, 2012). Finally, at the end of their journey, visitors can decide if they want to actively participate in shaping this art museum they just visited. How can I be part of the decision-making process? Can I pick artists, artwork, or programs? The theoretical context of museum management has changed considerably in the last 20 years, and recent work has brought attention to the nature of governance that guides the day-to-day management. In particular, a major concern has emerged in favor of including more voices from the local community that can allow all those who are interested to take part in the decision-making process that informs a museum’s activities. The literature in nonprofit management plays a leading role in helping museum management to mold the museum’s operation in a way that broadens the roles of visitors, opening up opportunities for active participation (Sandell & Janes, 2007). By untangling the disciplines that study and inform the art museum— focusing on the different steps of the visitor journey to and into the museum—this volume transforms this experience into an epistemological journey. Urban studies, architecture, interior architecture, art history, art education, and nonprofit management studies are a collection of disciplines, each of which is a practice that gives insights of different step of the visitor experience. The contributors for each chapter are experts who explain and reflect on the latest approaches within their discipline. In so doing, the visitor journey to and into the museum is transformed into an epistemological journey.

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6  Conclusions This chapter reviewed how the role of visitors has radically changed in museum studies since the 1970s with the new museology’s turn to meaning and how since then scholars have turned their attention to the perspective of the visitor. The aim of this volume is to contribute to this debate by analyzing the visitor experience through each step of the journey—from when visitor enter a city, to when they discover how to participate in the choices made by a museum. By brining to the forefront the discipline connected with each step, this volume transforms the visitor experience into an epistemological journey. The core of the chapter presented the theoretical foundation for this epistemological journey. The thought of the practices by Carlo Sini offered an ontology that rooted the design of the epistemological journey. Subjects, objects, and meaning emerge only in a specific practice: This is the ontological claim that led to understanding an epistemological exercise as the action of untangling subject, object, and meaning. The thought of the practice reveals that the museum visit is an interdisciplinary experience and calls for an epistemological investigation that can deconstruct its complexity. The remainder of this volume is the tale of this epistemological journey.

References Anderson, G. (2012). Reinventing the Museum: The Evolving Conversation on the Paradigm Shift (2nd ed.). AltaMira Press. Anscombe, G. E. M. (1965). Thought and Action in Aristotele. In R. Bambrough (Ed.), New Essays on Plato and Ariistotle (pp. 143–158). Routledge. Bennett, T. (1995). The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics. Routledge. Benso, S. (2017). Viva Voce: Conversations with Italian Philosophers. State University of New York. Bicknell, S., & Farmelo, G. (1993). Museum Visitor Studies in the 90s. Science Museum. Bourdieu, P. (1977). Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1993). The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature. Columbia University Press. Bourdieu, P., & Darbel, A. (1990). The Love of Art: European Art Museums and Their Public. Stanford University Press. Dean, D. (2002). Museum Exhibition Theory and Practice. Taylor and Francis. Dewhurst, M. (2014). Social Justice Art: A Framework for Activist Art Pedagogy. Harvard Education Press.

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Duncan, C. (1995). Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums. Routledge. Galison, P. (1987). How Experiments End. University of Chicago Press. Giebelhausen, M. (2003). The Architecture of the Museum: Symbolic Structurres, Urrban Contexts. Manchester University Press. Goodman, R. B. (2005). Pragmatism: Critical Concepts in Philosophy. Routledge. Grant, C., & Price, D. (2020). Decolonizing Art History. Art History, 43(1), 8–66. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-­8365.12490 Grodach, C. (2011). Cultural Institutions. The Role of Urban Design. In T.  Banerjee & A.  Loukaitou-Sideris (Eds.), Companion to Urban Design. Routledge. Hyland, K. (2012). Disciplinary Identities: Individuality and Community in Academic Discourse Books. Cambridge University Press. Knorr-Cetina, K. (1981). The Manufacture of Knowledge: An Essay on the Constructivist and Contextual Nature of Science. Pergamon Press. Latour, B. (1987). Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society. Harvard University Press. Lyall, C., Bruce, A., Tait, J., & Meagher, L. (2011). Interdisciplinary Research Journeys: Practical Strategies for Capturing Creativity. Bloomsbury. Macleod, S. (2001). Making Museum Studies: Training, Education, Research and Practice. Museum Management and Curatorship, 19(1), 51–61. MacLeod, S. (2013). Telling Stories of Museum Architecture. In Museum Architecture. A New Biography (pp. 11–35). Routledge. Monteil, L., & Romerio, A. (2017). From Disciplines to “Studies”. Revue d’anthropologie des connaissances, 11(3), a-m. https://doi.org/10.3917/ rac.036.a Muller, P.  O. (2004). Transportation and Urban Form. Stages in the Saptial Evolution of the American Metropolis. In S. Hanson & G. Giuliano (Eds.), The Geography of Urban Transportation. Guilford Press. Preziosi, D. (2009). The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology (2nd ed.). Oxford University Press. Prior, N. (2005). A Question of Perception: Bourdieu, Art and the Postmodern. The British Journal of Sociology, 56(1), 123–139. https://doi.org/10.1111/ j.1468-­4446.2005.00050.x Purbrick, L. (1996). Review of the Book The Birth of the Museum, by T. Bennett, and Civilizing Rituals, by C. Duncan. Journal of Design History, 9(1), 69–70. Rizvi, S. (2012). Multidisciplinary Approaches to Educational Research: Case Studies from Europe and the Developing World. Routledge. Rodney, S. (2012). The Story of a Visit. Journal of Conservation and Museum Studies, 10(1), 72–78. Rodney, S. (2019). The Personalization of the Museum Visit: Art Museums, Discourse, and Visitors. Routledge. Roppola, T. (2012). Designing for the Museum Visitor Experience. Routledge.

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Rorty, R. (1982). Consequences of Pragmatism: Essays, 1972–1980. University of Minnesota Press. Sandell, R., & Janes, R.  R. (2007). Museum Management and Marketing. Routledge. Sandell, R., & Nightingale, E. (2012). Museums, Equality, and Social Justice. Routledge. Schatzki, T.  R. (1996). Social Practices: A Wittgensteinian Approach to Human Activity and the Social. Cambridge University Press. Sini, C. (2004). L’analogia della parola. Jaca Book. Sini, C. (2009). Ethics of Writing. SUNY Press. Stam, D.  C. (1993). The Informed Muse: The Implication of “the New Museology” for Museum Practice. Museum Management and Curatorship, 12(3), 267–283. Stern, D. G. (2003). The Practical Turn. In S. P. R. Turner & P. A. Roth (Eds.), The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Social Science. Blackwell. Vergo, P. (1989). The New Museology. Reaktion Books.

Portland, OR: a cultural district Portland’s cultural district is located in the Portland downtown area. It contains an agglomeration of cultural institutions, including regional cultural attractions such as the Portland Art Museum (PAM), the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall, Antoinette Hatfield Hall (which houses the Brunish Theatre, Newark Theatre, and Winningstad Theatre), and the Oregon Historical Society and History Museum. The district also incorporates the South Park Blocks, one of Portland’s oldest and most popular parks. The park creates a connection between PAM, the public realm, and open spaces and displays several works of public art. The blocks surrounding the cultural district host a diverse residential population and specialty retailers with strong traditions (Downtown Retail Council and Portland Development Commission, 1999). The district is a dynamic crossroads of public transportation that facilitates movements of residents and visitors. In 2020, a new concept for a connected cultural district was released by the Portland Bureau of Transportation to expand the park area and redesign access to major routes, transit services, and accessible parking (PBOT, 2020)

CHAPTER 3

Cities and Urban Studies: Four Perspectives on Art Museums Massimiliano Nuccio and Davide Ponzini

1   Introduction Art museums and cultural institutions, more generally, have often been perceived as special components of the physical, mental, and socioeconomic spaces of cities. Urban studies research and practice deal with the city from multiple perspectives and, therefore, approach museums in multiple manners, blending urban planning and design, urban sociology, and economics. This chapter reflects a broad definition of urban studies and investigates four perspectives on the relationship between cities and art museums by providing essential debates and examples drawing on international debates, though maintaining Europe and North America as the main focus.

M. Nuccio Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Venice, Italy D. Ponzini (*) Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 E. Redaelli (ed.), Visiting the Art Museum, Sociology of the Arts, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12089-3_3

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First of all, considering cities as sociopolitical organizations, art museums are bearers of civic and cultural values. Their buildings, spaces, and collections tend to embody or represent these values, which may be important for one or more local communities, the whole city, a country, or the entire world. In this sense, the decisions and organization of the museum in relation to the city’s political life is a core question. Second, in as much as cities are the infrastructure for socioeconomic activities, art museums can be central components of urban systems of cultural production and consumption. In recent years, the study of cultural clusters, districts, and quarters showed important dynamics and synergies among museums and cultural institutions as well as the creative economy and tourism. Third, from a physical point of view, art museums are important buildings or complexes that stand out in the urban fabric; in this sense, urban planning research and practice see museums as landmarks of an area or city. Several considerations regarding the urban experience of citizens and visitors as well as for planners descend from this third way of approaching museums. Finally, for multiple reasons, art museums have become a central component in urban regeneration plans and projects. Drawing on a joint overview of these perspectives and a set of short examples, this chapter portends a complex understanding about the relationship between art museums and cities and how urban planners and scholars approach it. This chapter asks, What can visitors learn about the art museum and the city from urban studies? We tackle this question from four perspectives, and in particular, we draw on a few of our previous publications positioning the investigation in the literature about museums in general. We discuss basic conceptualizations from values, to economies, to the built environment, and, finally, to future transformations and offer examples specific to art museums. Section 2 explains how museums can be seen as bearers of civic and cultural values and describes the emblematic case of Newcastle and Gateshead, in the United Kingdom. Section 3—based on Nuccio and Ponzini (2017) and Ponzini (2009)—analyses the connections between museums and cultural districts and illustrates the impact of the agglomeration of cultural institutions in the Mount Vernon Cultural District in Baltimore, Maryland. Section 4 brings to the forefront the role of museums in the city fabric, considering both museums as landmarks and their surroundings (based on Ponzini, 2020). Finally, Sect. 5—based on Ponzini (2011)—focuses on museums as flagships and provides a critical perspective on the case of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. The

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conclusion brings this thread together to show four ways through which visitors and citizens can see the connections between the city and the art museum.

2   Museums as Bearers of Civic and Cultural Values Cities clearly can be seen as the hard infrastructure for organizing a society in space. City centers, transportation systems, squares, and other physical elements are key components in the urban form. At the same time, cities are sociopolitical organizations that generate and transform urban forms and how they function. In this second role, organizations and their existence heavily depend on culture, symbols, and other ways to convey and share meaning both related and unrelated to specific spaces. Art museums are typically bearers of civic and cultural values for the citizens and, in most cases, the rest of the region or the entire world as well. The physical spaces of art museums tend to embody or represent these values, which mirror the status of the city or its history. They typically display the positive features of the city, including the economic, political, and sociocultural power represented through the height or aesthetic of the museum building and the beauty of the collection it showcases. Art museums play a specific role because they are very often considered at the top of the museum hierarchy, collecting and exhibiting the best of human intellectual production. A debate around the position of the art museum in society and its practical functions is even more relevant after the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak when the role of the arts and cultural institutions has been questioned and many institutions have experienced crisis, downsizing, and sometimes closure. The opinions about the role of a museum can be polarized around two main opposed perspectives—aesthetic and utilitarian—which can include other subcategories, like educational and political (O’Neill, 2008). The advocates for the first aesthetic perspective share the idea that works of art do not need a justification for their existence or their role in carrying public meanings, since they carry intrinsic cultural, aesthetic, and inspirational value. This seems like an ideal and even utopian conception of the arts. It results in a museum serving exclusively aesthetic purposes stemming from early modernism and Théophile Gautier’s idea of art for art’s sake, art that has an intrinsic value and is divorced from any didactic, moral, or utilitarian function (Spencer, 1969). In this perspective, the

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museum may end up having a position that is totally autonomous from local society and the city it belongs to. The opposing point of view states that a museum as a public institution has a clear utilitarian function for society and, as a result, has multiple socioeconomic responsibilities to fulfill. This view is still shared by most policymakers both in Europe and North America, although expected economic returns can take different forms according to different national museum traditions or cultural orientations. Current museum policies are more and more focused on the economic contribution of culture; therefore, the monetary subsidies of museums are viewed as an investment, and the budget allocation is based on measures and quantitative criteria (Frey & Meier, 2006). Within the dominant utilitarian domain of museum functions, the social impact of museums has gained importance. We tend to agree that “museums play a formative role in defining and reproducing social relationships through their policies and narrative practices” (Coffee, 2008, p.  267). However, social impact is open to the opposite interpretation. Many describe museum spaces and exhibitions as elitist, overall degrading, and serving the interests of the ruling classes; others express appreciation toward the representation of humanity through museum collections and the essential democratizing role of museums when they are public. Regarding the latter dilemma, engagement with sociopolitical life at the urban and national levels is key to understanding the functioning of museums and art museums in particular. Controversies may emerge between those who support the inclusive role of the museum as a platform for exchange and discussion and those who stress that art displayed in the public realm is socially exclusive and, therefore, intrinsically divisive (Taylor, 2017). The question of who decides about museum programming has raised mixed answers where regimes and committees include the art establishment (critics, curators, scholars), private stakeholders, or public parties. In any case, elites typically remain in charge of decisions that affect the orientation of museums and, more or less directly, their relationship with the city and its sociopolitical life. The connection with visitors and “consumers” may have different arrangements in public or nonprofit museums. In many cases during the last 30 years, newly opened art museums represent a point of reference in relaunching the public perception and image of an area or a whole city. This occurrence has been led by two development approaches, which are not necessarily always in opposition with each

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other. The first, the civic identity model, responds to citizens’ and residents’ needs. The other, the city boosterism model, is more driven by other stakeholders, sometimes even international ones. The civic identity model promotes the local identity by projecting it on flagship buildings and artworks. Through this approach aim of policymakers has been to increase the city’s inhabitants’ sense of belonging and identification with the local cultural heritage. Art museums can increase the level of local pride pursued through cultural interventions by encouraging participation in social life. In the city boosterism model, interventions of an artistic and cultural nature carried out in urban areas have the main purpose of attracting media attention, investments, and tourists to the city. In these types of activities, particular attention is paid to the creation of events and amenities with great visibility and to the development of real estate and commercial investments capable of generating economic wealth. These are strategies often identified with place marketing with the aim of repositioning and revitalizing an area that has lost its reputation and attractiveness over time. It should also be noted that in this model the attraction is not aimed only at tourism but also at various stakeholders, most prominently in the real estate economy. An emblematic case of a cultural-led development that starts from a value rather than an economic and social dimension is the one that took place beginning in the mid-1990s in the two cities of Newcastle and Gateshead in the northeast of England (Bailey et al., 2004; Miles, 2004). Newcastle-Gateshead has undergone a strong change in the collective imagination, transforming itself from a declining area threatened by a strong economic crisis to a beacon of cultural attraction. Over the years this initiative adopted a more boosterish approach. The huge investments made in the two cities for the creation of cultural and entertainment infrastructures, combined with the realization of various events in the artistic field, have promoted the Newcastle-Gateshead area as a component of the cities’ cultural districts. The change has particularly affected the neighborhoods along the banks of the River Tyne that separate the two towns that are commonly referred to as the Quayside. The cultural investments made in Newcastle-Gateshead and the urban regeneration that followed allow us to position this initiative in part as city marketing aimed at improving the competitive position of the cities, attracting investments, and improving their image. In 2002, the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art opened in Gateshead with the aim of being

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the largest institution dedicated to contemporary art in the UK after the Tate Modern in London. The project began with the idea of renewing the BALTIC Flour Mills, a large abandoned warehouse, and hence, the decision to maintain the original structure of the building, whose industrial past is one of the main attractions for the inhabitants of the area. The link with its industrial identity is also expressed in the mission of this center, which defines itself as an “art factory” and which therefore places its emphasis not on the conservation of existing works but on the production of the same with the consequent attraction of artists to the area. The emphasis placed on production is then confirmed in the artistic programming of the BALTIC itself, which does not have a permanent collection but is dedicated to the production and hosting of temporary exhibitions. Some factors characterizing the Newcastle-Gateshead area make it possible to frame its project in the development model of civic identity. Policy interventions were aimed at public commitment and community participation to stimulate their involvement in the cultural life of the cities, therefore improving the image of the area in the perception of the people who live there. These interventions are essentially of two types: The first is the attempt to encourage the direct participation of citizens in artistic production, while the second consists of creating events primarily targeting the citizens with the aim of engaging them and generating political consensus. Similarly, there are numerous elements define Newcastle-­ Gateshead as strongly oriented toward a city boosterism strategy. Adopting this perspective, the development of a cultural district on the riverfront could be seen as driven by the pursuit of place marketing and area-­ repositioning objectives. The goal was, therefore, to change the external perception of the area by allowing the attraction of capital and tourists from the UK and beyond. Investments in physical capital incurred for the construction of large flagship buildings, the BALTIC among them, certainly fall within this sphere, since an orientation simply to the local public would certainly not have led to the construction of infrastructures of this size and scope. Although art museums are bearers of civic values and strengthen the production and reproduction of local identity, these effects are not only difficult to monitor, but they also develop over the medium and long term along a slow and site-specific process of accumulation and hybridization. In this sense, art museums should not be asked to become an immediate agent for cultural or urban change but can contribute through their cultural identity and civic values according to their constituency and in

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keeping with their mission (Lindsay, 2018). Also, they are active players in multiple urban policies—though sometimes ancillary to other interests— beyond cultural policy.

3   Museums as Anchors in Cultural Districts In as much as cities support socioeconomic activities, museums are central components of urban systems of cultural production and consumption. In recent years, the study of cultural clusters, districts, and quarters showed important dynamics and synergies among museums and cultural institutions as well as the creative economy and tourism. Multiple disciplines have explained the role of cultural production and consumption in urban and regional development from different angles. The spatial organization of the cultural and creative economy has been labeled as cultural clusters, quarters, and districts, often with limited distinction between the three terms. Specialized cultural firms and organizations with different geographic locations and within urban and regional areas of different sizes have been studied. Agglomeration economies are indeed recognized as sources of advantage for localization and clustering of specialization and complementarity in many industrial sectors, including the ones with high cultural content (Redaelli, 2019). Beyond the economic rationale, more socially complex models of agglomeration and development are capable of developing their own cognitive structures for combinations of material and social capital. In particular, the attention to knowledge spillovers and different forms of nonmaterial capital contributed to the understanding of the role of culture in the processes of local development. Museums, in particular, are recognized as key in the transition to the knowledge and creative economies, which typically rely on strong symbolic values that the museums and other cultural institutions bear and reproduce. Since the 2000s, concepts of cultural districts, clusters, and quarters have been used in slightly different manners according to their scale and size, and their local and national contexts, and the understanding of the culture in the local economy. According to Scott (2004) and Santagata (2006), recurrent features, such as the advantages of the given natural clusters, districts, or quarters, are capable of internalizing the positive externalities of culture, fostering capacity building, and improving social capital. Clusters, districts, and quarters typically leverage common urban infrastructure and, of course, economies of agglomeration.

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With reference to the city, the geographical scale of these agglomerations typically falls into two types: in sub-units of metropolitan areas they take the form urban cultural quarter or district, while in suburban, or less urbanized settings, cultural clustering leans more on the original idea of industrial districts and clusters. In general, cultural consumption and entertainment are described in the literature as the economic motors for more urban agglomerations, while production and the management of common advantages across firms and institutions justify the second type. In his groundbreaking study, Walter Santagata (2002) developed a taxonomy for cultural districts that became an important reference. He suggested four ideal types of cultural districts: industrial, institutional, and two versions of quasi-cultural districts, which typically might be a museum cultural district or a metropolitan cultural district. Other scholars further expanded this approach into the so-called system-wide cultural district model (Sacco et al., 2013), arguing about the productive orientation of the cultural district and the strategic policy links with multiple productive chains. Cities and regions can promote horizontal integration of cultural institutions and other organizations to improve the creation and spread of knowledge and innovation capacities to attract attention and talents and to support economic growth and the generation of new enterprises (Nuccio & Ponzini, 2017). The example of the Mount Vernon Cultural District in Baltimore, shows the relevance of the agglomeration as well as the active role that cultural institutions and museums can have in changing the functioning and perception of an urban environment (Ponzini, 2009). Besides its historic importance for being home to the upper-middle class until after the Second World War, and as the symbolic center of the city, the Mount Vernon neighborhood includes key icons for the whole city of Baltimore: the first monument of George Washington, the first Roman Catholic Church of the United States, the first research university of the United States, and numerous other cultural institutions. Despite the cultural and architectural quality of this place, significant decline pushed a group of cultural institutions and local stakeholders to recognize the neighborhood as a sort of common campus for their cultural offerings. In 1996  in particular, a group of cultural institutions (the Peabody Institute, Walters Art Museum, Enoch Pratt Free Library, and Basilica of the Assumption of the Archdiocese of Baltimore), foundations (the Goldseker Foundation and Annie E.  Casey Foundation), and residents’ and property owners’ associations joined forces to develop the Mount

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Vernon Cultural District (MVCD). The main goals of the group were to promote the attractiveness of the area and to face common problems and opportunities that were expected to derive from the substantial investments in the cultural facilities that were planned for the new future (MVCD, 1996). The Baltimore City Planning Department, the Baltimore Development Corporation, the Downtown Partnership, and others cooperated with cultural institutions in supporting this initiative (Ponzini, 2009). The MVCD improved the infrastructure conditions and image of the district and its distinctive cultural and architectural features. Substantial capital investments by public, private, and nonprofit organizations improved the functioning of individual cultural places, as well as public spaces like the central Mount Vernon Place park, and facilities that carried out production and consumption activities that support the development of the culture of the city and entertainment opportunities (bars and restaurants and retail, more generally). Institutions like the Peabody Conservatory of Music (part of Johns Hopkins University) and the Basilica of the Assumption invested significantly in renovating their cultural facilities and their relationship to public spaces and the urban realm. They improved access and circulation around cultural hotspots, and they targeted a stronger presence in the given spaces. These and other institutions promoted real estate acquisitions and renovations that enhanced the presence of students and higher-income populations and facilitated cultural, entertainment, and tourist activities as well as, in some instances, at the expense of lower-income residents and users of those spaces. Among the MVCD actors, the Walters Art Museum followed similar tactics and made significant improvements to its facilities and relationship to the public space, mostly notably the renovation and expansion of one large portion of the museum complex in 2001 and subsequent interventions to its historic facilities and the museum’s connection with the public realm. The museum benefited dramatically not only from the high density of other cultural institutions in the neighborhood but also from joining forces with them and improving the area as a common campus for the cultural district. Over the years, the MVCD organization promoted cultural activities in public spaces and increased attention on both the historic buildings and cultural activities, improving the image of the area and supporting economic and social activities that were complementary to cultural ones. The connection with real estate actors and the improved perception of the Mount Vernon area boosted further investments, including renovation of

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the housing, where was targeted to the upper-middle-class demographic. Overall, the functioning of this cultural district was successful in promoting the interests of museums and cultural intuitions as well as other pro-­ growth actors. However, the limited influence of public actors, such as the City Planning Department, and the idea that the decline of the area’s image was directly connected to the presence of low-income housing, homelessness, and other social problems made this experience socially unbalanced. Other cultural districts and quarters elsewhere in the US as well as Europe were successful in supporting a wider set of social groups. Cultural industries and tourism economies have been considered important drivers of economic growth in contemporary cities, and very often the arts and museums have been under recognized for the role they play in urban systems, being classified as simply urban amenities, tourist attractors, icons, or other ways to improve spending and consumption in a given area (Nuccio, 2015; Kresl & Ietri, 2017). The COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated that the functioning of museums extends beyond the presence of an audience or serving stakeholders in the tourism economy. It also highlighted other relevant functions of art museums, like heritage preservation, collection management, and scientific and artistic research that are at the base of any public activity. In many cities, cultural and tourism economies have become so important for the city as a whole suggesting that the economic effects of museums, and cultural institutions more generally, are the most important signifier of this success. In our view, however, these economic contributions constitute only a fraction of the important roles played by museums in cities.

4   Museums as Landmarks in the City Fabric An area or a city may contain museums that are longstanding landmarks while others are newly created landmarks. From the physical point of view, museums are important buildings or complexes that often stand out in the urban fabric and are very visible. The typical strategy for ensuring their prominence is to contrast the building against its physical and visual setting. In other words, the strategy consists in the emergence, prominence, and distinction of the museum structure from the more common city fabric (Venturi et al., 1972). The visual and perceptive dimensions of cities are typically at the foucs of architectural and urban design disciplines. One may not, however, underestimate their relevance in planning and urban studies debates and,

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in turn, the importance of planning practice in conceiving and managing the presence of museums in cities. As part of a more general reasoning regarding the urban experience, Kevin Lynch (1960) argued for the importance of the discrete visualization of districts and landmarks since the city cannot be visualized as a whole. How people perceive the urban fabric may shift over time and may depend on transformation as well as meaningful experiences. The legibility of the urban space and the built environment is crucial for people’s understanding of the city. In particular, images that stick in people’s minds (as part of what are typically mental maps) may build a collective perception of complex and even fragmented regions that one may call a city in the contemporary Western world. Landmarks have a prominent position in this conceptualization of the city. People use them for wayfinding as well as for making sense of entire quadrants of cities. They may be a permanent reference (a bell tower, a high chimney of an old industrial plant, etc.) in an evolving urban environment. Within this set of special buildings, museums can stand out for their façade or other distinctive architectural features and the experience of its spaces that carry significant and rich meanings attached to art and culture. More specifically, museums often constitute focal points or are a part of the city central areas. Museum quarters’ visual and perceptive recognizability within cities relies on museums distinctive facades, their unique historic buildings, and the like. Museums and cultural institutions populate central open spaces in cities, such as parks and squares, and may have different tactics for the choice of their locations. They may occupy a corner or border of an open space, making them visible from afar, or they may stand at the endpoint of an explicit path, for example, in a public park or in connection with public art installations (Lorente, 2019). In many cases, the image of special buildings like museums may become a reference in communicating and even further developing the future city, as we discuss in Sect. 5 of this chapter. In their classic book Learning from Las Vegas, Robert Venturi et  al. (1972) explored the complexity of the architectural form and urban environment in the 1960s and 1970s. In their pragmatic view, the existing urban environment was contradictory and challenging to urban planners and designers; nonetheless, reading the elements that composed fragmented cities like Las Vegas was key for designers to be effective. In particular, outstanding buildings may communicate in two ways: the “duck” and the “decorated shed” (Venturi et al., 1972, p. 87) The duck building has forms that are symbolic of its contents; the term is derived from the

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example used in the book, a duck-shaped shop building that a Long Island duck farmer used to publicize his products. The decorated shed suggests the strategy of attaching architectural elements and general symbols to a standard building to signify its relevance and contents. In particular, Venturi et al. (1972) emphasize how billboards are part of the Las Vegas (and more generally North American) landscape and are incorporated in various ways into the design and visualization of buildings. The provocative examples about this second type include a billboard stating “I am a monument” positioned over a generic building. Clearly, the duck and the decorated shed strategies are relevant for museums that are part of the city fabric or that are expected to drive change within it. The surprise and abrupt appearance of cultural facilities only recently became part of the urban design language and contemporary city patterns with one, the other, or both types of architectural communication. For example, the spark juxtaposition of the Kunsthaus Graz in Austria—designed by architects Peter Cook and Colin Fournier—to the historic city center led to nicknames like the “Friendly Alien” or “Blue Bubble” (Dreher et al., 2020). More generally, the perception and visualization of any building depend on its surroundings. In this sense, the presence and prominence of museums in part depend on land-use planning regulations and restrictions. Limiting the height of buildings near a museum may grant it visibility from a distance. Regulating alignments and even features on the façade of buildings adjacent to a focal point limits impairments and distractions to the eye. The connection of the museum with complementary functions and places also depends on regulation and other planning tools that sustain public spaces, such as controlling and coordinating the presence of streets, parking lots, shops, street vendors, and other elements in conjunction with the museum. In other words, the assemblage of the museum as an urban and cultural place that is embedded in the built environment in its physical context is an important planning matter that cannot be conceived as a mere technical problem for designers (Alaily-Mattar et  al., 2020). The assemblage approach and the understanding of the built environment as one of the key agents have been explored (Beauregard, 2015), though the discussion of the functioning and success of museums in their urban context under this perspective would require further attention and research.

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5  Flagship Museums in Urban Regeneration For multiple reasons, contemporary museums and contemporary art museums, in particular, have become central components within urban regeneration plans and projects. One reason clearly derives from the previous argument on urban landmarks where the creation of a new museum building focuses the attention, in part, on people visiting the area as well as on media. Since the 1990s, iconic interventions are told to be capable of branding projects, triggering regeneration, and changing the fate of an urban area and of a city altogether (Ponzini, 2013). The idea that museum architecture and, more specifically, the architecture of outstanding buildings may alone be capable of reimaging and rebranding contemporary cities is widespread even though there is little evidence to confirm this proposition. Even though key decisions are made by other elite actors, the figure of the architect gained importance and moved to center stage in the communication of the urban planning processes that use this kind of architectural narrative. The case of the regeneration of Bilbao’s waterfront in the second half of the 1990s and the role that the Guggenheim Bilbao Museum played in it has been perhaps the most cited in the academic literature and in public debates (Fig. 3.1). A critical reconsideration of this

Fig. 3.1  Guggenheim Bilbao Museum, Spain and the waterfront. (Source: Michele Nastasi)

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case may help cast light on the contribution of iconic, spectacular flagship museums to urban regeneration. The Guggenheim Foundation is a world-acclaimed museum institution for modern and contemporary art. It is based in New York in an iconic building facing Central Park designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. Besides this building and the one in Venice, the Guggenheim Foundation gained further global prominence for its spectacular building designed by Frank Gehry and inaugurated in Bilbao in 1997. The building attracted significant attention because of its innovative aesthetic and especially for being the centerpiece of the large redevelopment of a former industrial site on the waterfront of the Nervion River. Most assessments of this operation are positive and tend to celebrate museum’s impact on the overall renaissance of the city. However, the narratives that promote cultural-led regeneration typically overemphasize the importance of the museum itself (its structure, its image, or the number of visitors and tourists attracted in the years after the opening, for example) and ignore other urban factors that contributed to the economic revitalization and urban regeneration of the area (Ponzini & Nastasi, 2016). In this way, the messages putting the iconic museum building at center stage and its association with its starchitect affected the debate in several cities around the world, inducing extremely high expectations and putting the Guggenheim Foundation in the position of promoting a number of similar projects. A branch opened in Berlin in 1997 (and closed in 2013), and two opened in Las Vegas (Guggenheim Las Vegas 2001–2003 and Guggenheim Hermitage Museum 2001–2008). However, the Guggenheim has had numerous unsuccessful museum initiatives, including in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Taichung, Taiwan; Guadalajara, Mexico; Hong Kong; Vilnius, Lithuania; and others. Among the ongoing projects, the most promising in terms of completion is the one in Abu Dhabi, UAE.  It is part of a large cultural district being developed on Saadiyat Island in connection with other institutions, such as the Louvre Abu Dhabi museum, which opened in 2017 (Ponzini et al., 2020). These expectations draw on an oversimplified understanding of the role of museums and propose a linear and apparently causal explanation for the presence of a flagship museum as the motor of urban transformation, rather than perceiving the museum as a symbol for a phase of an area’s renaissance. The redevelopment of the riverfront in Bilbao was led by Bilbao Ria 2000, a public-private agency financed by the Basque government, the city and the province, the port authority, two railway companies, and the

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city of Barakaldo. This agency had the mission of promoting investments in derelict areas and urban infrastructures throughout the city and region. The financial mechanism supporting the redevelopment operations of this public-private agency included the land assembled by its shareholders or other stakeholders, land-use rezoning that could be fast-tracked by the public authorities, and improvements to the accessibility of the area in addition to the master plan design, development, and sales. This mechanism implied that the returns were to be reinvested in the improvement of the area or in other operations of public interest as defined by the shareholders of Bilbao Ria 2000. It is important to note that this agency was key in making the necessary legal, political, and economic resources available for promoting and realizing such large-scale developments in Bilbao. Among the resources utilized, massive public investments were carried out by the same network of actors, who could leverage national and supranational funds for developing the infrastructural system (a new subway and light rail system, a new airport, and other infrastructure added since the mid-1990s) as well as for economic revitalization and social cohesion (Plöger, 2007). All these planning measures together with other social, political, and economic factors contributed to urban change. The examples of the failed Guggenheim projects support the idea that fluxes in global economic activity and tourism and the allure and functioning of a city do not depend solely on one spectacular cultural facility. The connection with other cultural institutions and local interest groups with spaces of production and consumption and the image and visual identity of a city cannot be simply created by design, despite how prominent the designer may be. High expectations of museum architecture may lead to benefits for the promoters of such operations, such as global cultural institutions, starchitects, and real estate interests, that justify and concentrate enormous public investments and the bypassing of planning procedures (e.g., in terms of land-use regulations and height limitations) for the museum and the surrounding area to be developed. These expectations are often not matched with long-term positive effects, and they have been problematized in the academic debate. After closely analyzing this complex case, we think that cities today may turn their attention to new and spectacular museums with more complex approaches than relying on star power. For example, location is key. A redevelopment scheme must connect with not only the urban context but also the infrastructure and local system of cultural offerings and

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economies. In this way, a museum building can be put into its urban context in different manners as part of the city and area. The museum organization, then, becomes one of the many actors involved in urban transformation and may contribute to fostering certain trends of development or preventing potential side effects (e.g., gentrification and the expulsion of functions, populations, and users). However, the starting conditions affect the potential processes as well. Recent empirical studies confirm that positive spillovers and agglomeration economies are at work mainly in larger clusters (Gutierrez-Posada et  al., 2021), while smaller urban districts and second- and third-tier cities struggle to generate positive effects solely from the existence of an iconic brand-new art museum. Art museums play a pivotal role in creating clusters and favor extended processes of urban regeneration (Sacco et  al., 2013). However, a longstanding debate argues about the side effects of culture-led regeneration, such as overtourism and gentrification. Art museums and cultural institutions that partake in these processes can explore their role in other urban and social policies that can counterbalance the negative effects for the weakest social groups in an area or the city (Ponzini, 2009). The lesson learned from urban planning showed that in order to avoid white-elephant effects—consisting in building something too expensive to build and maintain—architectural interventions should take into consideration the urban fabric and landscape. New urban landmarks and aesthetics can certainly affect real estate markets, but they can also radically change the perception of places and their use both in positive and negative terms. It is difficult to generalize the outcome since art museums in different cities have different impacts on the urban experience of their citizens and visitors. The transformative effects of buildings and areas rely on a strong path dependency, namely an influence of the past on the local opportunities of change. This suggests an in-depth understanding of the cultural values at stake and the needed contextual conditions to avoid one-size-fits-­ all approaches. Urban and cultural policy research may support these processes by providing in-depth and contextualized analyses of other comparable cases as well as by supporting the production of usable knowledge (Ponzini, 2020).

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6  Conclusions In the public debate, cultural institutions and museums are typically depicted as benevolent actors, as much as they produce, reproduce, and support culture. However, through the lens of urban studies, visitors can learn that the relationship between art museums and cities is ambivalent and may change according to the specific geographical and historic context. We highlighted four perspectives of the role of the art museum, and museums in general, in the city: as bearers of civic and cultural values, as anchors of cultural districts, as landmarks connected to their surroundings, and as flagship institutions. However, these dimensions are not independent of one another, and the literature in urban studies just recently started exploring the interaction among them. Museums and their buildings can generate powerful narratives that strengthen social cohesion and exert the power of the status quo. Museums have been often portrayed as places of social inclusion and openness, but in fact, their role in urban affairs (and politics) sometimes entails a quite elitist decision-making system. As we argued, cultural institutions and museums have become, in some cases, supporters of urban transformations or regeneration projects that are focused on the interests and functioning of a museum, rather than to those within the local community. In other cases, museums may cater to certain specific groups and cultural values only. In this sense, our urban perspective provides a rich and nuanced picture of the role of museums in contemporary cities, calling for a more place-based understanding.

References Alaily-Mattar, N., Ponzini, D., & Thierstein, A. (Eds.). (2020). About Star Architecture: Reflecting on Cities in Europe. Springer Nature. Bailey, C., Miles, S., & Stark, P. (2004). Culture-led Urban Regeneration and the Revitalisation of Identities in Newcastle, Gateshead and the North East of England. International Journal of Cultural Policy, 10(1), 47–65. Beauregard, R. (2015). We Blame the Building! The Architecture of Distributed Responsibility. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 39(3), 533–549. Coffee, K. (2008). Cultural Inclusion, Exclusion and the Formative Roles of Museums. Museum Management and Curatorship, 23(3), 261–279. Downtown Retail Council and Portland Development Commission. (1999). District Retail Strategies: Phase 1. City of Portland.

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Dreher, J., Alaily-Mattar, N., & Thierstein, A. (2020). The Multifarious Effects of Star Architecture: The Case of the Kunsthaus Graz. In N. Alaily-Mattar, D. Ponzini, & A. Thierstein (Eds.), About Star Architecture: Reflecting on Cities in Europe (pp. 153–168). Springer Nature. Frey, B. S., & Meier, S. (2006). The Economics of Museums. In Handbook of the Economics of Art and Culture (Vol. 1, pp. 1017–1047). Elsevier. Gutierrez-Posada, D., Kitsos, T., Nathan, M., & Nuccio, M. (2021). Do Creative Industries Generate Multiplier Effects? Evidence from UK Cities, 1997–2018. PEC-Nesta White Paper. London. Kresl, P. K., & Ietri, D. (2017). Creating Cities/Building Cities. Architecture and Urban Competitiveness. Edward Elgar. Lindsay, G. (2018). One Icon, Two Audiences: How the Denver Art Museum Used Their New Building to Both Brand the City and Bolster Civic Pride. Journal of Urban Design, 23(2), 193–205. Lorente, J. (2019). Public Art and Museums in Cultural Districts. Routledge. Lynch, K. (1960). The Image of the City. MIT Press. Miles, S. (2004). Newcastle Gateshead Quayside: Cultural Investment and Identities of Resistance. Capital & Class, 28(3), 183–189. MVCD [Mount Vernon Cultural District]. (1996). Action plan. Mimeo. Nuccio, M. (2015). Capital of Culture and Capital from Culture: Rhetoric and Risks of the Cultural ‘Growth Machine’. Urbanistica, 155, 91–95. Nuccio, M., & Ponzini, D. (2017). What Does a Cultural District Actually Do? Critically Reappraising 15 Years of Cultural District Policy in Italy. European Urban and Regional Studies, 24(4), 405–424. O’Neill, M. (2008). Museums, Professionalism and Democracy. Cultural Trends, 17(4), 289–307. PBOT. (2020). A Concept for a Connected Cultural District. City of Portland. Plöger, J. (2007). Bilbao. City Report. LSE CASEreport 43. London. http:// sticerd.lse.ac.uk/dps/case/cr/CASEreport43.pdf Ponzini, D. (2009). Urban Implications of Cultural Policy Networks: The Case of the Mount Vernon Cultural District in Baltimore. Environment and Planning C: Government and Policy, 27(3), 433–450. Ponzini, D. (2011). The Guggenheim Effect and the Roles of Star Architecture in Contemporary Cities. Finnish Journal of Urban Studies, 49, 60–75. Ponzini, D. (2013). Branded Megaprojects and Fading Urban Structure in Contemporary Cities. In G. Del Cerro Stantamaria (Ed.), Urban Megaprojects: A Worldwide View (pp. 107–129). Emerald. Ponzini, D. (2020). Transnational Architecture and Urbanism: Rethinking How Cities Plan, Transform, and Learn. Routledge. Ponzini, D., & Nastasi, M. (2016). Starchitecture: Scenes, Actors and Spectacles in Contemporary Cities. Monacelli Press.

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Ponzini, D., Ruoppila, S., & Jones, Z.  M. (2020). What Difference Does Democratic Local Governance Make? Guggenheim Museum Initiatives in Abu Dhabi and Helsinki. Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, 38(2), 347–365. Redaelli, E. (2019). Connecting Arts and Place: Cultural Policy and American Cities. Palgrave Macmillan. Sacco, P. L., Ferilli, G., Blessi, G. T., & Nuccio, M. (2013). Culture as an Engine of Local Development Processes: System-Wide Cultural Districts II: Prototype Cases. Growth and Change, 44(4), 571–588. Santagata, W. (2002). Cultural Districts, Property Rights and Sustainable Economic Growth. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 26(1), 9–23. Santagata, W. (2006). Cultural Districts and Their Role in Developed and Developing Economies. In V. Ginsbourg & D. Throsby (Eds.), Handbook on the Economics of Art and Culture (pp. 1101–1119). Elsevier. Scott, A.  J. (2004). Cultural-Products Industries and Urban Economic Development Prospects for Growth and Market Contestation in Global Context. Urban Affairs Review, 39(4), 461–490. Spencer, M. C. (1969). The Art Criticism of Théophile Gautier. Librairie Droz. Taylor, C. (2017). From Systemic Exclusion to Systemic Inclusion: A Critical Look at Museums. Journal of Museum Education, 42(2), 155–162. Venturi, R., Brown, D. S., & Izenour, S. (1972). Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form. MIT Press.

Main and Mark Building: A hybrid structure The Portland Art Museum features a hybrid structure that brings together two buildings created at different times. The main building was designed by Pietro Belluschi and opened to the public in 1932. The Mark Building, just next door, was originally built as a masonic temple and was purchased by PAM in 1994. Renovated in 2005, the building now hosts the PAM’s modern and contemporary galleries. It also houses the museum library and storage. The two buildings are connected through a tunnel underground, which is also used as exhibition space (Portland Art Museum, n.d.)

CHAPTER 4

Buildings and Architecture: Typologies That Defy Definition Zachary M. Jones and Marzia Loddo

1   Introduction If you travel to the city of Milan, during your stay you might visit a family apartment, a grand palace, an old tire factory, and a Starchitect-designed icon. Despite their differences in size, structure, style, history, and urban context, what do these buildings have in common? They are all art museums! The Poldi Pezzoli Museum started as the home of the Pezzoli family, which was built into the fabric of the historic city center, and it housed their nineteenth-century art collection. The Brera Art Gallery is the city’s main public gallery for painting housed in an impressive seventeenth-­ century city palace that previously served as a monastery. Opened in 2012, the Pirelli Hangar Bicocca has become an important contemporary art exhibition space for Milan housed in the tire manufacturer’s former factory building. The Museo delle Culture di Milano (Mudec) was designed

Z. M. Jones (*) Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy e-mail: [email protected] M. Loddo TU Delft, Delft, The Netherlands © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 E. Redaelli (ed.), Visiting the Art Museum, Sociology of the Arts, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12089-3_4

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by Stararchitect David Chipperfield and is located in the Tortona neighborhood, a former industrial area that has been converted to the city’s cultural hub through the presence of Mudec and several other nearby institutions. Despite having very little in common, architecturally or otherwise, these four museums from the same city highlight the diversity and adaptability of the art museum typology, which defies a simple definition. This Milanese example is by no means extraordinary. Perhaps you can think of a similar set of examples from your own city. Though these museums share a basic kit of parts internally—entrance lobby, ticket area, coat check, gallery spaces, café and bookshop, storage, offices, etc.—there is little continuity in their scale or arrangement, and they do not dictate a clearly defined architectural typology for art museums. From an urban perspective, there is likewise little commonality in terms of how art museums interact with their urban environments or in how visitors experience them (Roos et  al., 2019). Some art museums fade into their context entirely, particularly when they’re housed in preexisting structures. Other times they are intended to serve as icons for an entire city and, thereby, stand out as much as possible from their context. Many others fall somewhere in between: standing out to a certain degree through their scale or architectural style while aiming to relate to and fit within their context (Macdonald, 2011). Art museums are by no means the only architectural typology to stretch conventional definitions and approaches. Take for example the conversion of a former industrial structure. When such a building gets transformed into housing, the overall space is divided into individual units with the required amenities inserted—in effect the existing structure adapts to the needs of the housing typology. Whereas in converting an industrial space to an art museum, the typology adapts to and preserves many of the existing spaces. This approach can be seen in the Tate Modern in London, where the massive spaces of the previous Bankside Power Station have become some of the museum’s defining features. In the Centrale Montemartini Museum in Rome, much of the machinery from the original power plant remains intact and provides a contrasting backdrop to the collection of ancient art on display. This adaptability of art museums is one factor that has led to their widespread diffusion in cities across the world while simultaneously giving new life to previously unused or undervalued spaces (Tzortzi, 2016), particularly industrial ones, that were otherwise at risk of being demolished.

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It is with the architecture that visitors first interact with the museum and through which they are introduced to the collection itself. In this chapter, we intend to present the architecture of art museums as a bridge between the city and the art itself, exploring the question, What does the visitor learn about the art museum and the building from architecture? We are not interested in defining an ideal approach or method for designing art museums but rather recognizing and embracing the resistance to a strict typology, seeing it as an asset and how it may dictate the future of art museums. To explore these themes, Sect. 2 traces the evolution of the museum typology and the forces influencing these changes from imperialism and mass tourism to the ever-growing expansion of collections, the global development of the cultural sector, and the ever-increasing threats from climate change. In Sect. 3, we present several examples of existing structures converted to art museums, looking at how and why these came about as well as the diversity in outcomes. We then examine newly created structures specifically designed as art museums in Sect. 4 to define more precisely some of the ways that art museums have been positioned in city development and promotion. In Sect. 5, we survey hybrid examples of art museums expanded with an addition designed to create a cohesive composition by blending in with the original structure or to produce a dynamic contrast that draws attention to the museum. These three categories are intentionally as simplistic as possible so as to demonstrate the wide range of approaches to the buildings and architecture that resist an overly structured typology. Through such a wide range of examples, in the Conclusions we then reflect on the future evolution of the architecture of art museums and how it might respond to recently emerging trends and global changes.

2  The Evolving Typologies of Art Museums It is not by accident or even necessarily intent that art museums have developed such broad architectural forms; rather, they have derived from or responded to a range of factors. These include the opening of private collections, promoting visions of empire, attracting mass tourism, the expanding of collections over time, the growth of the cultural sector, and the looming threat of climate change, to name some of the primary ones. In the West, some of the earliest private collections of art and antiquities can be traced to those in the possession of noble families and the church in the middle of the fourteenth century in Italy. Those of the Medici and Farnese families are some of the most famous dynastic collections, which

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were used to enhance the fame and renown of their families. Meanwhile, Sixtus IV created the first conception of the Capitoline collection in 1471, which was largely open to the public (Marani & Pavoni, 2006). These early collections were meant to demonstrate the power of city-states and were the precursors to public museums, which were meant to demonstrate the power and conquest of nations and empires (Giebelhausen, 2003; Schubert, 2000). The modern conception of the public museum emerged by the mid-­ eighteenth century in Europe and the second half of the nineteenth century in North America. This period saw the general growth of museums beyond just art and antiquities to include history, archaeology, geology, biology, and anthropology. The British Museum in London was founded, with limited access, in 1759 and was followed by the Louvre in Paris, opening to the public in 1793. Both institutions served as cultural symbols of their respective imperialist expansions. By 1870, Germany had followed suit, and the three nations regularly filled their collections with gains from conquests and archaeological digs in other countries. Growing collections necessitated the expansion of buildings through additions or the creation of new museums. With a strong focus on chronological presentation and political ideology, museum spaces were, until the end of the nineteenth century, crowded and congested, overfilled with objects and art that overwhelmed visitors (Bennett, 2013). The beginning of the twentieth century saw the introduction of new ideas regarding art museums. Going beyond a presentation of national power, more focused and smaller exhibitions emerged along with new functions. Following World War I, the American model began to become prominent, adding laboratories, libraries, workshops, and public educational services to the tradition of gallery exhibitions. In the 1920s, Henry van de Velde created a museum entirely dedicated to a single artist: Van Gogh (Schubert, 2000). In 1929, Auguste Perret promoted a new model of “the modern museum” (Schubert, 2000, p. 58) that promoted smaller public collections, leading to a greater need for storage space within museum structures (Basso Peressut, 2005, p. 58). These changes even led to a rearrangement of the Louvre and the use of courtyard spaces within the palace structure in the 1930s (McClellan, 1999). A key moment arrived in 1934 with the International Conference Muséographie, Architecture et Aménagement de Musées d’art in Madrid, organized by the League of Nations. The first international meeting of museography professionals created a forum for museology and museum-architecture

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professionals to present and debate their differing views on the organization and design of museums. In addition to discussing architectonic spaces, they also covered emerging conservation-related technology from lighting and heating to the ventilation of the rooms (Loddo, 2020b). Overall, the early twentieth century oversaw a shift from primarily repurposing existing structures for museums to designing them explicitly to be a museum conceived as a common public asset. Throughout the twentieth century, the issue of storage space for growing collections became an increasingly pressing topic. Museums located within historic structures were faced with a lack of space and the inability to alter protected buildings. Newly created museums likewise had to consider such needs during the design process. For existing or newly created structures, in many instances the only solution was to turn to external warehouses and storage facilities. Until very recently, these structures have been largely hidden and, in some cases (such as with the Louvre), located up to 120 miles away from the main museum building. As will be discussed in detail below, this ever-growing need for more storage space has often been the impetus for expanding art museums, either by adding wings or floors or by building separate structures. Some of the most recent practices have even taken a new approach to storage facilities: Rather than being hidden, these structures are highlighted and promoted as innovative architectural solutions (Loddo, 2020b). The second half of the twentieth century following World War II introduced a wide range of new factors for the architecture of art museums. In Europe, many museums had been damaged during the war and required reconstruction and reorganization. This led to new ideas about museum buildings as no longer just a container for art but as a core element that could add value to the collections themselves (Huber & Mulazzani, 1997). Combined with the arrival of mass tourism and leisure culture, museums no longer existed just as a public good to educate local inhabitants but also as a powerful attractor—with significant economic incentives for city officials. The second half of the twentieth century saw the rise of Starchitect-­ designed museums (Lindsay, 2020), most notably in the case of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Spain, designed by Frank Gehry (Basso Peressut, 2005). Although it was by no means the first instance of a globally recognized architect designing a famous art museum, this museum spawned the concept of the Bilbao Effect—that an iconic museum designed by a famous architect could singlehandedly turn around the fortunes of an entire city. While this concept has been hotly debated in the

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years since, it has led to many instances of cities seeking to accomplish similar goals through the creation of an art museum. More recently, art museums have had to face the harsh reality of climate change. In 2002, the Préfecture de Police de Paris declared that all museums located near the River Seine were at risk of flooding and were required to house their storage in a safer location. This decree most notably affected the Louvre. The museum originally considered a location about 20 miles north of the city of Paris, but ultimately constructed the previously mentioned warehouse and storage facility—Centre de Conservation du Louvre—some 120 miles away in the city of Liévin (Loddo, 2020b). The new location of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City, designed by Renzo Piano and opened in 2015, was specifically designed to withstand flooding from rising sea levels. In 2012, the arrival of Hurricane Sandy to New York City proved the need for such measures; the under-­ construction Whitney experienced significant flooding, which led to a series of design changes. As museums are critical protectors of our shared artistic and cultural heritage, they must be prepared to withstand the many threats posed by climate change they must be prepared to withstand and adapt to the many threats posed by climate change.

3  Existing Structures as Art Museums Some of the earliest public art museums originated from royal, princely, and imperial collections made accessible to a broader audience. In such cases, the buildings housing these collections were part of the gift to the public. Whether following the French Revolution, in the case of the Louvre in Paris, or under more peaceful conditions, such as when King Charles Albert of Savoy inaugurated the Sabauda Gallery in Turin, Italy on his birthday, examples abound. The largest museum in the world, the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, is likewise hosted in a series of palaces that belonged to the czars. The collection begun by Catherine the Great in 1764 is held in not just in not just one but rather a series of residences employed to house the growing collections that now occupy the Winter Palace, the Small Hermitage, the Old Hermitage, and the Hermitage Theatre (The New Hermitage, built in 1852, was specially built to hold the expanding collection) (Marani & Pavoni, 2006). The Hermitage’s satellite museum branches have taken a similar approach; the Hermitage Amsterdam opened in 2009  in the seventeenth-century Amstelhof building, while the Hermitage-Kazan Exhibition Center is

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located within a former nineteenth-century school structure within the Kazan Kremlin fortress, a UNESCO World Heritage site. Residential houses converted to museums are also common, such as the Palazzo Abatellis in Palermo, Italy. Built in 1495, it was eventually converted to a monastery and after World War II a museum. The exhibition path was designed by architect Carlo Scarpa in 1953, and it is still preserved today as a historic setup (Huber & Mulazzani, 1997). In Genoa, Italy, the Palazzo Bianco and Palazzo Rosso, which are located across the street from each other, are two examples of residential palaces repurposed as art museum. They belonged to the same owner, the Dutchess Maria Brignole Sale De Ferrari, who donated her palaces to the city to provide Genoa with a painting gallery. They were both modified over the years, especially after World War II when the buildings needed structural renovations and some museography choices were made by architect Franco Albini. When entering these buildings, it is still possible to detect their origin as patrician residences through how the configuration of the rooms was retained and because they preserve the original decorations. Though the buildings were not originally designed as art museums, the exhibition layout choices made within them clearly indicate to visitors that these structures now function as art museums (Loddo, 2020a). In some instances where castles and palaces have been adapted to be museums, they not only have become containers to enhance the art displayed within them, but they also are themselves a key aspect of the museum offering. Some of the spaces are presented as reproductions of the original rooms in terms of their furnishings and uses while other spaces focus on the display of exhibitions. The Meissen Albrechtsburg Castle in Germany, the Stirling Castle in Scotland, the Châteaux of the Loire Valley in France, and the Royal Castle in Warsaw are just some of the many possible examples of structures that blur the line between their original function as noble residences and their current role as art museums. Clearly, many such examples can be found throughout Europe, but examples can also be found around the world, such as in the City Palace in Jaipur, India, which hosts the Maharaja Sawai Man Singh II Museum. One of the world’s most recognizable examples is, of course, the Palace Museum in Beijing, China, housed within the Forbidden City. Over time, not only did the collections and residences of royalty begin to open to the public but so did those of lower nobles and so-called gentlemen collectors. While the buildings that house these collections are typically much smaller and lack a sense of grandeur as compared to their

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royal counterparts, they provide a more intimate experience with the collection and tend to blend into their urban surroundings; they also tend to blend into their urban surroundings. The nature of these smaller collections also differs from classical art museums in that they reflect the tastes of a single collector, or perhaps one family, and are not burdened with having to represent the art of an entire era or style. The fact that such spaces were originally designed to house a handful of people rather than large groups of visitors influences the experience visitors have when moving through the spaces and interacting with the artwork. One eclectic example of a house converted to a museum is the Poldi Pezzoli Museum in Milan in which the design of every room in this former residence was originally inspired by a different style from the past, such as Medieval, Baroque, Renaissance, and Rococo. Donated to the Brera Art Gallery by Gian Giacomo Poldi Pezzoli in the nineteenth century, the rooms reflect his diverse tastes as he collected arts and objects and placed them around the house depending on his mood (Marani & Pavoni, 2006). Another quite eclectic example is the Sir John Soane’s Museum, which contains the various collections of the neoclassical architect Sir John Soane within a terrace house in central London. The museum is filled to the brim with his collections of paintings, sculptures, architecture models, and even the sarcophagus of Seti I. Examples of structures converted to art museums are by no means limited to residences of varying sizes. The Molenmuseum De Valk in the Netherlands is located in a windmill and hosts small exhibitions. A former salt warehouse was redesigned by Renzo Piano between 2000 and 2009 to become the Emilio and Annabianca Vedova Foundation in Venice to display Emilio’s own work (Loddo, 2020b). The Design Museum in London has a history of repurposing buildings; it was first located in a 1940s banana warehouse in the Shad Thames area and in 2016 moved to a Grade II* listed modern building that formerly housed the Commonwealth Institute. EAC (Espacio de Arte Contemporáneo) is a contemporary art museum in Montevideo, Uruguay, located in a former prison in which the prisoner cells house small exhibition spaces and other buildings are used as additional exhibition and conference. The former Monastery of Our Lady in the German state of Saxony-Anhalt has been converted to the Magdeburg Art Museum and is today one of the most important venues for contemporary art and sculpture in the country. In France, the Musée d’Orsay was originally a railway station, the Gare d’Orsay; today it hosts one of the biggest collections of Impressionist

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artists. The interior design, including the exhibition setup, furniture, decoration, and fittings, were chosen by the Italian architect Gae Aulenti. The list of examples from around the world is extensive. The few included here provide a sense of the variety of building types and architectural styles that have come to host art museums. In some cases, the grand architecture of royal palaces continues to define the prestige of the art collections they hold while also defining their urban context. In other instances, converting a building into an art museum serves to rehabilitate structures that might otherwise fall into disuse (or which were already abandoned) and can help to define new identities for their surrounding context. Several of these issues will reappear in the following sections regarding the role that architecture can play in attracting museum users while also risking overshadowing the collections they intend to promote.

4  Newly Created Structures as Art Museums At the end of the twentieth century, as mentioned earlier and also thoroughly discussed in Chap. 3, the Guggenheim Bilbao Museum became the international symbol of designing an iconic and globally recognized building to house an art museum (Macdonald, 2011). Designed by Frank Gehry in his recognizable deconstructivist style, the architecture itself serves as a main attractor, sometimes to a greater degree than the art itself. In some cases, new structures specifically designed to be art museums can introduce a new tension, the architecture being at risk of outshining the collections held within. An illustrative example is the MAXXI museum in Rome, designed by another Starchitect, Zaha Hadid (Emmer, 2018). In 2014 as part of the Open Museum Open City exhibition, the empty spaces of the museum itself served as the exhibition—empty of any “distracting” art so that visitors might fully take in the futurist style of the building. These are just two examples of the blurring of the line between art and architecture and the evolving role of the architecture of art museums from a practical space to protect and display artworks to becoming part of the collection itself. The creation of new buildings to serve as art museums, and their role as symbols of the city, is by no means a new phenomenon (Giebelhausen, 2003). Originally housed in the Montagu House from the mid-eighteenth century, by the mid-nineteenth century the collection of the British Museum was transferred to its new home, an imposing classical structure that has since been repeatedly added to (Caygill, 1981). Despite its

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temple-­like appearance with its classical pediment, the structure was not the former home of a governmental or religious institution. Rather, it was designed to reflect the museum’s numerous expanding collections of classic art and artifacts and to represent the colonial ambitions and powers of the British Empire. Structures designed in the imperial era have since had to reckon with their difficult colonialist past—perhaps none more so than the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren, Belgium (DeBlock, 2019). The Art Nouveau structure built by Leopold II has recently undergone significant refurbishing and rebranding but has yet to shake its racist and colonialist past with many protests being held against its reopening. Once meant to convey the power of the Belgian colonial empire, its traditional architecture now reminds of a dark past in which it actively participated. Many questions around these issues remain as some activists, researchers, and members of the community believe that collections should be kept in museums while others actively advocate for the return of objects to correct historical injustices (Jenkins, 2016; van Beurden, 2017). An interesting counterexample is that of the Chilean National Museum of Fine Arts built in 1910 to commemorate the first centennial of the independence of Chile from Spain, a monument to celebrate the end of colonialism. Such examples reveal how the meaning and interpretation of the architecture can change, in some instances to the detriment of the collections held within. In other cases, the once groundbreaking design of an art museum can come to be recognized as an integral part of a city’s heritage. Perhaps the most representative example would be the original Guggenheim Museum in New York City, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright from 1943 to 1959. This International Style building was unlike any art museum previously built, famously known for its curves and sloping ramps that have been seen as a challenge to exhibiting art collections. In 2019, the building was inscribed to the UNESCO World Heritage List as part of the twentieth-century architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright (UNESCO, 2019). Once recognized as pushing the boundaries of architecture, it is now considered an important part of our shared universal heritage, the architecture itself is in need of conservation and protection just as the collection it showcases. All the examples cited in this section, despite their different architectural styles, were designed to command attention either through their strong classicism or groundbreaking modernity. As discussed in Chap. 3,

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one of the clearest examples of a museum that stands out from its context is the blue biomorphic Kunsthaus Graz in Austria—designed by Peter Cook and Colin Fournier for the 2003 European Capital of Culture initiative. The building has been lovingly nicknamed the “Friendly Alien” for its undulating glass façade that markedly stands out from its eighteenth-­century context. In other instances, a more literal approach is taken in which the architectural design of the museum is heavily influenced by a specific art piece. The Shanghai Museum rises in the shape of an enormous ancient bronze vessel called a “ding,” specifically the Da Ke ding on display in the museum. The form of the recent National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC, by David Adjaye was also inspired by a traditional artifact: the Yoruba crown motif found in a sculpture (Taylor, 2011). Such design choices present the architecture on a symbolic level, going beyond attempts at just standing out from their immediate surroundings to signify and represent an entire culture and history. Some architects have also taken the opposite approach by designing art museums intended to blend into, rather than contrasting with, their surroundings. The Chichu Art Museum in Japan designed by Tadao Ando disappears, literally, into its natural setting with the majority of the structure located underground. The Parrish Art Museum by Herzog & de Meuron, located in rural New York, reinterprets a simple house outline form through its intersecting gable roofs that fit in with the local context rather than making a grand statement in opposition to the setting. These more subtle approaches do not risk overshadowing collections, as some of the previously mentioned examples have been accused of. One of the key driving factors in the spread and expansion of art museums is their continuously growing collections, the majority of which are hidden away in storage. A recent trend is opening up these typically secluded spaces, and architecture is playing a key role in revealing them. The Schaulager (schauen means “seeing” and lagern, “storing”) in Münchenstein, Switzerland (2000–2003), hosts the contemporary art collection of Emanuel Hoffman. The purpose of the museum is to study the collection and serve as a place where the artworks are shown as the artists conceived them without designed displays. Even though the Schaulager is only accessible to a specialist public, as well as to school classes, teachers, and students, it was designed by a renowned firm: Herzog & de Meuron. Likewise, the award-winning firm of MVRDV designed the

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Fig. 4.1  The Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam. (Source: Marzia Loddo, 2020)

eye-catching Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam (Fig. 4.1), with its fully reflective rounded structure topped with trees (Loddo, 2020b). One might easily mistake the mirrored building as a new museum rather than a publicly accessible art storage facility. This is just one example of the newly emerging museum typologies that question traditional approaches. Other museums around the world are planning similar interventions. With some art museum collections now going on hundreds of years old, the architecture housing them has and likely will continue to take on multiple meanings as they evolve and expand to accommodate growing collections and meet new challenges. Many of the examples from this section have at some point served as icons of individual cities or even as symbols representing entire nations. In other cases, they’ve become the flagships for international brands of museums with satellites around the world or have reduced the impact of the architecture as much as possible to instead showcase the exhibitions contained within.

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5  Hybrid Structures as Art Museums While existing structures have a long history of defining their context and new structures can be framed as an opportunity to create a new idea about a place, art museums within hybrid structures maintain a delicate balance between these two. The poster child for hybrid art museums is undoubtedly the Louvre Museum in Paris with its glass pyramid, completed by I.M. Pei in 1993, which has become recognizable around the world for its stark modernist contrast to the rest of the palace (Pei, 2018). However, this spectacle is only the most recent in a long history of additions as Medieval, Renaissance, and French Classical styles can all be found in different wings of the palace. Despite the initial controversy surrounding Pei’s addition, it perhaps well follows the previous approach of the museum reflecting the style of the present day rather than attempting to blend into or copy previous architectural styles. It is this balance between respecting, or following, an existing structure and contributing something new that architects must consider when designing a hybrid structure to host an art museum. Hybrids may come about when a new museum is reusing an existing structure but also requires additional spaces. In other cases, as collections grow, additions are required to meet the new needs of the museum. As the examples will show, hybrids can involve both the previously discussed types of an existing structure that was hybrids can be museums that utilize a structure built for a different purpose or those originally built as a museum. A common approach since the second half of the twentieth century is to design a structure that maximizes the contrast between the existing building and the new addition. The Museum of the Civilizations of Europe and the Mediterranean (Mucem) in Marseille represents this technique. Designed by French architect Rudy Ricciotti and opened in 2013, Mucem sits on the Marseille waterfront. This very precise and modern structure, with its two square boxes covered by glass and a concrete latticework, stands in stark contrast to the historic seventeenth-century Fort Saint-Jean to which it attaches by a singular yet pronounced footbridge spanning the channel flowing beneath. The juxtaposition of these two components is as much reinforced by the negative space that separates them as it is by the singular element that physically connects them. From an urban perspective, this project has played an important role in the regeneration of the city’s port area by providing a new icon and rehabilitating a historic monument (Calafat, 2021). The historic and modern

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Fig. 4.2  The Mucem in Marseille. (Source: Marzia Loddo, 2019)

character of these spaces also reflects the diverse nature of the museum’s exhibitions, which span the centuries (Fig. 4.2). Other than the bridge, the Mucem makes no other attempt to reflect or connect the existing structure to the new. Other approaches reveal a more direct or concrete linking within their hybridization. In the CaixaForum in Madrid, designed by Herzog & de Meuron, the weathered Corten steel addition grows out of the brick base of the former power station. The materiality and sharpness of the addition contrasts with the traditional building from which it is merged. However, this contrast is only skin deep as only the façades of the original building were preserved; the entire interior was gutted and redesigned as a single cohesive element. In this way, the existing façade grounds the new elements within the existing urban context but this experience is not continued into the interior gallery spaces. The same architects took yet another approach when designing the Switch House addition to the Tate Modern in London. In this instance, the new addition is anchored to one corner of the existing structure and uses the same brick palette as the former Bankside Power Station to which it is attached. However, its twisting and angular form clearly delineates it from the original structure.

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Meanwhile, a completely disconnected hybrid can be found in the Neoclassical 1941 National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. and the 1978 East Building extension designed by I.M. Pei and opened in 1978. From the urban experience, no tangible connection between these two structures exists as their only physical connection occurs underground. To the uninitiated, these buildings would appear to be two separate art museums. Their outward experience even reflects the collections held within, with the classics found in the original West Building and the contemporary and modern collections in the East Building. Another approach to hiding the hybridization can be seen in the 1992 addition to the Guggenheim Museum in New  York by Gwathmey Siegel & Associates Architects. The grey rectangular tower, which was based on original drawings by Frank Lloyd Wright, fades into the background, with most visitors likely even unaware that this addition is part of the museum. One counterexample to these contrasts is the Neues Museum, Berlin, Germany originally built in the mid-nineteenth century and restored by David Chipperfield at the start of the twenty-first century. Chipperfield took great care to blend his design with the original as much as possible— not by copying it verbatim but by respectfully filling in the gaps and matching the new to the old. This approach perhaps reflects the different nature of this hybrid as the building was significantly destroyed during the bombings of World War II and was left to decay for several decades before attempts to restore it began. This blending of the past and future manages to simultaneously pay tribute to losses and destruction while also bringing the museum and visitor experience into the present. In this hybridization, the original structure was not something to keep at arm’s length or to empty of all meaning but rather to integrate with intimately. Over time, hybrid museums have become increasingly common in large part due to the expanding collections of museums that require ever more space, both to be displayed and stored. The examples shared here highlight the drastically different approaches architects take in designing these kinds of art museums, from overaccentuating the differences in architectural styles or materials to physically separating different elements. In other instances, new elements are merged with the old to form a cohesive, singular structure. These choices derive largely from the purposes behind developing these structures: to serve as a standout icon, to meet the growing needs of the museum, or even to heal old scars. The hybrid version is another testament to the adaptability and flexibility of art museums, revealing not only the evolution in how they are interpreted over time but also how they physically expand and change.

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6  Conclusions In terms of their architectural size, style, and layout, art museums present endless possibilities. To return to our original question, the academic discipline of architecture reveals to the visitors how the art museum building has evolved over time, responding to shifting dynamics. These forces range from the opening up of an individual’s private collection within their home to displays of imperial power, and from creating a vehicle to attract mass tourism to promoting a new cultural identity for a city. Our purpose here was not to declare certain approaches as being correct or incorrect or better or worse than another. Rather, our purpose was to reflect on this array of possible interventions and how they can frame the relationship and meaning of the museum between their urban (or natural) setting and the presentation of the works found within. Considering the lack of any formal typological restrictions, what does this mean for the future of art museums and the design of their containers? How will they continue to evolve and adapt to our ever-changing world, and what are the key aspects they should respond to? Can collections, and subsequently the buildings that house them, continue to grow forever? As we’ve discussed here, architecture has played a pivotal role in the creation and expansion of museums and their collections—from Starchitect-designed storage facilities intended to attract attention and funding (even if the user experience and interest is untested) to the limitations of historic or heritage structures serving as art museums that may no longer have adequate space to host visitors and which cannot be as freely altered. The recent COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted many of the global challenges art museums will have to face with the threats emerging from climate change and even future pandemics. With physical visitor numbers dropping to unparalleled lows, does it make sense for art museums to continue to seek out Starchitects to design exorbitantly expensive structures that no one can visit? Their design must also consider how visitors move through the space and visit collections and issues such as not overcrowding the spaces and respecting physical distancing requirements. Such concerns may significantly impact the choice of whether to use existing structures or to construct entirely new buildings as dictated by the need for more space or the freedom to be able to adapt the structure. These considerations, of course, accompany all the previously existing threats from flooding, forest fires, and mass immigration caused by climate change.

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Another recent emerging trend has been the digitalization of collections, which allow visitors to virtually explore the artworks. For example, the Google Arts and Culture platform contains over 500 museums and galleries, including several of the examples cited in this chapter, that allows visitors to either view individual works of art separately or to use the walk-­ through feature to explore some of the museum spaces. This digital approach makes art museums far more accessible to those who might otherwise not be physically or financially able to visit. Readers of this chapter who have never visited the Tate Modern in London, the Guggenheim Museum in New  York City, or the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg can instantly take virtual tours of these buildings and collections and acquire a greater understanding of the issues discussed here. Such a visit is objectively far more sustainable than undertaking a long journey by car or plane. A more complex example is the emerging immersive digital museum experiences such as the Van Gogh Exhibition: The Immersive Experience, which could be held in 22 cities around the world simultaneously. Entirely digital, these kinds of exhibitions do not need to transport physical paintings from one city to the next nor do they require an art museum to host them. They can be displayed in any space large enough to mount screens and projectors to project animated images and that allow virtual reality walk-throughs to take place. Going even further, the Van Gogh Exhibition became the first entirely interactive virtual exhibition freely accessible to anyone to visit in 2020. By no means do we present these examples as an ideal future of the art museum, but they clearly represent another phase in the ongoing evolution and expansion of the art museum—one that stretches the boundaries of their role in urban contexts and the visitor experience. The continuing pressures of climate change and the continuing expansion of collections represent additional critical considerations that will continue to shape the architectural spaces needed to properly house collections. Museum and library buildings require stringent indoor environments for temperature, humidity, and environmental stability. This means that their design presents unique challenges relative to applying concepts of sustainability as well as withstanding the consequences of climate change. Some experts argue that a sustainable design approach is urgently needed to create buildings that rely less on externally provided energy and will be more resilient during periods of power supply disruption while also being more economic over the long term. However, collections-based institutions located in historic buildings have other considerations. They

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require integrated strategies that focus on improving the building envelope; collection preservation, human comfort, and access needs; alternative energy sources; seasonal and diurnal adjustments; and microenvironments for objects. These strategies must be aligned not only with international calls for reducing energy but also with international conservation standards. One new initiative that is tackling these challenges is the Diffused Uffizi program, which will spread its collection to smaller museums, churches, and exhibition sites across the Tuscany region. This innovative approach will potentially reduce the stresses and pressures on the Uffizi Museum itself while being to display more of its collection, which will help support lesser-known towns. This example highlights just one possible approach that art museums can explore as they begin to face the many challenges discussed here; in the coming years, there will undoubtedly be many others to consider and discuss. The flexibility and adaptability of the art museum typology, which defies a single or simple definition, allows art museums to become as diffused and as varied as they are today while continuing to evolve in the future.

References Basso Peressut, G.  L. (2005). Il museo moderno. Architettura e museografia da Perret a Kahn [The Modern Museum. Architecture and Museography from Perret to Kahn]. Lybra Immagine. Bennett, T. (2013). The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics. Routledge. Calafat, M.  C. (2021). The Mucem’s Centre for Conservation and Resources: Promoting Collections and Cultural Heritage Careers. Museum International, 73(1–2), 120–129. Caygill, M. (1981). The Story of the British Museum. Trustees of the British Museum. DeBlock, H. (2019). The Africa Museum of Tervuren, Belgium: The Reopening of ‘the Last Colonial Museum in the World’: Issues on Decolonization and Repatriation. Museum & Society, 17(2), 272–281. Emmer, M. (2018). Zaha Hadid: Fluid and Topological Architecture. In M. Emmer & M. Abate (Eds.), Imagine Math 6 (pp. 27–45). Springer. Giebelhausen, M. (Ed.). (2003). The Architecture of the Museum: Symbolic Structures, Urban Contexts. Manchester University Press. Huber, A., & Mulazzani, M. (1997). Il Museo Italiano: la Trasformazione di Spazi Storici in Spazi Espositivi: Attualità dell’Esperienza Museografica degli Anni’50 [The Italian Museum: The Conversion of Historic Spaces into Exhibition Spaces: The Relevance of Museographical Experiences of the Fifties]. Edizioni Lybra immagine.

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Jenkins, T. (2016). Keeping Their Marbles: How the Treasures of the Past Ended Up in Museums-and Why They Should Stay There. Oxford University Press. Lindsay, G. (Ed.). (2020). Contemporary Museum Architecture and Design: Theory and Practice of Place. Routledge. Loddo, M. (2020a). Franco Albini e Caterina Marcenaro: A Productive Relationship in the Genovese Cases of Palazzo Bianco and Palazzo Rosso. Nuova Museologia, 43, 40–45. Loddo, M. (2020b). Storage Facilities for the Collection of Western Art Museums. A Focus on the Italian Context. Maggioli SPA.  Politecnica Series. https://doi. org/10.30448/UNI.43162.20 Macdonald, S. (Ed.). (2011). A Companion to Museum Studies (Vol. 39). John Wiley & Sons. Marani, P. C., & Pavoni, R. (2006). Musei: Trasformazioni di un’Istituzione dall’Età Moderna al Contemporaneo [Museums: Institutional Transformations in the Modern and Contemporary Eras]. Marsilio Editori spa. McClellan, A. (1999). Inventing the Louvre: Art, Politics, and the Origins of the Modern Museum in Eighteenth-Century Paris. University of California Press. Pei, I. M. (2018). Erweiterung Grand Louvre in Paris. In Gebäude, die Zeichen setzen/Landmark Buildings. In C. Schittich (Ed.), A Review of Three Decades of Architecture (pp. 13–18). DETAIL. Portland Art Museum. (n.d.). A Brief History of the Museum. Retrieved February 9, 2022, from https://portlandartmuseum.org/about/brief-­history-­museum/ Roos, L., Favre, F., Hagmann, M., & Chesham, K. (2019). Metamorphosis. En Face. ISBN: 978-94-6366-180-5. Schubert, K. (2000). The Curator’s Egg: The Evolution of the Museum Concept from the French Revolution to the Present Day. One-Office Press. Taylor, K. (2011). The Thorny Path to a National Black Museum. The New York Times. Retrieved August 31, 2021, from https://www.nytimes. com/2011/01/23/us/23smithsonian.html Tzortzi, K. (2016). Museum Space: Where Architecture Meets Museology. Routledge. UNESCO. (2019). The 20th-Century Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright. Retrieved September 5, 2021, from https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1496 van Beurden, J. M. (2017). Treasures in Trusted Hand Negotiating the Future of Colonial Cultural Objects. Sidestone Press.

Paradise: An artistic practice and immersive interface In the Paradise exhibition, the artist collaborative Fallen Fruit explored Oregon’s paradisiacal backyard through the lens of Portland Art Museum’s permanent collection (Portland Art Museum, n.d.). Fallen Fruit, which includes artists David Allen Burns and Austin Young, creates site-specific projects using fruit to examine concepts of place and history and issues of representation. The artist collaborative also produces serialized public projects and site-specific installations that invite the public to experience the world as a fruitful place. In Paradise, Fallen Fruit created a stunning immersive art installation using selected pieces from the PAM’s permanent collections to thematically explore concepts such as paradise, sublime landscape, and the greater Northwest

CHAPTER 5

Exhibitions and Design: A Perspective on the Project of Museum Display Francesca Lanz and Jacopo Leveratto

1   Introduction In this chapter, we bring museums displays into sharp focus through the lens of exhibition design. We do so by drawing on our own disciplinary backgrounds as architects trained in Italy in the field of interior architecture, exhibition design, and museography and our research expertise respectively in museum and critical heritage studies, and architectural design. Our aim is to draw the reader’s attention to the key role of design in determining how a display looks and feels and what it means, providing stimuli and suggestions from the field of exhibition design that may be useful for developing a more sophisticated and nuanced analysis of

F. Lanz (*) Department of Architecture and Built Environment, Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK School of Arts and Cultures, Newcastle University, Newcastle, UK e-mail: [email protected] J. Leveratto Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 E. Redaelli (ed.), Visiting the Art Museum, Sociology of the Arts, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12089-3_5

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displays. The chapter explores the question, What can visitors learn about the art museum and its exhibits from design? In stressing and discussing the impact of exhibition design and interior architecture in the museums meaning-making, we reiterate the role of designers beyond design—as critical thinkers. Our focus here it thus set on exhibition design, meaning those aspects of display primarily related to its setup in a given museum space (Tzortzi, 2015; Macleod et al., 2012; Roppola, 2012; Dernie, 2006). This involves the design of the spatial layout of the exhibition; decoration of the room and its colors, materials, and lighting; temporary removable partitions; the backdrops and possible subspaces; but also sounds, images, projections, and smells. It regards the exhibition furniture and display apparatus, including display cases, pedestals, panels, and fixed and movable furniture, such as lamps, chairs, and benches. It also includes aspects of communication and graphic design. It does not, however, refer to the architectural design of the museum, its interior spaces, and museum interior spatial layout, which are here considered as part of the wider overall museographical project. Nor does it include the scientific project beyond the display as choices pertaining mainly to the collection, i.e., what we may call the “curatorial project.” This is not to suggest that these aspects can be understood as independent or that the museum environment and its contents can or should be considered as separate or distinct, since we firmly believe the opposite. However, such a distinction is fundamental for us for the specific purpose of this chapter to discuss the critical autonomy of exhibition design as a designerly act that is not merely instrumental to the curatorial project. This chapter is organized into five sections. The first two explain our decision to focus on exhibition design and build on theories and ideas of exhibition design from the field of interior architecture and museography, combining them with approaches and methodologies in display analysis stemming from museum and heritage studies. The following two sections present two theoretical monographs: Mostrare: L’Allestimento in Italia dagli Anni Venti agli Anni Ottanta [Exhibiting: Exhibition Design in Italy from the Twenties to the Eighties] by Sergio Polano (1988) and Narrative Spaces: On the Art of Exhibiting by Herman Kossmann et al. (2012). They serve as emblematic examples of two different ways of understanding display through interior architecture and exhibition design. The final section provides the reader with advice that can underpin a more insightful analysis of how and with which intentions and effects the museum display can be arranged in the spaces to support the visitor experience.

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2   Museography and Museum Studies: Two Perspectives on Display To start, it should be noted that there is no English term for the Italian museografia—commonly and awkwardly translated in an anglicized version as museography. Likewise, there is no effective way of translating museum studies into Italian. This is not a merely linguistic issue, however, but rather a matter of different, often disconnected, approaches to and traditions in the study of museums that results in different methodological and theoretical ways of thinking about museums and analyzing their displays and design. Museografia in the Italian context is an area of research and study as well as a professional practice with a long and recognized tradition that dates to the middle of the twentieth century and includes the work of some of the best Italian architects, such as Franco Albini, Luciano Baldessari, Achille Castiglioni, Gio Ponti, Marco Zanuso, BBPR, and Carlo Scarpa. Their contributions not only shaped the Italian approach to museum design but also established an international reference in the field (Huber, 1997; Basso Peressut, 1999; Giebelhausen, 2003; Macleod et al., 2012; Tzortzi, 2015). Often defined in contrast to museology, museography is defined by Desvallées and Mairesse (2010) as a “practical or applied aspect of museology” (p. 52): whereas museology concerns theoretical and critical thinking about museums, museography pertains to the technical and practical aspects, possibly suggesting a difference between the two as a matter of practical-technical versus critical-­ theoretical areas of expertise and approaches to display. Although not completely incorrect, this way of defining museography is, however, essentially an oversimplification that may hinder the possibility of establishing a dialogue between these two different but complementary aspects of a museum project. Moreover, this definition risks overlooking the real and specific contribution of museography to what museums do and mean. In Italy, museographical studies are distinct from museological studies. The difference between the two, however, is mainly related to curricula and their specific focus rather than their presumed practice-based versus theory-based approach. Museography is taught in architectural courses, notably interior architecture. Museographical courses deal with theoretical and design aspects of the museum as a project, including architectural and interior design, spatial layout, and exhibition design, which are explored with regard to both their practical and critical implications. Museology

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courses instead are usually taught within art history programs and focus on curatorial aspects, such as collection management and conservation. Although these different curricula usually lead to distinct careers— architects who specialize in museum design and museum curators—there has always been strong dialogue and collaboration between the fields. Nor it is unusual for people trained in the field of interior architecture and museography to enter careers as museum professionals. Museum studies is a more recent and now well-established academic field, especially in the UK and other English-speaking countries, with university departments and specific Master of Arts courses in this area of study. Museum studies is often closely connected to heritage studies, and courses in the field comprise a variety of subjects, including philosophy, cultural and social studies, history, education, art history, museology, anthropology, epistemology, and much more, but surprisingly not design. Museum studies is a quasi-vocational University Degree, in so far it is meant to introduce students to a museum career or a doctoral programme and academic research in the field (Mason et al., 2018). A key focus in museum studies today relates to the role and practices of museums in contemporary societies and their relation to visitors, as institutions with a key educational, cultural, and political role and as places where social relationships—such as knowledge and power, identity, theory, and representation—play out. In this respect, the strong influence of the new museology on the birth and evolution of museum studies can be seen. Mason et al. (2018) explain that new museology in other contexts and languages has been named and developed slightly differently as “sociomuseology,” “critical museum theory,” or “new museum theory” and can be related to other debates related to “ecomuseology” and “community museology” (2018, pp.  20–22). Although the revolution of the new museology and its different variations has affected museums and museum studies differently across different countries—mainly Western countries and with a greater impact on English-­ speaking ones—it has spurred a broad and radical change in the museum field with important consequences on how we think of, theorize about, and create museum practices. New museology has shifted from a collection-centered to a visitor-­ oriented approach and from an understanding of museum objects as inherently valuable to understanding them as situational and contingent. By questioning museums supposed neutrality and claims of truth and

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advocating for their accountability and greater openness and inclusivity, new museology has sought to move the focus of museum studies from chiefly practical and pragmatic issues of collection and museum management to more theoretical, critical, and humanistic questions (Vergo, 1989; Marstine, 2005; Macdonald, 2012). The novelty of this approach mainly lies in a greater awareness of the political nature of museums, their social role, and their power to influence the understanding of the past in the present for the future. In the wake of new museology theories, an interpretation of museums as temples, repositories, and places to exhibit and contemplate historical and artistic treasures has been gradually overtaken by a new understanding of museums as public services and social agents where visitors (different and varied) are considered to hold and are invited to play an active role in creating and interpreting the messages in a museum. This chapter combines a museografical approach with theories from museum studies to articulate how exhibition design is not merely the technical or creative implementation of a curatorial project but also a constituent element per se of the display with its own scientific and critical autonomy. It is an element with a remarkable impact on what a display means, not just how it looks, which therefore requires close attention both to its design and to its critical assessment. In doing so, we address the reader as a “critical [emphasis added] museum visitor” (Lindauer, 2006): “The critical museum visitor—says Margaret Lindauer—notes what objects are presented, in what ways, and for what purposes. She or he also explores what is left unspoken or kept off display. And she or he asks, who has the most to gain or the most to lose from having this information, collection, or interpretation publicly presented?” (p. 205). This perspective serves as our starting point for discussing the role of design in displays.

3  Exhibition Design as an Aspect of Display Christopher Whitehead (2016a) notes that a “central problem in theorizing and analyzing display—although often unacknowledged—pertains to ontology and translation. What is display?” (p. 2). This is an important but extremely complex question, the answer to which falls far beyond the scope of this chapter. It is enough here to point out that the term display is usually broadly used in the literature to refer to any and all of the

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intellectual and design actions involved in the process of exhibiting a collection in a museum. Display, therefore, alludes to an extremely wide, complex, and varied array of tangible and intangible aspects in creating an exhibition, whether temporary or long term, including the selection and interpretation of the items to be exhibited, along with their organization, ordering, and interpretational framing; their distribution in museum spaces and the arrangement of each of these spaces, room by room, down to the scale of the individual display case; the design and decoration of such spaces and the design of their display elements, furniture, and exhibition devices; and the design of digital and analog informational apparatus, from exhibition wayfinding and coordinated-image to labels and panels their graphic design and position in the display. Whitehead (2016a, 2016b) proposes a definition of display as a “sophisticated form of representation and communication that aims to present particular narratives or organizations of knowledge, or to create sensory environments and affective spaces that invite or impel visitors to respond in a certain way” (Whitehead, 2016a, p.  2). He adds that a display is a “political, public production of propositional knowledge intended to influence audiences and to create durable social effects” (2016b, p.  2). Mason et al. (2018) compare displays to other forms of written histories and highlight how their distinctive aspect is being in architectural space. Displays are in “architectural spaces” and they are “physical, spatial, aural, sometimes emotional and affecting, always embodied” (p. 56). However, they later say that displays are “about more than the use of a certain technique or the arrangement of certain kinds of material in a given space” (p. 167). A display is an “act” that “can never be neutral, for it produces particular ways of knowing and valuing objects” (p. 167). These two definitions, targeted as they are to two different audiences and developed in diverse contexts and with different scopes, exemplify how the field of museum and gallery studies has recently shown an increased awareness of and attention to the role of space and design elements in determining what a display means and does (see the excellent literature review provided by Tzortzi, 2015). The works by Margaret Lindauer (2006) and Stephanie Moser (2010) are emblematic of an approach to critical display analysis that accounts for the key role of exhibition design. In The Critical Museum Visitor (2006), Lindauer provides a series of indications meant to help a critical visitor to critique an exhibition with the support of an investigative process and

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critical observations. She invites them to carefully and critically consider different aspects of the museum and its displays, including the museum architecture, its location, interior layout, and display style. In particular, she encourages the critical visitor to consider the display style by focusing on “design elements—wall color, lighting, font style, physical barriers between audience and artifacts, and spatial relationships of objects to one another—and note how these elements influence the way you move through the display” (p. 210). These elements should be read in connection and along with others encompassing the selection of objects and their arrangement, the writing style of labels, and other elements beyond the display, such as the museum’s mission, journal articles, newspapers, and documentary and literary works. However, as Stephanie Moser notes, Lindauer’s description of how to assess the design style and its design elements is quite elusive and leaves the reader with little guidance. In her article, The Devil Is in the Detail: Museum Displays and the Creation of Knowledge (2010), Moser addresses this issue by presenting a methodological framework for conducting research on the knowledge-building capacity of museum displays. Moser stresses how in order to explore and analyze such meaning—and knowledge—building capacity for museum displays, it is fundamental to holistically and wholly assess a large amount of different and complementary elements involved in the production of an exhibition that work together in the display as a “system of representation” (Moser, 2010, p.  23). Moser focuses on what she calls the “devilish details” (Moser, 2010, p. 30) of a display, that is, all the design aspects of an exhibition that determine how it is and what it looks and feels like, with ultimate consequences for what it means. Architecture, location, setting, space, design, color, light (including display furniture, such as cabinets, cases, etc.), subject, message, text, layout, display types, exhibition style, audience, and reception: Moser discusses each of these elements, setting down a series of guiding questions for each to be used as starting points for a display’s critical assessment. As she remarks, these elements are more than mere “props” but “devices that work together to create an environment within which visitors gain understandings of culture, history, and science, as well as concepts such as civilization, progress, race, and gender” (Moser, 2010, p. 23). Lindauer and Moser’s common goal is to provide indications for how to look at and analyze displays in an enhanced and more critical, holistic

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way. Both highlight the importance of what Moser calls the “exhibitionary environment” and its design elements as an “integral part of the messages that are both intentionally and unintentionally communicated” in a display (Moser, 2010, p. 28). In doing so, they look at exhibition design not only as the practical side of making an exhibition involving pragmatics and technical aspects but as a key element of it, with effects on the meaning-­ making and knowledge-building of the display, as well as on how visitors interpret and make sense of their visit. At the same time, it should be noted that this implies recognizing that exhibition design plays more than a merely putting-into-practice role; it poses questions regarding the ethics of design aesthetics, which are, as exemplified by the two monographs below, generally overlooked in most museographical and exhibition design-centered criticism. While exhibition design in museum studies courses is still often considered a matter of wiring, furnishing, and lighting in relation to conservation and ergonomic standards or design trends, approaches like the ones suggested by Lindauer and Moser are representative of growing attention on the “importance of space in creating the museum experience, with particular emphasis on the learning and affective experience of the visitor, as well as the capability of the museum to embody theories, construct knowledge and produce meaning” (Tzortzi, 2015, p.  68). Sharon Macdonald (2007) states, that within such a “more ‘interpretative paradigm’ […] design is recognized more fully as an integral part of the visitor experience, with potentially more far-reaching implications for structuring the very nature of that experience rather than simply providing a more or less attractive medium for presenting content” (p. 150). However, with few but a growing number of exceptions, the assessment of the role of exhibition design in display analysis, especially in texts addressed to students in museum studies, has not progressed much further than its interpretation as a sophisticated form of “packaging messages.” (Macdonald, 2007, p.  150). In many cases—and this is also partially true for Lindauer and Moser—exhibition design elements are assessed as implicitly subordinate to a curatorial project that comes before the act of design. The display ends up being a translation and consequence of a scientific project, reflecting and reinforcing its underlying rationale. From this perspective, the evaluation of design elements, their meanings, and their impact within any display can also be related to architectural and design considerations pertaining to their intended meaning and impact. In the following two sections, we present two monographs that offer an

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example of how displays can be analyzed and discussed critically from the perspective of the contribution of  interior architecture and exhibition design to its meaning and knowledge production.

4  Exhibition Design as Artistic Practice Mostrare (1988) by historian Sergio Polano, is a critical survey of the modern Italian approach to exhibition design, which is now called critical display. In the history of museum display—from sixteenth-century cabinets of curiosities to modern white cubes—exhibition design had always been subordinate to a given curatorial project (O’Doherty, 1976). During the mid-twentieth century, however, another understanding of exhibition design in art museums emerged (Tzortzi, 2015). This new approach claims that the interior design of art museums could be “a critical tool that makes art accessible” (Los, 2002, p. 82) and that the design of both displays and space must be intrinsically related in a more comprehensive form of exhibition design. The best example of this new approach, which is thoroughly described by Polano, is the now dismantled setting of Michelangelo’s Rondanini Pietà within Milan’s Museum of Ancient Art (Fig.  5.1), designed by BBPR Architects during the renovation of the Castello Sforzesco complex (1946–1963). The sculpture was placed at the end of a one-way chronological circuit of 15 rooms in the middle of a lowered area created to receive natural light from a preexisting window covered by a hull-shaped wooden ceiling and hidden by a polygonal niche in gray ashlar. The idea was to invite visitors—only by means of a mute but expressive architectural device—to an all-embracing experience of contemplation designed as a theatrical space of contact between the artwork and the audience. This example, however, is only the epitome of the broader panorama depicted by Polano, which illustrates the entire Italian design culture after World War II. At the time, the chronic insufficient economic support of Italy’s extraordinary built heritage that characterized the national panorama pushed the best-practicing architects to experiment mainly in the field of interiors, with a specific focus on temporary setups, be they domestic, theatrical, retail, or in museums. Polano’s book represented the first critical survey of this activity, which rarely found a place in the history of architecture studies, but which turned out to have a profound impact on professional practice, also beyond Italy, thanks to the spread of architectural magazines and reviews. For this reason, the structure of the book

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Fig. 5.1  Michelangelo’s Rondanini Pietà by BBPR. (Source: Jacopo Leveratto)

juxtaposes an essential critical apparatus with a varied collection of projects, essays, catalogs, and annotated bibliographies, thus recalling an exercise in curatorship rather than a monograph. The most interesting aspect that emerges from Polano’s book is the meaning that exhibition design assumes in the act of displaying. At first glance, it may resemble a continuation of the tradition of Friedrich Kiesler and Herbert Bayer, who attempted to integrate space and objects into an

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“organic unity” defining the visitor’s experience (Celant, 1996, p. 378). However, Polano’s study contains something more. It presents the idea that exhibition design is a form of applied art, using architectural interiors to create exhibits (Polano, 1988). This applied art refuses any form of automatism or technicism and focuses on the essential relationship between meaning and signifier of an exhibition and its integration in a spatial shape. This means looking at the multifaceted connection that designers poetically create in this field between space, objects, and visitors as artists mediating between other artists, whether architects, sculptors, or painters. This perspective resonates with the latest approaches of art history described in Chap. 6, which considers the exhibit an artwork in itself. This approach to exhibition design requires designers to shift their attention from informing to presenting, thus moving from the idea of reproducing a certain meaning to enabling visitors to produce their own. Previously, in contrast, the effort of exhibition designers was to convey, re-express, or underline a preconceived idea. Polano (1988) describes how Italian architects and designers aimed at presenting the artworks in an unexpected way to allow visitors to establish a form of connection in an intimate and disintermediated dimension. This involved refusing chronological, thematic, or analog arrangements and focusing on artworks themselves and the rhetorical enhancement of their physical dimension. All of this made use of an instrumental repertoire belonging to the tradition of architectural design, which was built on the relationship between that physical dimension and human perception and consisted of the interplay between lighting, support, and layout definition. The purpose was to establish how an artwork could be seen, confronted, and approached according to its specific material nature, rather than to a given critical interpretation or historical lecture. There are many Italian examples of this kind of design, from Franco Albini’s Genoese museums (1949–1956) to Carlo Scarpa’s Museo di Castelvecchio in Verona (1956–1973). However, if we want to highlight the international influence of this approach, the best example would probably be the sculpture pavilion designed by Aldo van Eyck for the Arnhem Museum in the Netherlands (1965–1966). Van Eyck’s intention was not simply to display sculptures, but to accompany visitors in their active discovery in a random and spontaneous way, like in an unexpected meeting. He divided the space into five parallel corridors of just over 2 meters within which he scattered the artworks. Each

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artwork was presented on a plinth specifically conceived to bring the piece to the same height as the viewers as if they were mere passersby walking along the streets of a city. This feeling is emphasized by the sudden bend in the cement walls, which in some sections expanded to form something akin to a small public square and in others opened into passages, doors, and windows, almost denying, albeit only visually, the exclusiveness that a linear distribution might have suggested. All of this used an ordering geometry and a physical arrangement that tended to ignore the traditional idea of a display, favoring a logical system of spatial organization focused on human motility and perception viewed in their fundamental cognitive value. A critical visitor of van Eyck’s pavilion, in other words, would have not recalled a single artwork or the architecture itself but rather the specific theatrical setting created by the full integration of the two in which they would have moved in a semistructured choreography. The underlying concept of the project was to lead visitors to appreciate the entire exhibition, instead of an individual work of art, by transforming a collection of exhibits into a harmonic, meaningful flow of perceptions, experiences, and suggestions. This flow also had to be materialized by a spatial definition that could offer a unifying and authorial interpretation—while being capable of opening further interpretations and levels of meaning—which is what Polano ultimately meant when he compared exhibition design to a form of art. Not a Gesamtkunstwerk, or a “total work of art,” but a process and product that conveys meaning and is thus capable of being conceptualized and reconceptualized from multiple perspectives. This product not only includes the definition of lighting, support, and layout but also touches on all informational apparatus needed for the exhibition, from labels to catalogs, with all elements subject to the same aesthetic character that reflects a certain poetic intent. Polano’s survey covers a specific time period, so it cannot be generalized uncritically. However, his way of conceptualizing exhibition design— which has been followed by many influential critical studies, especially in Italy, from Francesco Dal Co (2015) to Gianni Ottolini (2017)—can suggest an approach to art museums that goes beyond their informational and social missions. Exhibition design, which broadly relies on designers’ poetic intent and ability to translate it into a built shape, could explain the proliferation of approaches through which focus has progressively shifted from the visitors’ interpretation to the visitors’ experience, such as artist

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programs and immersive narrative spaces. Today, the great majority of art museums currently tend to work with temporary events. However, looking at exhibition design critically—as if it were a form of artistic practice— can still say a lot about the role museums intend to play. By unveiling how certain displays, in their material form, materialize nondiscursive pedagogic programs or political positions, the visitor gains deeper insights into the museum’s mission.

5  Exhibition Design as an Immersive Interface The idea that the content of form is equally relevant to communication as the form of content is the thesis advanced by a more recent book about the art of exhibiting written by Herman Kossmann et al., entitled Narrative Spaces (2012). This book focuses on the narrative potential that exhibition design has progressively developed over the years, eventually transforming not only the conceptual scope of the discipline but also the professional practice itself when dealing with art museums and exhibitions. In this field, the recent proliferation of ahistorical arrangements, exhibitions curated by artists, and ephemeral displays can be read as part of the same movement that has increasingly been growing and distilling since the 1970s, and which has entirely changed the roles, processes, and products consolidated over the last 20 years. For decades, curators represented the primary and sole authority in setting the criteria for defining a certain collection—the content—whereas designers were expected to play a subsidiary role in supporting the curators’ arrangements by various material means—the form. However, the 1969 exhibition Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form curated by Harald Szeemann for the Kunsthalle of Bern in Switzerland changed everything by radically questioning the role of the curator within institutions and the very approach to exhibitions. The logic of producing art installations was extended to whole collections in a constellation of totalizing, multisensory, and experiential theatrical settings that required that a new profession be defined. This new profession did not comprise a single type of professional, like architects or designers or multimedia artists. It was characterized by collectives or companies—such as Casson Mann, Ralph Appelbaum, Uwe Brückner, Studio Azzurro, or Kossmanndejong, co-founded by Herman Kossmann himself—that expressly specialized in designing and realizing ‘experiences.’ Even though

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the terminology used to describe them, including terms like “art” and “poetry of space,” may recall paradigms and of critical display described in the previous section, the reality the authors address is remarkably different. What gradually emerged from the passage “from an idea of a museum as a collection to that of a museum as narration” (Cirifino et al., 2011, p. 5) was a new approach prompted by a post-interpretative turn and further fueled by media and techniques borrowed from performance and digital arts. It would be misleading, however, to think that this change has been mainly driven by the growing complexity of the technological means of production. The most relevant difference from the critical display is in considering the exhibition as a form of storytelling. This is a communication technique capable of transmitting some types of knowledge, both explicit and implicit, by creating a personal link with visitors through images, gestures, and metaphors that can be recognized and introjected. For this reason, the design of an exhibition of this type can no longer be recognized as the definition of a neutral and mute background, nor as the application of technical interfaces between the exhibit and the visitor. On the contrary, it is meant as an act of theatrical or film direction capable of making room for different expressive solutions and multilayered levels of meaning (Atelier Brückner, 2011). This explains why designers in this field increasingly refer to their work as mise en scène or scenography to underline the attempt to place visitors in a memorable set within which they can interact in a personal and emotional way. The instrumental toolbox of exhibition designers—lighting, support, and path augmented by digital means—has remained substantially the same, but their final strategies have evolved remarkably to intensify the visitor experience. To effectively and personally appeal to different visitors—characterized by diverse backgrounds and cultural expertise— requires different narratives and emotional strands be offered that operate on multiple levels of reception. New strategies beyond the traditional strategies based on the control of sight and movement have been added lately, including synchronicity, layering, immersion, and, above all, interaction, since visitors are not considered a passive audience of the narration but participating and performing actors in the spatial drama created (Kossmann et  al., 2012). A variety of perceptive stimuli and emotional charges, usually mediated by digital means, are designed to reach a narrative goal. All this does not compete with the actual value of the object on

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Fig. 5.2  Librocielo by Attilio Stocchi. (Source: Jacopo Leveratto)

display but is studied to amplify the potential for a mutual relationship between the collection. There have been numerous examples of this approach to exhibition design since the seminal Van Gogh Alive exhibition in 2010. The most interesting ones, however, like those presented by Kossmann et al. (2012) in the second section of their book, are those that complement a collection of original and physical exhibits displayed in chronological, thematic, or analog arrangements, with digital projections, multimedia tools, and hypertext to create layered and synchronic opportunities for personal appropriation. A great example is the Librocielo exhibition presented by Attilio Stocchi in Italy, at Milano Design Week in 2012 (Fig. 5.2). Here, with a unique sound and light installation, the rare books of the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan—the second oldest public library in the world— revealed part of its contents to visitors by talking among themselves in a sort of virtual dialogue of innumerable voices made visible by lasers crisscrossing the hall. These lasers were a way to materialize the links among

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distant historical artworks and also the personal link to the visitors, who recognize themselves in those works. Exhibitions like Librocielo remarkably changed the previous consolidated roles, hierarchies, and processes of exhibition production. The traditional dichotomy between curators working on ideas and designers working on ways to convey them no longer makes sense in the face of these new cultural products. Increasingly, the first impulse does not come from an institutional curator or a designer alone but from a hybrid professional. Over the last two decades, the two categories have substantially intersected on the verge of the “new interdiscipline” that has been called “scenography” (Kossmann et al., 2012, p. 12). This intersection gives life to new forms of multidisciplinary directions, including all kinds of professionals, such as designers, curators, custodians, filmmakers, lighting technicians, copywriters, and communication experts. At the same time, museum institutions have often limited themselves to select, book, and host the shows proposed by these companies, thus partially renouncing their role as producers of knowledge to take on solely that of broadcasters of content in the form of stories. Although the majority of art museums have not been affected by this change, an increasing number have begun to organize their permanent collections in the form of temporary exhibitions curated by external subjects, each time according to a specific theme or given narrative. The book by Kossmann et al. (2012) offers a valuable resource for critically reading this phenomenon beyond the most common reactions, which alternatively feature enthusiasm for new technologies and allegations of vacuous glamorization. On the one hand, situating the idea of narration within the borders defined by experience, immersion, interaction, and personal engagement removes the suspects of authoritative unidirectionality that the term narration sometimes hints at. On the other hand, museums and cultural institutions are depicted not only as collectors and keepers of knowledge but mainly as living social spaces well aware of their role yet struggling to find new strategies and means to create contact with their audience and intersect new ones.

6  Conclusions By critically looking at exhibitions through the lens of design, critical visitors can learn that the spatial form of the display is a crucial factor in determining their experience and the role of art museums. The definition of display as the content of form is as relevant as the form of

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content that still dominates the discourse of museum studies. A growing corpus of studies considers space and design elements as key aspects of display in studying museums. However, although they recognize the relevance of these factors in the act of knowledge making, several studies correlate the factors in a predominantly unidirectional way that is essentially subordinate to the scientific project of the display, which is mainly understood as a matter of curatorship and interpretation. We argued here that display represents a critical museum practice with its own scientific and critical autonomy that contributes to an exhibition interacting with other disciplines, expertise, and practices. Every analysis of display should examine design aspects not only for their relation to curatorial choices but also as the result of an authorial act aimed at critically mediating between shape and meaning, one that is neither solely practical-technical or critical-­theoretical but which derives from technical-artistic competencies traditionally ascribed to the field of architecture and spatial design. This means assessing spatial and formal features for their significance in design as well, not just for their communicational significance. In other words, when visiting an art museum, visitors should pay attention to the exhibition design and should interpret the display for the way it establishes a relationship between them and the artworks. The design choices involve specific theoretical and critical architectural positions that exist along with others in the overall display project: Who are the designers of a specific exhibition? Do they have a recognizable approach that may suggest a precise poetic? How does this work differ from others they created in the past? How is it situated in the overall design context of its time? What was their relationship with the curator? Which kind of design processes were implemented? Were the designers invited to take part in the project of the display from the beginning? These are some of the questions that are often overlooked in critical display analysis, yet they are extremely relevant when viewing art displays. These questions should not be ignored, at least until designers interpret and perform their role as critical thinkers capable of mediating between shape and meanings.

References Atelier Brückner. (2011). Scenography. Making Spaces Talk: Projects 2002–2010. Avedition. Basso Peressut, L. (1999). Musei: Architetture 1990–2000 [Museums: Archtiecture 1990–2000]. Motta.

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Celant, G. (1996). A Visual Machine: Art Installation and Its Modern Archetypes. In R.  Greenberg, B.  W. Ferguson, & S.  Nairne (Eds.), Thinking About Exhibitions (pp. 371–386). Routledge. Cirifino, F., Giardina Papa, E., & Rosa, P. (2011). Studio Azzurro Musei di Narrazione: Percorsi Interattivi e Affreschi Multimediali / Museums as Narration: Interactive Experiences and Multimedia Frescoes. Silvana Editoriale. Dal Co, F. (2015). Francesco Venezia e Pompei: L’architettura come arte del porgere [Francesco Venezia and Pompei: Architecture as the Art of Handing Out]. LetteraVentidue. Dernie, D. (2006). Exhibition Design. Laurence King. Desvallées, A., & Mairesse, F. (Eds.). (2010). Concepts clés de Muséologie [Key Concepts of Museology]. Armand Colin and ICOM. Giebelhausen, M. (2003). The Architecture of the Museum: Symbolic Structures, Urban Contexts. Manchester University Press. Huber, A. (1997). Il Museo Italiano. La Trasformazione di Spazi Storici in Spazi Espositivi [The Italian Museum: The Transformation of Historical Spaces in Exhibition Spaces]. Lybra. Kossmann, H., Mulder, S., & den Oudsten, F. (2012). Narrative Spaces: On the Art of Exhibiting. NAI. Lindauer, M. (2006). The Critical Museum Visitor. In J.  Marstine (Ed.), New Museum Theory and Practice (pp. 203–225). Wiley. Los, S. (2002). Carlo Scarpa. Taschen. Macdonald, S. (2007). Interconnecting: Museum Visiting and Exhibition Design. CoDesign, 3(1), 149–162. Macdonald, S. (2012). A Companion to Museum Studies. Blackwell. Macleod, S., Hourston Hanks, L., & Hale, J. (Eds.). (2012). Museum Making: Narratives, Architectures, Exhibitions. Routledge. Marstine, J. (2005). New Museum Theory and Practice. Wiley. Mason, R., Robinson, A., & Coffield, E. (2018). Museum and Galleries Studies: The Basics. Routledge. Moser, S. (2010). The Devil is in the Detail: Museum Displays and the Creation of Knowledge. Museum Anthropology, 33, 2232. O’Doherty, B. (1976). Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of Gallery Space. Lapis. Ottolini, G. (2017). Architettura degli allestimenti [The Architecture of Exhibitions]. Altralinea. Polano, S. (1988). Mostrare: L’Allestimento in Italia dagli Anni Venti agli Anni Ottanta [Displaying: Exhibition Design in Italy from the Twenties to the Eighties]. Lybra Immagine. Portland Art Museum. (n.d.). Paradise. Retrieved February 24, 2022, from https://portlandartmuseum.org/exhibitions/paradise/ Roppola, T. (2012). Designing for the Museum Visitor Experience. Routledge. Tzortzi, K. (2015). Museum Space: Where Architecture Meets Museology. Ashgate.

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Vergo, P. (1989). The New Museology. Reaktion. Whitehead, C. (2012). Interpreting Art in Museums and Galleries. Routledge. Whitehead, C. (2016a). Why Analyze Museum Display? Retrieved October 6, 2021, from https://eprints.ncl.ac.uk/223873 Whitehead, C. (2016b). How to Analyze Museum Display: Script, Text, Narrative. Retrieved October 6, 2021, from https://eprints.ncl.ac.uk/237369

The Clay Figure: A Deeper Engagement The Clay Figure, part of the Tourniquet Series (2009), is an artwork by Virgil Ortiz in PAM’s permanent collection. A visitor who is deeply engaged with an artwotk might zoom in to examine the details of the object, or zoom out to learn its history and reflect on its placement within the exhibition space, like playing with a mirror of changing sizes. the small statue (15 inches tall) is made of white and red clay slips and black (wild spinach) paint on Cochiti red clay. Cochiti Pueblo is a Native American community in New Mexico with a long tradition of producing art made of clay. Virgil Ortiz is a Pueblo artist, born in 1969, well know for his pottery and fashion design, including traditional Cochiti and experimental figurative pottery. He affectionately calls this statue the “Sassy lady” and explains how he was inspired to create it by observing the fashion in nightclubs. Ortiz’s choice of motif and medium continue the tradition of artists from Cochiti Pueblo who create artworks out of clay as a means of social commentary (Portland Art Museum and Northwest Film Center, 2021). The museum chose to display the Clay Figure in a small stand-alone case within one of the Native American Galleries

CHAPTER 6

Artworks and Art History: Toward a Deeper Engagement with Art Exhibition and/as Art Akiko Walley

1   Introduction Browsing through an art museum, we occasionally encounter a work that causes us to ask, Is this “art?” One’s experience of a work of visual or material culture is often personal, free, and affective. Not all encounters in an art museum need explanation or articulation. On the other hand, if one is seeking a way to understand more deeply about one’s experience of an artwork (e.g., how the work makes one feel, why certain works might speak to one person more than another, how one’s encounter with an artwork may have been directed or orchestrated by the museum space, why certain works enter an art museum when others do not, etc.), that is where art history can help. Fundamentally, art history helps to ground an artwork within the complex web of contexts across time and space,

A. Walley (*) University of Oregon, Eugene, OR, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 E. Redaelli (ed.), Visiting the Art Museum, Sociology of the Arts, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12089-3_6

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providing insights into how it came to be, how it is today, and how it touches and is touched by those who come into contact with it. Within an art museum, an art-historical investigation is most often transmitted in the form of an exhibition, providing voices to artworks and a point of contact for the visitors to actively engage with them. An artwork within an art museum is never purely aesthetic, independent, or static (Preziosi, 2009). An art-­historical approach can help a visitor to look closely at and find interesting details in the formal qualities of an artwork, think deeply about these details in the context of the work’s life since its production, and critically and empathetically consider its place within an art museum. This chapter addresses the question, What can visitors learn about the art museum and its artworks from art history? It features a recent exhibition organized for the 2019 Aichi Triennale in Aichi prefecture, Japan. Launched in 2010, Aichi Triennale has garnered a reputation for its cutting-­edge contemporary art exhibitions and its collaboration with public art museums within the prefecture. This fourth Triennale, under the artistic direction of the journalist and political activist Tsuda Daisuke, included an exhibition entitled After “Freedom of Expression?” (Hyōgen no fujiyū ten, sonogo; hereinafter AFE), which collected artworks that were rejected or removed from public museums due to their overt comment on Japan’s imperial past. AFE was shut down just three days after its opening in response to emotive, in some cases threatening, complaints. Although the official reason was public safety, artist and scholarly communities perceived this sudden closure as a censorship on the artists’ freedom to express and people’s right to know. AFE was eventually reopened one week before the end of the Triennale, but the incident attracted national and international attention as the gravest art controversy in Japan’s postwar history. The purpose of this chapter is not to provide an exhaustive analysis of AFE or to academically evaluate the claims made by concerned parties. Rather it presents how an art historical approach can help visitors engage with an artwork and art exhibition more deeply, critically, and empathetically. AFE was selected as a case study because it received minimal involvement from an art historian in its planning process, providing this chapter an opportunity to demonstrate what insights an art historical approach might have contributed. Following a brief introduction to art history and its approaches (Sect. 2), Sects. 3 and 4 discuss an artwork exhibited at AFE, A Statue of Peace by Kim Seo-kyung and Kim Eun-sung, as a physical object and visual experience (Sect. 3) and a cultural artifact (Sect. 4). Reflecting a more recent disciplinary concern, Sect. 5 expands beyond an

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object-based investigation to consider an exhibition (specifically, in this case, AFE) as a kind of artwork produced through a complex web of institutional engagements (O’Neill, 2012) with which a viewer can critically interact and analyze, just as with any piece of visual or material culture. The chapter concludes with a brief reflection of what a viewing of an artwork is and could be for a museum visitor.

2   Art History and Its Approaches An art historian’s basic methods, Anne D’Alleva (Cothren & D’Alleva, 2021) succinctly explains, include a “formal analysis of works of art; laboratory analysis of works of art (to determine age, identify materials, or reconstruct the artist’s working process); and research into related historical documents” (p.  16). Today, an art history student would first learn how to observe and articulate the formal qualities of an artwork. This training derives from how art history was established as an academic discipline beginning in the nineteenth and into the twentieth century. Prior to this modern period, the question of the who, the identity of the artist responsible for its creation, was of primary importance. For instance, seven out of ten fascicles in the earliest history of painting in China, Lidai minghua ji (Masterpieces of painting through the ages), compiled by Zhang Yanyuan (821–874 CE) in 853, are dedicated to the evaluation of 370 artists from antiquity to 841. The book that is often described as the origin of Western art history—Giorgio Vasari’s (1511–1574) Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori, e architettori (The lives of the most excellent painters, sculptors, and architects), published in 1550 and 1568, also presents a series of biographies. Although the connoisseurial eye toward not just the what but the who of an artwork still defines the aptitude of a scholar within certain subfields of art history (or in the popular imagination of an art historian), the discipline has long grown out of considering the artist-as-auteur as a primary concern. Generally speaking, the what, the when, the who, and the how are now all considered just part of the multitude of contexts that make an artwork a cultural artifact. In many respects, the history of art historical methodology can be characterized as the theoretical seesaw over how best to balance the formal qualities (lines, color, composition, material, etc.) with the contexts of its production and reception within one’s interpretation of an artwork. The evolution of formal qualities and the varying external contexts that shaped the creation and survival of any given

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artwork intertwine in a complex way, but they are not equal or completely synchronous. A shift in the imperial regime in China could have triggered a change in the trend in the appearance—the style—of a Buddhist icon across East Asia, for instance, but the same style could have flourished long past the fall of said regime. Artworks were and are never insulated from external factors of their time, yet it is too hasty to conclude that this is ground to dismiss the artists’ agency in their creation. Establishing a scientific (meaning objective or systematic) way of analyzing and discussing an artwork’s formal qualities and contexts of its production, in fact, was considered critical for art history to emerge as a discipline of study. Although from today’s perspective the methodology of a German scholar Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–1768) was problematically misguided, his works on Greek art and architecture are still considered a cornerstone in the development of art historical approaches because of the author’s attempt to place his formal analysis within the context of the contemporaneous natural and cultural climate. About a century later in the nascent period of art history as an academic field, Alois Riegl (1858–1905) and Heinrich Wölfflin (1864–1945) attempted to decouple form from context. Erwin Panofsky (1892–1968) teetered the discursive seesaw in the opposite direction by proposing further layers of analysis (namely iconography and iconology) to the history of style. The basic concerns for the formal qualities and contexts still constitute the core of art historical approaches today. What is critically different, however, is the awareness of how the receivers of artworks, including scholars and curators, mold or even rewrite the history of art. In the 1970s and onward, the art history discipline—first in the United States and Europe—saw a rejuvenation when an array of new approaches began to pull on different threads within the complex mesh of contexts of both art production and reception: Marxism, psychoanalysis, feminism, queer theory, race and postcolonial theory, and transnationalism, to name a few (Harrison et al., 2000, 2001; Harrison & Wood, 2003; Nelson & Shiff, 2003; Cothren & D’Alleva, 2021). Especially since the 1980s, art historians have been engaged in a constant reevaluation of the very institutional framework that defines what art is, including art education, the art market, art museums, and the discipline of art history itself. This self-reevaluation of the institutional framework is challenging art history to evolve from its white-, male-, and Western-­ centric epistemology to a more diverse and inclusive disciplinary ideal (for a recent work focusing on museum practice, see Reilly, 2018). In the

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twenty-first century, those engaged in art history have been confronted with the task of decolonizing the discipline, seeking ways to eradicate and atone for the colonial legacies that still make up its very DNA from standard classification and periodization to descriptive and analytical lexica, privileging certain races, ethnicities, genders, social classes, and histories (Grant & Prince, 2020; Wood & Wainwright, 2021). Moreover, disciplinary concerns have highlighted a complex web of institutional engagement that produce an exhibit and encouraged a critical examination of exhibits as a kind of artwork (O’Neill, 2012). In short, art historical approaches to images, objects, cultures, and ideas are nimble and fluid. The breadth of topics an art historian might study makes the scope of art historical knowledge ever expanding and evolving. The fundamental transtemporal, transregional, and transcultural interests of the discipline make it limiting—even dangerous—to formulate a succinct definition of what constitutes an art historical knowledge or methodology. It is, however, at least safe to conclude that in art history, a product of visual or material culture—such as an artwork or an exhibit—is analyzed through three categories: art as a physical object, art as a visual experience, and art as a cultural artifact (Glass, 2017). The remaining sections apply the three categories to AFE as both an exhibition with artworks and exhibition as an artwork to present the kinds of perspectives an art historical approach could contribute.

3   A Statue of Peace as Physical Object and Visual Experience AFE was planned as a sequel to an earlier exhibition, Non-Freedom of Expression: The Erased (Hyōgen no fujiyū ten: kesareta mono tachi; hereinafter NFE) that took place in Tokyo in 2015 (Kunimoto, 2022). Tsuda Daisuke invited the four leading organizers of NFE—Arai Hiroyuki, Iwasaki Sadaaki, Okamoto Yuka, and Nagata Kōzō—to mount AFE at the 2019 Aichi Triennale, which combined select artworks from the original 2015 show with works that were since then censored out of public exhibitions. The four leading members of the NFE organizing committee were joined by a sociologist and critic Ogura Toshimaru to form the AFE organizing committee. As soon as the details of the exhibition were released, however, complaints and threats began to come into the Triennale office. The day after the exhibition opened to the public, politicians and influencers—including the mayor of Nagoya City, Kawamura Takashi—began

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issuing statements, mostly to condemn AFE using rightist rhetoric, calling it an “atrocity” and a “blow to the heart of Japanese people” (Ikeda & Tanaka, 2019). Just three days into the event, the Triennale committee shut down the exhibition without consulting either the AFE committee or the 16 artists who contributed works to it. Responding to the spurred outcries from other artists participating in the Triennale, as well as artists and academic communities around the globe, the Aichi prefectural governor, Ōmura Hideaki, who was also serving as the head of the Triennale committee, appointed an external review committee to conduct a formal investigation. After protests, debates, international workshops, and a lawsuit, AFE was finally reopened eight days before the end of the Triennale (Aichi Triennale, n.d.; Keehan, 2019; Iwaki, 2020). One of the works that was singled out throughout the controversy was Kim Seo-kyung and Kim Eun-sung’s A Statue of Peace (Fig. 6.1). More

Fig. 6.1  Kim Seo-kyung and Kim Eun-sung. A Statue of Peace. 2011 (as exhibited at the Aichi Triennale, 2019). Acrylic on fiberglass-reinforced plastic. Retrieved January 8, 2022, from https://censorship.social/artists/kim-­seo-­kyung-­kim-­ eun-­sung/. (Copyright: Kim Seo-kyung and Kim Eun-sung)

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formally, Peace Monument (Heiwa no hi), this work originated as a prototype in fiberglass-reinforced plastic (FRP) for the bronze statue of the same title the artist duo produced in 2011 to commemorate the 1000th weekly demonstration by the Korean women who had been forced to serve as sexual slaves by the Japanese military during the Pacific War (called “comfort women” or ianfu; for the remainder of this essay, the two statues will be distinguished as “FRP Peace” and “Bronze Peace”). Peace Monument had a special significance to the AFE committee members, who considered it “ground zero” (genten) of their activism (Okamoto, 2019, p. 13). Art history approaches artworks as both objects of investigation and evidence. Upon completion, works of art begin to hold their own agency in their engagement with their audience. Thus, a close analysis of an artwork’s physical qualities and other formal traits can reveal insights independent from the original intent of its makers. To understand FRP Peace as a physical object, we must first take a moment to understand the 2011 Bronze Peace (Fig. 6.2). A girl in traditional Korean attire (hanbok) wearing a flaring skirt (chima) and upper garment (jeogori) appears seated rigidly in a chair. Her hands are clasped into fists on her thighs, and her heels are raised slightly from the ground. Her eyes gaze forward calmly but intently. Perched on her shoulder is a small bird. Beneath her chair toward the back is a shadow of a grandmother (halmeoni) created in mosaic using small pieces of rock. Next to her is an empty chair. To the left of this installation, a rectangular epitaph is placed into the platform with a carved inscription in Korean, English, and Japanese. The English reads as follows: December 14, 2011, marks the 1000th Wednesday Demonstration for the solution of Japanese Military Sexual Slavery issue after its first rally on January 8, 1992, in front of the Japanese Embassy. This peace monument stands to commemorate the spirit and the deep history of the Wednesday Demonstration. (Kim & Kim, 2021, p. 44)

The epitaph is carefully phrased to make clear that the statue commemorates the rally itself and is not an anti-Japanese monument. Today, the girl in Bronze Peace continues to sit facing the empty lot that used to be the location of the Japanese embassy in Seoul. In FRP Peace, Kim and Kim transformed the plastic prototype for the bronze counterpart into an exhibitable artwork by painting it in acrylic

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Fig. 6.2  Kim Seo-kyung and Kim Eun-sung. A Statue of Peace. 2011 (created to commemorate the 1000th weekly demonstration by the Korean women). Bronze. Seoul, South Korea. Photograph Jeong Yanghee. (Courtesy: Kim Seo-kyung and Kim Eun-sung)

pigment. The main components of FRP Peace are identical to Bronze Peace: a girl sits in a chair by a second empty chair, and halmeoni’s shadow appears beneath her with an epitaph placed to one side. Furthermore, the rough texture on the girl’s clothing has the materiality of metal, tethering FRP Peace to the bronze statue. Meanwhile, the overall coloring—especially the redness of her cheeks and lips and the colors in her pupils— imbues the statue with a lifelikeness fundamentally different from the bronze piece. Finally, rather than representing wooden chairs, FRP Peace is accompanied by actual chairs made of wood. The effect resulting from these changes is thought-provoking. First, the two statues present a different level of gravity. Bronze Peace is affixed to a specific site, and the chosen materials—bronze and stones—add weight and a sense of permanence. As a work made for exhibition,

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everything about FRP Peace, in contrast, is light and mobile. Among the twelve symbols with which this monument is imbued, Kim and Kim (2021, pp. 32–45) explain that the “one of the most important elements” is the “site itself, that is in front of the Japanese embassy,” but FRP Peace only retains this element by proxy. The shadow of halmeoni in the FRP version is not made of stones and marble but painted in white on translucent acrylic sheets. The sitting girl can be installed on any chair provided by the hosting institution, while the platform with the shadow and epitaph is optional according to the availability of space. For instance, NFE exhibited FRP Peace without the platform but pasted the photographic reproduction of the shadow on the wall behind the statue (Okamoto & Gim [Kim], 2019, pp. 22, 76–77). As opposed to Bronze Peace, for which the two chairs are also made of bronze, the real wooden chairs in FRP Peace serve as the threshold between the reality of the viewers and the imitative and fictive presence of the statue. In short, the Bronze and FRP statues are connected in their origin and meaning but are two distinct artworks that engage with viewers in different ways due to the difference in their materials and surface treatment. The wall text that accompanied FRP Peace in AFE only introduced the bronze statue and the issue of the comfort women without touching upon the FRP version’s own expressive agency. In her recent lecture in Kyoto, Okamoto Yuka recapitulated Kim and Kim’s explanation of the twelve symbols imbued in Bronze Peace using the FRP version for show-­and-­tell with no mention of the shift in physical quality and the context of viewing (Okamoto, 2021). Art history aspires to understand the material, cultural, and historical contexts of works themselves, which naturally encompass the creators’ intent. This also means that for an art historian, a creator’s intent is not the be-all and end-all. Arguably, in FRP Peace, the increased lifelikeness and presence due to the use of colors and actual chairs encourage viewers to empathize with the girl’s gaze much more than the bronze counterpart. Unlike Bronze Peace, which requires one to confront women’s suffering always through the lens of the Japan-Korean relations of the past and present due to its physical location, the mobility of the FRP statue leaves room for more personal reflection. FRP Peace also includes an epitaph on the base, so it never loses sight of the circumstances that led to its production. Yet the reduced materiality of the shadow and the translucent nature of the platform—not to mention the fact that the platform is optional—seem to further push the specificity of the historical and political context to the

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background. For this reason, one could argue that FRP Peace communicates Kim and Kim’s broader message concerning the ongoing oppression against and sexual violence toward women more powerfully than the bronze counterpart.

4   FRP Peace as a Cultural Artifact An art-historical perspective clarifies that Bronze Peace and FRP Peace ought to be considered as two distinct works in terms of the viewer experience, and the latter statue is more in keeping with Kim and Kim’s nuanced and universal statement on women’s suffering. This section analyzes FRP Peace as a “cultural artifact” by placing it in the context both at the time of production and in its later reception. Kim and Kim (2021, pp. 37–38, 45; Takashige, 2019) state that their intent for Bronze Peace was to empathize with the triple suffering the women faced: their experience during the Pacific War itself, the discrimination they faced upon returning to Korea after the war, and the official discourse concerning this aspect of wartime history from both the Japanese and Korean governments. The Japanese government, however, interpreted the bronze statue as an anti-­ Japan monument. In December 2011, almost immediately following the dedication ceremony for Bronze Peace, the then prime minister of Japan, Noda Yoshihiko, submitted a request to President I Myeong-bak for the removal of the statue (Odawara, 2020). Since 2011, 160 Statues of Peace have been erected around the world (Shōjozō secchi, 2021). The Japanese government has issued a complaint and request for removal virtually every time a statue is erected. Most recently, in September 2021, Japan’s chief cabinet secretary, Katō Katsunobu, protested to the German government for extending the installation permit for A Statue of Peace in Berlin (Berurin shōjozō, 2021). In sum, Bronze Peace is now a powerful symbol of Korean identity and resilience that calls for remembrance of Japan’s annexation of Korea and reflection on the ongoing Korea-Japan diplomatic tensions. Both the opponents and supporters of AFE—including the organizing committee—perceived FRP Peace as just the stand-in for the historical and political contexts surrounding Bronze Peace. What does it mean to position FRP Peace in its own context? One fruitful avenue is to zoom in on the fact that FRP Peace is an artwork made for exhibitions rather than as a site-specific public monument. The FRP statue’s ability to physically pop up within one’s place or space of identity poses a special kind of threat. During the preparation process for AFE, Ōmura Hideaki and the

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curatorial team at the Aichi Museum of Art contested the inclusion of FRP Peace. When the list of artworks was shared with the museum on April 11, 2019, the curators proposed to substitute FRP Peace with a panel presentation. In the two months leading up to the Triennale’s opening, Ōmura requested the statue’s removal on two occasions (Aichi Triennale no Arikata Kentō Iinkai, 2019). Once the Triennale opened, Takasu Katsuya, an orthopedic surgeon and a national celebrity who became one of the most vocal public opponents of AFE, tweeted on August 1 to a picture of FRP Peace: “Unless this repulsive display is removed, I’ll quit being a Nagoya citizen, now” (Geijutsusai, 2019). Notably, the curatorial team judged that exhibiting FRP Peace as a photographic reproduction would not pose a problem as long as the statue was not physically present in the museum. It is safe to surmise that the curatorial team guessed correctly, considering that beginning with the Asahi Newspaper’s initial coverage of AFE’s content in the July 31 issue (Hwang, 2019), FRP Peace appeared repeatedly in media and social networking services to illustrate AFE-related stories and opinions. The Aichi Triennale Organizing Committee (ATOC) began receiving complaints about AFE as soon as the Asahi Newspaper article was released. There is no evidence, however, of the newspaper company, Takasu Katsuya, or any other AFE opponents or supporters being targeted for reproducing the image of FRP Peace, clarifying that engaging with a photographic reproduction of an artwork is not perceived as equivalent to engaging with the artwork itself. Thus, had the FRP Peace been included in AFE only as a panel display, it probably would not have become a target of such aggressive complaints. Conversely, this double reaction to an artwork and its reproduction explains why it was critical for the AFE committee to include FRP Peace in the exhibition. Exhibiting an artwork as a panel installation is in essence a form of self-censorship that reduces the physicality of an artwork into packaged information, depriving the viewers of the opportunity to engage with the work in person. For the AFE committee, the impulse to self-censor within ATOC was almost as monumental a battle as the external pressure to stymie the exhibition. As a condition to reopen AFE, Ōmura’s review committee proposed giving the curators of the Aichi Museum of Art direct access to the artists to reconceptualize the exhibition and modify the labels. The AFE committee adamantly rejected this proposition over the concern that this could open doors to the same type of (self-)censoring the artworks were subjected to in the first place. Many of the pieces included in AFE were artworks that the

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hosting museums had removed voluntarily after or even before complaints were filed against them. AFE exposed how problematically elusive the definition of “censorship” can be within art institutions. The special issue of Bijutsu techō (Art Magazine) dedicated to the topic of freedom of expression in the aftermath of the AFE incident, for example, includes an interview with curators and art directors where Kataoka Mami, the director of Mori Art Museum in Tokyo comments: “I was more curious about the institutional consensus. What sort of discussion took place that resulted in such an aggressive exhibition. It is unthinkable in Mori Art Museum” (Narita, 2020, p.  135). This statement affirms a level of self-­censoring within art museums under the guise of institutional consensus. The fact that Kataoka was selected as the artistic director for the next Aichi Triennale (now renamed “Aichi 2022”), who in the press conference announcing the appointment emphasized that an art festival is “entertainment” and her aim is to make Aichi 2022 a “fun event” for all (“Aichi Triennale” wa, 2020), underscores the deeply seeded culture of self-­censorship in the contemporary Japanese art world that AFE brought to light. At the same time, the double reaction to FRP Peace and its reproduction also prompts us to question the impact of disseminating one’s artwork as images. AFE reopened on October 8 with some significant viewing restrictions, including no cameras or cellphones in the exhibition space. For Kim and Kim, however, the dissemination of FRP Peace as an image was part of the performative aspect of this work. Thus, a compromise was reached to allow the gallery staff to take a snapshot of any visitor interested in having their picture taken with the statue. Okamoto Yuka recollects how rewarding it was to see visitors’ interests even though “her legs were stiff from squatting to take so many pictures” (Okamoto, 2019, p.  58). Despite Okamoto’s positive feeling, the AFE incident betrayed that dissemination of an artwork through an image mostly encourages a rereading of the artwork to fit one’s own agenda rather than the sense of reflection and empathy the artists intended to evoke. In other words, instead of the visual “information” of the artwork serving to “tame” one’s emotion (Tsuda, 2020, p. 9), it was mobilized to justify and crystallize it. A more poignant use of image emerged following AFE’s closure where individuals shared snapshots of themselves sitting next to an empty chair being the girl from A  Statue of Peace. Intriguingly, the initiator of this moment, Shimada Yoshiko—who carried out a series of performances, Becoming a Statue of a Japanese Comfort Woman, in 2012–15 (Nakamura, 2020; Kunimoto, 2022)—called it “being a statue of non-freedom of

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expression” (Hyōgen no fujiyū ten zō ni nattemiru), equating the statue with AFE and the oppression of freedom of expression that the exhibition revealed (Shimada, n.d.). The discussion of this phenomenon is outside the scope of this essay. One point worth highlighting, however, is that being A  Statue of Peace is qualitatively different from posting a photograph of oneself with FRP Peace on social networking services. As opposed to the latter, which is a commemoration or documentation of one’s encounter with an artwork, in the former, each snapshot is an independent artwork. Ultimately, what the art historical investigation into the difference between FRP Peace and its reproduction reminds us is the presence of an art museum as a physical space that orchestrates interactions between objects and objects, objects and viewers, and viewers and viewers.

5   After “Freedom of Expression?” as an Artwork As mentioned in Sect. 2, a key avenue of art historical investigation since the 1980s has been the power that art institutions exude over molding what art is. This perspective is particularly important for a twenty-first-­ century visitor because beginning in the 2000s, and especially in the wake of the George Floyd protests in 2020, an increasing number of museums in the United States (e.g., the Whitney, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Smithsonian, and Museum of Modern Art) began reassessing their institutional practices that enabled and perpetuated systemic racial, ethnic, gender, and class disparities. The museum field in Japan has not yet matured enough to address the parallel issues within its institution. The AFE incident, however, did catalyze a national and international debate over a complex set of issues that lurk beneath present art and cultural practices (Satō, 2011; Hutchinson, 2007), including Japan’s conduct before, during, and after the Pacific War; the postwar governmental stance on the Japanese empire’s crimes against neighboring nations; the present status of the emperor; the history of museum institutions in Japan; the government’s cultural policies past and present; historical and contemporary practices of external and self-censorship; the system of federal funding support for cultural events; the ambiguous relationship between art events such as a Biennale and Triennale and museums; and standard museum policies concerning politically sensitive exhibition contents. In art museums, the institutional authority to dictate the art production and reception is typically exercised through collection, exhibition, and educational programming. True, curators are often at the heart of

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daily museum operations, tasked to supply content expertise. The research on museum practices, including curation, however, has long moved away from considering curators as auteurs (O’Neill, 2012, p.  205). Instead, recent literature encourages looking at an art exhibition in its complexity beyond curatorship, as suggested also in Chap. 5 where, through the lens of design, exhibits were considered as artistic practices. Comparable to any other object or image, an art exhibition should be considered an artwork that is a physical object typically constituted of two or more components (i.e., individual works of art) arranged within a physical space; a visual experience that can be formally analyzed through paying attention to the space itself (the layout, lighting, wall color, location of exists and text panels, etc.); and a cultural artifact that exists within the broader context of a museum institution and the society that surrounds it. This final section returns to AFE to demonstrate what an analysis of an exhibition as an artwork looks like. Related to the present scholarly approach to decouple curators as individuals from exhibitions as their artwork, it is noteworthy that when the Aichi Triennale review committee issued the preliminary report, supporters of AFE criticized it for zeroing in on Tsuda and the AFE committee’s lack of curatorial experience as the chief cause of the outcry (Narita, 2020). The criticism derived from the awareness that the intense hostility exhibited toward AFE primarily derived from the categorical rejection of any criticism of Japan’s imperial past. There was a good chance that no method of curation could have made any difference in the outcome. Relevant to the present discussion is the fact that AFE had a dispersed curatorial responsibility by design because Tsuda requested the committee sign a dual contract as a “participating artist” (shuppin sakka) who contributed to the exhibition itself with their artwork and as a “contracted vendor” (gyōmu itaku keiyaku) responsible for curating AFE and recruiting the artists who actually produced works for the exhibit. The review committee’s report problematized the curatorial liberty the AFE committee supposedly enjoyed, focusing solely on the vendor contract, downplaying the committee’s right as participating artists. Two of the AFE committee members—Okamoto and Arai—emphasize, however, that the committee was required to be in close communication with Tsuda and Ōmura throughout the planning process; therefore, no decision was made without their consent (Okamoto, 2019, p.  17). In the meantime, the Aichi Museum of Art only had a contract with ATOC, not the AFE committee. Unlike the remaining part of the contemporary art exhibition, for

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which the curators from the museum took the lead, only an assistant curator was assigned to AFE to serve in a supporting role with virtually no involvement in the curatorial decision-making process. For the purpose of this section, this ambiguity surrounding the curatorial responsibility serves as a point of departure because it betrays the reality of an art exhibition, which is a conglomerate of crisscrossing institutional agendas. To critically assess AFE, it is essential for one to analyze the physical and formal qualities of the exhibition in terms of the gallery space and object layout, as well as the visual experience one receives from publications and publicity materials. For instance, conducting a formal analysis of how the artworks were reproduced in related publications allows us to tease out the fundamental disconnect between Tsuda and the AFE committee in what they understood to be the aim of the exhibition. In the Aichi Triennale official catalogue, the select artworks from AFE were presented on one two-page spread as a collage of high-quality but small images accompanied by a one-paragraph description written not by the AFE committee but by ATOC (2020, pp.  58–59). The description concludes with a brief note on the exhibition’s closure and reopening. Unlike the narrative around the AFE incident issued from Ōmura, Tsuda and the review committee, which focused on the AFE committee’s role as the “curator,” the catalogue caption underlines how the installation was the “artwork” of the AFE committee, stating: “The Organizing Committee members of the ‘Freedom of Expression?’ were invited to the Aichi Triennale 2019 as participating artists” (ATOC, 2020, p. 58). The paragraph does not feature any of the 16 artists who actually contributed pieces to AFE. The entry on AFE is a stark contrast to how the catalogue features the artists who participated in other parts of the Triennale’s contemporary art exhibition, each of whom received a two-page spread introduction with an image or images of their artworks. In contrast, Okamoto and Arai’s edited volume demonstrates the AFE committee’s approach to the artworks, where a five-page column features each artist with a snapshot of their artwork accompanied by a caption describing the piece and, in most cases, the censorship incident that led to its inclusion in the exhibition (Hyōgen no fujiyūten, sonogo, 2019). The accompanying images are reproduced in monochrome, and rather than using professional art photos, they opted for Ahn Se-hong’s documentation of the gallery installation. The differences identified through the formal analysis above reflect the irreconcilable agenda toward AFE between Tsuda, who ultimately embodied the interest of the establishment (ATOC, provincial government

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bodies, museums), and the AFE committee, an activist body with a clear anti-establishment initiative. The glossy, full-color, and frontal-shot photos in the Triennale catalogue unmistakably convey that the pieces in AFE are works of art, yet the page layout and text make clear that the artists who produced them were not the participating artists of the Triennale. The participating artist as per the contract was the AFE committee, so as far as ATOC was concerned, the works in the exhibition simply constituted the committee’s expressive vision. In other words, the exhibition itself was the artwork the audience was to appreciate. This impression aligns with Okamoto’s recollection of Tsuda’s comment as he explained the decision to discontinue the exhibition. Tsuda stated, “AFE made such a kerfuffle. It is now reported in national news as a ‘trend.’ We [Tsuda and Ōmura] feel that the exhibition served its purpose to stir discussion to a certain extent” (Okamoto, 2019, p. 34). For Tsuda, the act of including AFE in the Aichi Triennale was itself a statement and performance that problematized and agitated the status quo. As long as the collective message was transmitted and received, it was not as essential that visitors were able to physically access and engage with each work within the exhibition. How about the AFE committee? In Okamoto and Arai’s edited volume, although the photographs were taken by a photographer-artist, they were not professional photographs of artworks. The diagonal perspective employed in some of the shots and the minimum quality of reproduction transformed the artworks into documentation of the history of censorship and the AFE incident itself. On the other hand, the addition of captions and the effort made to capture all the pieces in the exhibition—not just a selection—convey the committee’s conviction to not inadvertently edit, or censor, an artist’s expression. The aim of the AFE committee was to secure a space for artists to express and viewers to engage. Okamoto states: In short, a “freedom of expression” entails the freedom of a person to express, the freedom of a viewer to know, and the presence of a “space for communication of and conversation over one’s expressions” between artworks and viewers, viewers and viewers, and artists and viewers. (Okamoto, 2019, pp. 13–14)

In short, Tsuda and the AFE committee members aligned in their central political agenda regarding art censorship but diverged critically in their approach to artworks and the meaning of audience engagement. Had AFE gone smoothly, this difference would not have posed a problem. The

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unexpected volume of complaints, however, forced the parties involved to act according to their priorities that apparently were never adequately shared in the preparation process.

6  Conclusions What can visitors learn from art history about artworks and art museums? Art history reminds us that an artwork—whether it be a single object or an entire exhibition—is a mirror of changing sizes. When one stands in front of an artwork, one’s immediate reaction is comparable to a small hand mirror: a reflection of just one’s own emotion, experience, and knowledge. Art history helps us to expand that mirror. When we stand in front of a large mirror, we may first only see our own reflection, but then we begin to notice other things, such as our surroundings and other people around us near and far. In art viewing, these reflections beyond ourselves are analogous to the contexts that brought the work to where it is—right in front of us. These contexts encompass the intents of the artist, curator, museum institution, scholars and critics who studied the piece, as well as the conditions of the physical surroundings, such as the lighting, temperature, smell, color of gallery walls, and presence of other artworks and visitors. The bigger the mirror, the clearer we can see that the artwork is part of our context (or history) just as much as we join the work’s own context by engaging with it. If we study the mirror long and close enough, we may notice that some reflections draw our attention more than others (like how lifelike FRP Peace looks) or even find cracks and missing pieces (do I agree with the explanation about the symbolic significance of FRP Peace? isn’t there more?). This is where a deeper engagement with an artwork begins.

Appendix: Glossary of East Asian Characters Aichi Triennale あいちトリエンナーレ Ahn Se-hong 안세홍 安世鴻 Arai Hiroyuki アライ=ヒロユキ Bijutsu techō 美術手帖 chima 치마 genten 原点 gyōmu itaku keiyaku 業務委託契約 halmeoni 할머니

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hanbok 한복 韓服 Heiwa no hi 平和の碑 Hyōgen no fujiyū ten zō ni nattemiru 表現の不自由展像になってみる Hyōgen no fujiyū ten: kesareta mono tachi 表現の不自由展− 消されたものたち Hyōgen no fujiyū ten, sonogo 表現の不自由展その後 ianfu 慰安婦 I Myeong-bak 이명박 Iwasaki Sadaaki 岩崎貞明 jeogori 저고리 Katō Katsunobu 加藤勝信 Kawamura Takashi 河村たかし Kim Eun-sung 김운성 金運成 Kim Seo-kyung 김서경 金曙炅 Lidai minghua ji 歷代名畫記 Nagata Kōzō 永田浩三 Noda Yoshihiko 野田佳彦 Ogura Toshimaru 小倉利丸 Okamoto Yuka 岡本有佳 Ō mura Hideaki 大村秀章 shuppin sakka 出品作家 Takasu Katsuya 高須克弥 Tsuda Daisuke 津田大介 Zhang Yanyuan 張彥遠

References Aichi Triennale. (n.d.). Biennale Foundation. Retrieved December 31, 2021, from https://www.biennialfoundation.org/biennials/aichi-­triennale/ “Aichi Triennale” wa “Aichi 2022” e: geijutsu kantoku Kataoka Mami-shi ga shūnin kaiken [“Aichi Triennale” becomes “Aichi 2022: Inaugural Press Conference with the Artistic Director Kataoka Mami] [Video]. (2020, November 16). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtWcHHs_S0c&t=1040s Aichi Triennale no Arikata Kentō Iinkai. (2019, December 18). “Hyōgen no fujiyūten, sonogo” ni kansuru chōsa hōkoku [“After ‘Freedom of Expression?’” Report]. Retrieved December 31, 2021, from https://www.pref.aichi.jp/ uploaded/life/267118_926147_misc.pdf Aichi Triennale Organizing Committee. (2020). Aichi Triennale 2019: Taming Y/ Our Passion. Aichi Triennale Organizing Committee.

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Berurin shōjozō no secchi enchō, Nihon seifu “Doitsu ni tsuyoku kōgi.” [A Statue of Peace in Berlin: Japanese Government “Strongly Protests” to Germany]. (2021, September 6). Wow! Korea. Retrieved December 31, 2021, from https://news.yahoo.co.jp/articles/24a9226d87715dfb5753502c9177322 1229f817c Cothren, M., & D’Alleva, A. (2021). Methods and Theories of Art History (3rd ed.). Laurence King Publishing. Geijutsusai “Aichi Triennale” daienjō: Takasu Katsuya inchō “kono kegarawashii tenjibutsu o katazukenakattara Nagoya shimin yamemasu, nau.” [Art Fest, Aichi Triennale, Crashed and Burned: Takasu Katsuya, “Unless This Repulsive Display is Removed, I’ll Quit Being a Nagoya Citizen, Now”]. (2019, August 2). Gajetto tsūshin. Retrieved December 31, 2021, from https://news.nicovideo.jp/watch/nw5737357 Glass, R. (2017, October 28). Introduction to Art Historical Analysis, in Smarthistory. Retrieved December 31, 2021, from https://smarthistory.org/ introduction-­to-­art-­historical-­analysis/. Grant, C., & Prince, D. (2020). Decolonizing Art History. Art History, 43(1), 8–66. Harrison, C., & Wood, P. (2003). Art in Theory, 1900–2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas (2nd ed.). Blackwell Publishers. Harrison, C., Wood, P., & Gaiger, J. (2000). Art in Theory 1648–1815: An Anthology of Changing Ideas. Blackwell Publishers. Harrison, C., Wood, P., & Gaiger, J. (2001). Art in Theory, 1815–1900: An Anthology of Changing Ideas. Blackwell Publishers. Hutchinson, R. (2007). Censorship in the Japanese Arts: Introduction. Japan Forum, 19(3), 269–280. Retrieved December 31, 2021, from https://www. tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09555800701579925 Hwang, C. (2019, July 31). Hyōgen no ba o ubawareta sakuhin ten: shōjozō, kyūjō haiku…futatabi tou [Exhibition for Artworks Shunned from Places for Expression: A Statue of Peace, haiku on Article 9…Problematized Once Again]. Asahi Newspaper Digital. Retrieved December 31, 2021, from https://digital. asahi.com/articles/ASM7W5KJPM7WOIPE00M.html?pn=7 Hyōgen no fujiyūten, sonogo: sakuhin no koe o kiku [“After ‘Freedom of Expression?’”: Listen to the Artworks’ Voices]. (2019). In Y.  Okamoto & H. Arai (Eds.), Aichi Triennale “tenji chūshi” jiken: hyōgen no fujiyū to Nihon [Aichi Triennale “Exhibition Closure” Incident: Japan and Non-freedom of Expression] (pp. 81–85). Iwanami Shoten. Ikeda, A., & Tanaka, S. (2019). “Heiwa no shōjozō” tenji chūshi e: Aichi Triennale o Kawamura Takashi, Nagoya shichō ga shisatsu [A Statue of Peace, Exhibition Closed: Kawamura Takashi, Major of Nagoya City, Inspects Aichi Triennale]. Huffpost. Retrieved December 31, 2021, from https://www.huffingtonpost. jp/entry/takashi-­kawamura_jp_5d43b0c3e4b0aca3411b5441

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Iwaki, K. (2020). Diffracting the Politicized Spectacle: Queering Censorship in the Aichi Triennale. Performance Research, 25(5), 84–91. Retrieved December 31, 2021, from https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1352816 5.2020.1883327 Keehan, R. (2019). The 2019 Aichi Triennale: Notes on “After ‘Freedom of Expression?’” Di’van 7, 118–129. Retrieved December 31, 2021, from https://issuu.com/unswartdesign/docs/di_van_7 Kim, S., & Kim, E. (2021). Aita isu ni kizanda yakusoku: “Heiwa no shōjozō” sakka nōto [The Promise Etched into the Empty Chair: A Statue of Peace, Artists’ Note] (Y. Okamoto, Trans.). Seori Shobō. Kunimoto, N. (2022). Situating Being a Statue of a Japanese ‘Comfort Woman’: Shimada Yoshiko, Bourgeois Liberalism, and the Afterlives of Japanese Imperialism. Verge: Studies in Global Asias, 8(2), 170–200. Nakamura, J. (2020). Becoming Missing ‘Comfort Women’: Embodiment, History, and Position. In Transgenerational Remembrance: Performance and the Asia-Pacific War in Contemporary Japan (pp.  71–91). Northwestern University Press. Narita, H. (2020). Bijutsukan wa kankyaku ni dō hirakareru bekika? [How Should an Art Museum Be Opened to Its Viewers?]. Bijutsu techō, 1081, 134–141. Nelson, R. S., & Shiff, R. (Eds.). (2003). Critical Terms for Art History (2nd ed.). University of Chicago Press. O’Neill, P. (2012). The Culture of Curating and the Curating of Culture(s). MIT Press. Odawara N. (2020, April 4). “Kako” tono taemanai taiwa no tameni: “Heiwa no shōjozō” o megutte [Towards a Continuous Dialogue with the “Past”: A Statue of Peace]. Bijutsu techō. Retrieved December 31, 2021, from https:// bijutsutecho.com/magazine/insight/21563 Okamoto, Y. (2019). “Hyōgen no fujiyūten, sonogo” chūshi jiken: tōjisha toshite kirokusuru 270-nichi no danshō [“After ‘Freedom of Expression?’” Closure Incident: An Organizer’s Synopsized Record of 270 Days]. In Y. Okamoto & H. Arai (Eds.), Aichi Triennale “tenji chūshi” jiken: hyōgen no fujiyū to Nihon (pp. 9–63). Iwanami Shoten. Okamoto, Y. (2021, July 29). Hyōgen no fujiyūten eno kōgeki toha nanika [What Does an Attack on Freedom of Expression Look Like?] [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mi4_VkLmNdo Okamoto, Y., & Gim [Kim] B. (2019). “Heiwa no shōjozō” wa naze suwari tsuzukerunoka [Why is the Girl in A Statue of Peace Waiting?] (Rev. 2nd ed.). Seori Shobō. Portland Art Museum and Northwest Film Center. (2021). Playing with Fire: In Conversation with Virgil Ortiz. Art Unbound [Video]. YouTube. https:// youtu.be/Mjy5CYGIIdw

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Preziosi, D. (Ed.). (2009). The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology (2nd ed.). Oxford University Press. Reilly, M. (2018). Curatorial Activism: Towards an Ethics of Curating. Thames and Hudson. Satō, D. (2011). Modern Japanese Art and the Meiji State: The Politics of Beauty (H. Nara, Trans.). Getty Publications. Shimada, Y. (n.d.). Hyōgen no fujiyū ten zō ni nattemiru, Being a Statue of Non Freedom of Expression. Facebook. Retrieved December 29, 2021, from https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?vanity=yoshiko.shimada.56&se t=a.10157370903348164 Shōjozō secchi kara jūnen: chōkokuka fusai “Nihon no shazai ga nozomi” [Ten Years since the Erection of A Statue of Peace: Sculptor Duo, “Our Hope is Japan’s Apology”]. (2021, December 21). Yonhap News. Retrieved December 31, 2021, from https://news.yahoo.co.jp/articles/a23c21b25c2de9ed 223d6099fdfba6c315c85438 Takashige, H. (2019, October 10). Shōjozō, Nihon kyūdan dewa nai ito: rikai no kagi wa “minshū bijutsu” [A Statue of Peace is Not Condemnation of Japan: A Deeper Understanding through Korea’s “People’s Art”]. Asahi Newspaper Digital. Retrieved December 31, 2021, from https://digital.asahi.com/articles/ASMB963R4MB9UCLV00S.html?pn=6 Tsuda, D. (2020). Tame Y/Our Passion. In Aichi Triennale 2019: Taming Y/Our Passion (pp. 8–9). The Aichi Triennale Organizing Committee. Wood, P., & Wainwright, L., with Harrison, C. (2021). Art in Theory, the West in the World: An Anthology of Changing Ideas. John Wiley & Sons.

Object Stories: a socially responsive program Object Stories is a program at PAM of creating rotating exhibitions that are based on storytelling and objects chosen by community members (Portland Art Museum, n.d.). For each exhibition, community members participate in a storytelling workshop and then collaborate with the museum to create exhibitions and programs around objects important in their lives. PAM created this program of storytelling with objects to interrupt the traditional authoritative museum voice and create a platform where Portland and the Pacific Northwest’s many communities can directly address issues affecting their lives. Object Stories aims to make PAM a safe and responsive space open for dialogue, conversation, and the exchange of ideas

CHAPTER 7

Programs and Art Education: Becoming Socially Responsive Dana Carlisle Kletchka

1   Introduction Art museums have long been a complex symbol of power and privilege in Western culture. However, in the past 40–50  years, North American museums have undergone a radical shift in their purposes, practices, and philosophies. The field of art education, specifically as it intersects with art museums, plays a pivotal and ongoing role in this transformation. Art education paradigms inform the work of art museum educators, who in turn create practices by developing programs using theoretical paradigms that inform interpretation, engagement, and learning with members of the broader public. This chapter illustrates theories and practices developed in art museums that address structural inequalities that, even as they are acknowledged, remain embedded in art museum practice. Specifically, it asks, What can visitors learn about museum programs from art education? The chapter begins with an overview of early art education and museum programs in the United States in Sect. 2. Section 3 navigates three

D. C. Kletchka (*) The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 E. Redaelli (ed.), Visiting the Art Museum, Sociology of the Arts, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12089-3_7

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museological paradigms as a framework for understanding how museums internally conceptualize and externally engage with their surrounding communities as they evolve into more human-centered, socially responsive institutions. Section 4 explains how the shift through socially responsive practices address structural inequalities through educational programs, and Sect. 5 offers examples of these practices at two museums in Columbus, Ohio—the Columbus Museum of Art and the Wexner Center for the Arts on The Ohio State University campus. The conclusions emphasize the need for museums to follow a human-centered trajectory with particular attention to marginalized communities.

2   Early Art Education and Museum Programs in the United States Although education in some form or the other has been a guiding principle of American museums since their inception, initial programmatic efforts in art museums in the United States are somewhat difficult to delineate as a whole since they were, until the early twenty-first century, generally published as part of printed newsletters or year-end reports, which can only be examined in person as part of institutional archives, or in conference proceedings. However, some large art museums (such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, NY) have digitized their archives; others have published books, academic articles, or conferences about their educational programs or philosophies (Toledo Museum of Art, 1937; Larrabee, 1968); and some agencies have funded broader studies of the field that include rich examples of theory and practice (Low, 1942; Newsom & Silver, 1978). These often reveal a concern for particular audiences and the ways in which art museums are situated within society more broadly. There are relatively few published in-depth explorations of the history of art museum education in the United States. The literature that does exist often draws particular themes out of examples of practice from large institutions in major American cities (Cherry, 1992; Buffington, 2007) or proposes typologies of experience (Zeller, 1989; Burnham & Kai-Kee, 2011). For example, Terry Zeller suggests that there were three philosophies, or museum missions, that served as the foundations of much museum practice in the twentieth century: An aesthetic mission of revealing quality and taste by exposing visitors to the finest examples of art and design. An educational mission that utilized academic scholarship, didactic information in the galleries, and museum handbooks in order to inform

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visitors of the objects contained therein but also to convey values in an effort to “break down physical, psychological, and intellectual barriers in order to make the museum truly accessible to all” (Zeller, 1989, p. 37). A social welfare mission—fostered by a direct rejection of the political regimes that threatened democracy worldwide during the 1930s and 1940s—focused on social welfare and providing services to the public as a way of encouraging critical thought and original judgment. All three of these philosophies engendered remarkably similar programming over the years, such as school tours, art classes, films, art-historical lectures, and gallery talks. The content of these programs, however, was deeply influenced and shaped by the philosophies that undergirded their creation. This chapter is somewhat of a departure in that it acknowledges the myriad influences on more than a century of museum programming, investigating how art education in public schools intersects and overlaps with museological imperatives of serving audiences and communities. American art education methodologies and paradigms over the last century have had an enormous impact on how art museums served school audiences and children under the age of 18 even as they remained oddly separate from pedagogical practices in the galleries themselves. Public school art education just before the turn of the nineteenth century, when it existed at all, relied on copying, shading, and measuring lines and geometric forms, such as squares and circles, to refine students’ perception, including exercises in light and shade and drawing from nature. While pedagogical practices derived from a handful of European models, most students in the early 1900s engaged in manual training exercises designed to improve their accuracy and neatness in drawing geometric shapes and ornament (Efland, 1990), help them observe and replicate natural forms from nature, or teach them “an influence for order, cleanliness, and love of home and family” from black-and-white reproductions of paintings by well-known artists (Stankiewicz, 2001, p. 116). As the progressive education movement—with its emphasis on improving social circumstances for students and the communities in which they lived—began to influence American art education, the pedagogical practices and expected outcomes of teaching art to children changed dramatically. Curricula went from being mostly industrial drawing to showing concern for self-­expression to being grounded in psychological research and the belief that children are innately creative beings. In what became an overlapping interest, the burgeoning picture study movement posited that art was a language spoken by influential artists through their masterpieces that students could learn to

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both interpret and internalize (Zeller, 1989). Museums began to capitalize on that interest by creating and offering lantern slides and small reproductions on loan to public school teachers. Early museum administrators were quite happy to turn on the lights and unlock the doors in the service of education; later, museum thought leaders such as John Cotton Dana (1917), originally a librarian, encouraged museums to adopt a more populist inclination by lending their collections to storefronts and other popular public spaces. In the early 1900s, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Museum of Fine Arts Boston introduced educational guides to lead adults and children to the finest works of art in their collections, and young visitors at an art museum could expect to find a range of engaging activities, such as classes, games, activity cards, and even clubs (Ramsay, 1938). All these practices can be said to embody the philosophical orientation of the Modernist museum (see Sect. 3) as they served to impart knowledge to—not with—learners both inside and outside of the galleries. Benefactors of art museums in the United States—namely those industrialists and tycoons whose philanthropic gestures built museums, libraries, and universities—stood to benefit from refining the tastes of the average citizen, who might become a designer or consumer of their goods (Stankiewicz, 2001). It is crucial to note the treatment of these average citizens, and the children who grew up to become them, existed at intersections of race, class, gender, disability, and socioeconomic status. While pedagogical practices and programming are commonly described using a broad historical brush, it is important to note these intersectional characteristics of identity yielded vastly different treatment by both schools and museums. And while our current understandings of social justice may not recognize early programmatic efforts as inclusive or equitable, schools and museums framed them as beneficial to a broad public who otherwise would not have had access to such objects or understandings. In this way, museum programming and art education became inextricably linked with broad museological prerogatives that changed and evolved in response to cultural perceptions about art, design, and the role of creativity in educating both children and adults.

3   Evolving Theoretical Frameworks in Museums A variety of political, social, educational, and economic discourses shape museological practices, from collecting to exhibition development and from interpretation to programming. The expectations placed upon what

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museums do, how they do it, and who they do it for have changed radically since museums established a position in American culture in the 1870s. The fact that museums in the United States have always claimed to be for the public good has, in turn, provided an opportunity for the public to question and critique their efforts. I recently wrote about the changing museological landscape by identifying three distinct paradigmatic frameworks for conceptualizing art museum practice and purposes—Eilean Hooper-Greenhill’s (2000) modernist museum and post-museum and Dewdney, DeBosa, and Walsh’s distributed museum (2013)—which chronicle the turn from object-based to visitor-centered to socially responsive practices (Kletchka, 2018). These frameworks are loosely chronological and necessarily malleable as practices vary tremendously from museum to museum, but they all situate a particular relationship between objects, programs, museum staff (especially educators), and the public. Modernist museum describes an institution that presents content to visitors through a carefully curated set of objects assembled by disciplinary experts. This method of revealing knowledge, and the accompanying unidirectional transmission of information, manifested in all facets of museological work, from staffing to fundraising and programs. Museum staff divided visitors into various roles that corresponded primarily with external characteristics, such as age (youth or adult), grade levels (primary, secondary, or university), or purpose of engagement (weekend classes for children, professional training, or tours for visitors who are blind or disabled), and created opportunities that they thought were most appropriate for such groups. Even the architecture of museums built in the late 1800s and early 1900s reified their status as institutions of expertise, keepers of truth, and imparters of knowledge as they modeled their floor plans and ornament after Greek exemplars, harkening back to Western standards of knowledge and beauty (Duncan & Wallach, 1980). Two important museological philosophies informed a turn toward visitor-­centered rather than object-oriented practices, first programmatic and then pedagogical. The notion of post-museum, conceptualized and explicated by Hooper-Greenhill (2000, p. 138), recognizes the dynamic processes of interpretation with individuals who are not blank slates but are shaped by intersecting experiences of gender, race, and class (to this I would add ability and neurodiversity) experienced outside of the museum context. Power and privilege are two important underpinnings of post-­ museum pedagogy, both in terms of practices in museum spaces and in recognizing the “allegedly unproblematic and homogenous borders of

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dominant cultural practices” (Hooper-Greenhill, 2000, p. 140), including colonialist origins of collecting, conserving, and interpreting. The reinvented museum, a museological concept outlined by consultant Gail Anderson (2012), takes the themes of awareness and responsiveness and turns them toward the goal of making the museum—from the board to the staff and volunteers—consider more deeply the communities that it ostensibly serves. Both of these museological philosophies toward practice—post-museum and reinvented museum—demonstrate a concern for external factors outside the objects that were previously paramount in much museum work. The Great Depression in the United States brought about vast changes in beliefs about capitalism and the economy, the potential of progressive education, and the ways in which scientific methods, specifically the measurement of aptitude, could shape school curriculum. The arts in particular—including dance, theatre, music, and visual arts—became a vehicle to express ideas about the nature of reality (Efland, 1990). These changes manifested in K–12 art education as a belief in the unadulterated potential of young children and the ability for their personal growth to be nurtured through artistic expression. Art museums responded to progressive educational thought by considering how their work might change society for the better, offering programs for specific populations to combat social problems. In addition to increasing object-based learning opportunities in the museum for tours and gallery talks, museums of all ilks began offering classes to employees in design fields, immigrants who wished to learn English, Native American populations whose creative work was in the museum collections, and adults with interests in specific areas of the collection (Ramsay, 1938). At the same time, the impulse to cultivate good taste, aesthetic refinement, and “emotional response” coalesced into educational programs for children, who attended Saturday classes, storytimes, movies, and special lectures (Godwin, n.p., 1937). If the programming at the Toledo Museum of Art, in Toledo, OH in the 1930s serves as an example, art museums considered their work as an extension of—and perhaps even better than— the child-centered education that a young student might experience in public school, with a complex curriculum that included tours, lectures, music appreciation classes, and art production experiences promoting emotional growth (Toledo Museum of Art, 1937). Programs for adults and children, while situated as a service to the public, conceptualized fine art as a panacea for the drudgery of life: It refined aesthetic tastes,

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cultivated emotional development and freedom, and provided valuable information to populations who might otherwise be underserved. This concern for improving society after World War II combined with increased government funding for nonprofit educational and religious organizations resulted in a vast increase of educational programming and museum education staff in art museums. The civil rights movement, feminism, and distrust of political authority called attention to imbalances of power and privilege in American society. While creative self-expression in K–12 art education, which Viktor Lowenfeld (1947) theorized into developmental stages of growth, remained a powerful influence in public schools, museums absorbed the impulses of both these social and emotional undercurrents into their gallery pedagogy. Creative drama in which viewers imagined works of art through the senses (i.e., what do you smell/ hear/feel/taste in this painting?) (Mayer, 2007), mimicked the bodily positions of statues, or responded to work through other forms of art such as poetry or music became a common practice under the auspices of educational departments and docent programs. Though exemplars of fine art were verboten in most K–12 classes under creative self-expression (with the rationale that student creativity might be stifled by the exposure), many art museum educators also subscribed to a modified version of this philosophy, eschewing the copying of masterpieces or the use of coloring books in favor of “time and encouragement to explore and express ideas freely on his [sic] own” in museum galleries and classrooms (Newsom & Silver, 1978, p. 59). Art museums positioned their work with schools and communities as supplementary to inadequate art education and—in programs that harkened back to John Cotton Dana’s populist endeavors— distributed less valuable works of art from so-called teaching collections to schools or packed them in vans to be exhibited in neighborhoods occupied by minoritized populations (Newsom & Silver, 1978). At the same time, the professional art museum educators in museums changed drastically in a process of professionalization that saw the formation of professional organizations and groups, a growing body of academic literature including journals and books, and degree programs at the master’s level. Against a backdrop of social turbulence, pervasive questions about equal rights, and questions regarding the role of art museums in society, art museum educators forged relationships between their institutions and visitors through programs that were not previously possible (Kletchka, 2018). As the prosperity of the postwar years waned, trickle-down economics took effect, and the culture wars of the 1980s became more pervasive, art

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museums saw a drop in visitation by both school groups (due to lower rates of school funding) and other visitors while experiencing precariousness in their own soaring budgets, which continued to depend on the financial generosity of wealthy benefactors and public funding through tax revenue. Inspired by widespread school reform in math and science that rooted curriculum in disciplinary examples, a new paradigm of art education emerged—and this time, the resources and expertise offered by art museums and their education staff were of great consequence. Discipline-­ based art education (DBAE), introduced by W.  Dwaine Greer (1984) under the auspices of the Getty Center for Education in the Arts, comprised sequential K–12 curriculum in aesthetics, art criticism, art history, and art production. It conceptualized art as a subject of study for all students rather than just an expressive activity. The Getty established professional development institutes for teachers, administrators, museum educators, and academic partners under a system of regional institute grants throughout the United States that included consortia in Florida, Minnesota, Nebraska, Ohio, Tennessee, and Texas. These six consortia utilized art museum environments to offer professional development institutes (referred to as DBAE Summer Institutes) “predicated on the belief that teaching art requires knowledge of artworks and of the inquiry processes of the artist, art historian, art critic, and aesthetician,” bringing museum educators and art teachers together in an academic context and placing art museums squarely amid a paradigm shift (Wilson, 1997, p. 56). In this way, art museum educators became a conduit for teaching art in schools differently without necessarily changing their interpretive or learning strategies as their programs already employed strategies for interpreting, criticizing, and making art. The educators who aligned with the DBAE curriculum effort shared the philosophical belief that opportunities in the museum leveled the influence of an elitist system and that understanding art should be accessible to everyone. While the curricular reverberations of DBAE continued well into the new century, a more expansive understanding of the potential for both art education and art museum practice emerged. These possibilities evolved along with the global development of and access to personal computing, digital technology, and networked forms of communication. The distributed museum builds on viewer-centered experiences, utilizing more contemporary models of communication that recognize the complex subjectivities of museum audiences, their cultures, and their systems of representation (Dewdney et al., 2013). The work of distributed museums

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is founded on the belief that there is a need to reenvision the relationship between museums and their publics as cultural power undergoes processes of exchange and redistribution—that is, the rich potential of experiences is explored as museum staffs increasingly recognize the agency of potential audiences. The work of collecting, interpreting, engaging, and learning in museums is necessarily reimagined as reflexive forms of communication and modes of knowledge production evolve and change. Furthermore, the relationship between academia and museum work will become more intertwined as their established practices are disrupted and renegotiated (Kletchka, 2018). The reconceptualization of visual arts in the K–12 curriculum in the late twentieth century emerged at the same time that museological theory began to more fully explore how museums could become socially responsive to their visitors and communities. In short, the field of art education and museological practice both expanded the definition of what is valued and valuable in both classroom and gallery spaces. In practice, museums increasingly centered visitors and their interests in interpretive and programmatic offerings wrought by traditional and contemporary artistic media in their permanent collections, special exhibitions, and digital offerings. Around the same time, academics in the field of art education began to embrace an emerging paradigm of visual culture art education (VCAE), as “a broadening of curriculum content and changes in teaching strategies in response to the immediacy and mass distribution of imagery … includ[ing] a new level of theorizing about art in education that is tied to emergent postmodern philosophies based on this growing environment of intercultural, intracultural, and transcultural visualizations” (Freedman & Stuhr, 2004, p. 816). The experiences represented by pervasive visual culture included the mundane—television, fashion design, music videos, website interfaces, advertising, and cartoons—and more traditional notions of visual art that included fine art, folk art, performance art, and photography. All of these art forms are contextualized by conditions that lead to their inclusion in visual art curriculum, including (1) personal and communal identities, (2) newer media and visual technologies, (3) the blurring of disciplinary boundaries and the significance of interdisciplinarity, and (4) the “importance of interdisciplinary knowledge to the complexity of visual culture” (Freedman & Stuhr, 2004, p. 817). Both visual culture art education and the distributed museum signified a turn toward socially responsive pedagogy and visitor- or learner-centered practices. This does not mean that museums and schools did not address issues

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affecting their students and audiences in the past; rather, it suggests that the reality of those experiences became increasingly important in education and interpretive programming in art museums and K–12 art curricula.

4  Addressing Structural Inequalities Through Educational Programs The turn to socially responsive practice urges museum educators to consider audiences more holistically and base their programming not only on objects and exhibition narratives but also on social relationships that recognize the inherent complexity of identity and communication processes (Kletchka, 2018). Before discussing the specific ways art museums are addressing inequalities through educational programming, it is important to note traditional departmental structures, purposes, and philosophical underpinnings of museum programming and address the positionality of those staff members charged with creating public programs. While the number of staff members in a department of education/learning/interpretation/engagement varies, there are typically educators in charge of a range of public programs to support exhibition content who interpret objects in galleries through labels, didactic materials, or activities; serve as liaisons between the local K-12 and/or university communities; and represent their department on exhibition committees. Museum staff who engage in this kind of work generally have a master’s degree in art history and are overwhelmingly young (ages 26–40), white, heterosexual, cisgender women who are married and have been in the museum education field for less than 10  years. Every day, art museum educators with little formal, academic art education—but a great deal of on-the-job training—are asked to make curricular and programmatic decisions on of behalf learners and audiences with whom they may share few demographic similarities. They are also the staff members most likely to be asked to do diversity, equity, access, and inclusion work as part of their professional responsibilities in representing the public interest, even though they largely do not embody the diversity or perspectives of their broader communities (Kletchka, 2021). These circumstances create barriers in addressing structural inequalities inherent in museum practices and remain deeply problematic. Marit Dewhurst, a professor of art and museum education, and Keonna Hendrick, a long-time museum educator and now director of diversity,

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equity, inclusion, and access at the Brooklyn Museum, in Brooklyn, New York, suggest that there are meaningful steps museum educators can take to become anti-racist in their public practice and thus move toward social justice in their work. Dewhurst and Hendrick (2017) explain that these conversations can help dismantle entrenched racist practices: “In all of this work, we aim to support ways of calling each other into the work of racial justice and equity while caringly calling each other out for the ways in which we may accidently perpetuate racism” (p.  104). They emphasize the importance of identifying racist practices by careful scrutiny of “interactions with museum content, interactions with museum audiences, and interactions with museum institutions” (p. 106) toward an end goal of developing “attitudes, policies, and pedagogical approaches that can inspire educators to begin the process of dismantling racism within their own personal and institutional contexts” (p. 106). They offer art museum educators a number of tools to begin dismantling the racism embedded in much museological practice and programming, including developing a shared language and terminology for discussing race, racism, diversity, and social justice; creating brave spaces supported by established protocols for openly talking about racism and listening to others tell their stories of experiencing the world; identifying and analyzing potentially racist practices; and committing to actions and strategies of accountability that revolve around the work of racial justice and equity to dismantle institutional racism. These strategies are nestled into a growing body of scholarship directed at art museum educators specifically, as much of their work has a direct impact on the public. However, their work is also embedded in and a product of a much larger body of museological work. According to British museologists Eithne Nightingale and Richard Sandell, museum staff in the late 1990s and first decade of the twenty-first century moved concerns for social justice and human rights to the core of museum practice. They claim that “attempts to construct new narratives that reflect demographic, social, and cultural diversity and represent a plurality of lived experiences, histories, and identities—once the preserve of a few pioneering institutions— are increasingly widespread” (2012, p. 1). Conversely, they also recognize that museums have, since their inception in most Western cultures, operated on foundations that are exclusionary, oppressive, and marginalizing— which makes it difficult to ascertain if these changes are truly the result of a system-wide commitment to social justice or performative practices that fall far short of working toward a socially just world enacted for the benefit

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of donors, foundations, and government agencies that distribute the financial support necessary to keep cultural institutions afloat. However, Nightingale and Sandell also argue that at this point, arguing over the obligation is folly; in short, museums are public forums, their work is consequential, and museum staffs have an ethical obligation to respond and act in service to their communities (2012). In other words, museums must engage in a socially responsive ethos that supports “the notion that museum and gallery spaces offer potential for community gathering for adults and young people alike; that exhibitions present the opportunity to inform, learn, and foster understanding; and that museum staff members must be cognizant of the role that they play in their communities” (Kletchka & Casto, 2021, p. 176). If the necessity for museums to address structural inequalities is taken as a given, how do museums publicly demonstrate that commitment? How might visitors understand the work that museums do through the programs they offer? Even though the administrative work of museums is often obscured from public view, educational and interpretive work does not exist in a vacuum and the front-facing programmatic aspect of museum work must be built on a promise to “embrac[e] a new visitor-centered philosophy from the perspective of all museum staff members, not just those educators who had always been responsible for engaging with the public” (Kletchka, 2018, pp. 306–307). This perspective about the importance of an inclusive organizational culture is reiterated and highlighted in Chap. 8. In a previous article about post-critical museologies (Kletchka, 2018), I suggested that the following actions demonstrate a visitor-centered epistemology that works toward social justice and human rights: 1. Decenter institutional and curatorial authority by gathering information from visitors about what they are learning from exhibitions and programs; 2. Resist casting visitors into specific group descriptors based on age, gender, sex, or familial status and recognize their diversity through a multilayered approach to gallery experiences; 3. Experiment with various ways of connecting exhibitions with personal understandings and experiences through activities that focus on ideas or themes rather than art-historical eras or ideas;

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4. Adopting frameworks for learning and evaluation that focus on personal experience and understandings rather than on art history or objects; 5. Structuring exhibition and installation projects as the work of interdisciplinary teams rather than the sole purview of curators; and 6. Centering diversity and inclusion at an institutional level with the understanding that all audiences benefit from intentional radical inclusion of all community members. The intentionality of art museum educators to dismantle racism (and other marginalizing practices) at the heart of socially responsive visitor-­ centered programming demonstrates a commitment to addressing structural inequalities through programming.

5  Socially Responsive Programs: The Columbus Museum of Art and the Wexner Center for the Arts I have thus far inquired into some of the rationales for and influences on art museum programming, paying particular attention to the ways in which art education paradigms and art museum education programming coalesce. I’ve theorized the role of art museum educators and museum programs that work toward social justice on behalf of their communities, but as with any educational endeavor, it is imperative to offer examples of practice. The community of Columbus, Ohio, has two art institutions that can be said to offer socially responsive programming in the service of the community—the Columbus Museum of Art and the Wexner Center for the Arts on The Ohio State University campus. Both serve the racially and socioeconomically diverse city of Columbus, a large, growing city and a cultural, educational, and artistic hub of the Midwest. In an article in Studies in Art Education, I identified the Columbus Museum of Art as an embodied example of post-critical socially responsive practices. After the economic downturn of the late 2000s, the museum embarked on an internal process of identifying how and why it wished to serve its community, eventually identifying the ideas of radical social inclusion and fostering creativity as pillars of its community-based practice (Kletchka, 2018). Notably, the museum’s orientation is made clear on its website as part of its public mission statement:

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There’s a willingness at CMA to try new things. We encourage curiosity about art, conversations about creativity, and connections with cultures. A community hub where ideas can be exchanged and different voices heard, the Museum nurtures creativity through building relationships with diverse partners and designing engaging experiences. (Columbus Museum of Art, 2022a, para 2)

As of this writing, the museum continues its socially responsive work through regularly evaluating programs and exhibitions to ascertain what visitors say they learn, featuring nationally and locally significant exhibitions in their galleries, working together in cross-departmental teams instead of solely by their professional relationships to objects, and placing social and pedagogical connectors—such as puzzles with images from the gallery, games, and audio recordings made by community members—in their permanent collection and special exhibition galleries. An on-site example of this practice is the JP Morgan Chase Center for Creativity, featured on the lower floor of the original museum space. The Center comprises a Big Idea Gallery with “Hands-on activities in the gallery [that] encourage us to consider the objects we value, the people we care about, and the communities in which we live (Columbus Museum of Art, 2022b, para 2), an Open Gallery featuring small exhibitions by local and national artists, and the remarkable Wonder Room (Fig. 7.1), a colorful space for reading, exploring, making, and thinking about art. A final powerful example of work that centers myriad community constituencies is the CMA’s Center for Art and Social Engagement (CASE) gallery, located amid other permanent collection spaces, that brings together art objects, ideas, and social activities such as board games. The most recent iteration of CASE focuses on Justice in America: A Visual Inquiry. It features a quote from No Name in the Street, a book by the Black, gay author James Baldwin, in concert with works of art from the permanent collection and a continuous wall drawing by the CASE artist fellow Sa’dia Rehman that “engages the gallery architecture, and combines motifs from a range of sources. Decorative patterns, typical of art of the Islamic world, interweave with images of migration, incarceration, and protest” (Columbus Museum of Art, 2022c, para 4). Ultimately, CASE is an excellent example of an explicitly collaborative effort between learning and engagement and curatorial staff that “forge[s] deeper connections between the Museum, its collections, and communities near and far (Columbus Museum of Art, 2022c, para 3).

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Fig. 7.1  Wonder Room at Columbus Museum of Art. (Source: Dana Carlisle Kletchka)

The Wexner Center for the Arts (the Wex) on the campus of The Ohio State University also has a long history of socially responsive museum programming and community engagement. The Wex recently re-envisioned the Education Department to become Learning and Public Practice and, in so doing, reconceptualized how students experience museum professions. In Socially Responsive Museum Pedagogy: Education at the Wexner Center for the Arts, a chapter on the Wex’s work with the Ohio State and Columbus community, the former curator of Education Shelly Casto and I detailed a few of the ways staff worked with

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multiple constituencies throughout the university and Columbus metropolitan area to offer programs that honor the work of contemporary artists, explore current issues of broader concern in our society, and engage the public in increased awareness and involvement. Undergraduate and graduate students from across the university engage in docent training [Note: student gallery teaching is no longer under the auspices of a docent program] and give tours of exhibitions, paid interns and student work on projects with artists and audiences throughout the institution, and partnerships with students and faculty result in public programming as well as academically-­ focused explorations of contemporary work. (Kletchka & Casto, 2021, p. 171)

Three programs at the Wex that specifically center social justice and are emblematic of their public practice are Art & Ecology, a multidisciplinary program focusing on issues of ecological, social justice, and contemporary art; Every Beat of My Heart, an exhibition, public performance, and community engagement with contemporary artist Kerry James Marshall; and Endless Orchard, a public fruit farm located in a neighborhood without consistent access to fresh produce (Kletchka & Casto, 2021). Art & Ecology offered high school students the opportunity to engage in education and curatorial practice in small groups at the Wex. In order to partner with students from a wide variety of environments and backgrounds that accurately reflected the diversity of the city, the Wex offered class enrollment, supplies, books, and transportation reimbursement to all participants. Learners first conducted in-person or online interviews with contemporary artists in order to consider how their work grappled with complex issues, such as the climate crisis and environmental racism. They then had the opportunity to research various topics related to their conversations or that they wanted to investigate using the extensive resources of Ohio State. This research informed a studio project that later became part of an exhibition featured at the arts center. In addition to learning about art production, artists, and contemporary ecological issues, students met and connected with learners from outside their neighborhoods; formed nuanced opinions about complex, interrelated environmental issues; and engaged in environmental work with their own communities after the conclusion of the program. An exhibition of artist Kerry James Marshall in 2007 created space for a larger exploration of historical themes embedded in his work. Every Beat of My Heart, installed in the galleries of the Wex, was part of a larger series of narrative work that featured superheroes based on African archetypes.

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Marshall, a Black artist whose work centers African American experience, participated extensively in public performances and outreach opportunities related to the exhibition. Students from a variety of racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic backgrounds performed a Bunraku puppetry show after auditioning and training with Marshall and a well-known jazz percussionist, bringing community members who had never visited into the Wex’s orbit. Several students who participated in the performances continued to keep in touch with Wex staff over the following years, some of whom became students at Ohio State. A third large collaborative project involved several departments at Ohio State, university students, community members, social service organizations, and corporate entities. Socially engaged artists David Allen Burns and Austin Young of the Fallen Fruit public art collective traveled to Columbus to connect with local constituents and plan a number of activities that led to the development of a publicly accessible fruit park. Their work sought to reconnect urban areas and community resources by preparing, planting, growing, and harvesting fruit with neighbors. The artists worked with Wex staff, Ohio State students and faculty, and residents of the Weinland Park neighborhood to plan the garden and plant trees that became a resource for fruit in an area where it is otherwise difficult to consistently procure fresh produce.

6  Conclusions In this chapter, I investigated what visitors can learn about museum programs from the field of art education. In doing so, I revealed some of the ways knowledge is produced about learning and engagement in the art museum, particularly how it has been informed by art education discourses, as well as how art museum educators are positioned in relationship to publics and other staff members. I delineated how art museums relate to their audiences through their programmatic offerings, both historically and as part of an overall shift to a socially responsive visitor-­ centered philosophy of engagement that works toward social justice and human rights. While many art museums have embraced this shift, such as the Columbus Museum of Art and the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, many still value the preeminence of the art object, a position that ultimately threatens their ongoing relevance and support. Recent events in the United States, such as a downturn in political support for the arts and culture, the Black Lives Matter and Stop Asian Hate

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movements, a seemingly unending global pandemic, and growing concern for the (mis)treatment of workers—including the full-time, part-time, and contract-staff members at art museums—emphasize the necessity for art museums to pursue a human-centered trajectory in their philosophies and practices with particular attention to communities who are marginalized and disenfranchised. The digital technology that enables all of us to discover, uncover, and communicate about imbalances of power and privilege globally is the same technology that museums should be investing in to connect and remain in vibrant contact with our communities near and far. COVID-19 forced us to collectively take a moment to pause and consider what serves us as a museological community and what should be changed in response to the changing needs of our visitors and audiences. It is imperative for all of us who work in or on behalf of museums to use this opportunity wisely.

References Anderson, G. (Ed.). (2012). Reinventing the Museum: The Evolving Conversation on the Paradigm Shift (2nd ed.). AltaMira Press. Buffington, M. (2007). Six Themes in the History of Art Museum Education. In P.  Villeneuve (Ed.), From Periphery to Center: Art Museum Education in the 21st Century (pp. 12–20). National Art Education Association. Burnham, R., & Kai-Kee, E. (2011). Teaching in the Art Museum: Interpretation as Experience. The J. Paul Getty Museum. Cherry, S. (1992). A History of Education in American Museums. In P. M. Amburgy, D. Soucy, M. A. Stankiewicz, B. Wilson, & M. Wilson (Eds.), The History of Art Education: Proceedings from the Second Penn State Conference, 1989 (pp. 292–295). National Art Education Association. Columbus Museum of Art. (2022a). About. Retrieved January 18, 2022, from https://www.columbusmuseum.org/about-­cma/ Columbus Museum of Art. (2022b). Big Idea Gallery. Retrieved January 18, 2022, from https://www.columbusmuseum.org/big-­idea-­gallery-­home/ Columbus Museum of Art. (2022c). Center for Art and Social Engagement. Retrieved January 18, 2022, from https://www.columbusmuseum.org/ center-­for-­art-­and-­social-­engagement/ Dana, J. C. (1917). The Gloom of the Museum. The Elm Tree Press. Dewdney, A., DiBosa, D., & Walsh, V. (2013). Post-critical Museology: Theory and Practice in the Art Museum. Routledge. Dewhurst, M., & Hendrick, K. (2017). Identifying and Transforming Racism in Museum Education. Journal of Museum Education, 42(2), 102–107. Duncan, C., & Wallach, A. (1980). The Universal Survey Museum. Art History, 3(4), 448–469.

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Efland, A. (1990). A History of Art Education: Intellectual and Social Currents in Teaching the Visual Arts. Teachers College Columbia University. Freedman, K., & Stuhr, P. (2004). Curriculum Change for the 21st Century: Visual Culture in Art Education. In E. W. Eisner & M. D. Day (Eds.), Handbook of Research and Policy in Art Education (pp. 815–828). National Art Education Association. Greer, W.  D. (1984). Discipline-based Art Education: Approaching Art as a Subject of Study. Studies in Art Education, 25(4), 212–218. Hooper-Greenhill, E. (2000). Museums and the Interpretation of Visual Culture. Routledge. Kletchka, D. C. (2018). Toward Post-critical Museologies in U.S. Art Museums. Studies in Art Education, 50(4), 297–310. Kletchka, D. C. (2021). Art Museum Educators: Who Are They Now? Curator, the Museum Journal, 64(1), 79–97. Kletchka, D.  C., & Casto, S. (2021). Socially Responsive Museum Pedagogy: Education at the Wexner Center for the Arts. In B.  Bobick & C.  DiCindio (Eds.), Engaging Communities through Civic Engagement in Art Museum Education (pp. 170–185). IGI Global. Larrabee, E. (Ed.). (1968). Museums and Education. Smithsonian Institution Press. Low, T. H. (1942). The Museum as a Social Instrument: A Study Undertaken for the Committee on Education of the American Association of Museums. The American Association of Museums. Lowenfeld, V. (1947). Creative and Mental Growth: A Textbook on Art Education. The Macmillan Company. Mayer, M.  M. (2007). New Art Museum Education(s). In P.  Villeneuve (Ed.), From Periphery to Center: Art Museum Education in the 21st Century (pp. 441–448). National Art Education Association. Newsom, B. Y., & Silver, A. Z. (Eds.). (1978). The Art Museum as Educator: A Collection of Studies as Guides to Practice and Policy. University of California Press. Nightingale, E., & Sandell, R. (2012). Introduction. In R. Sandell & E. Nightingale (Eds.), Museums, Equality, and Social Justice (pp. 1–10). Routledge. Portland Art Museum. (n.d.). Object Stories. Retrieved February 24, 2022, from https://portlandartmuseum.org/learn/programs-­tours/object-­stories/ Ramsay, G.  F. (1938). Educational Work in Museums of the United States. The H.W. Wilson Company. Stankiewicz, M. A. (2001). Roots of art education practice. Worcester, MA: Davis Publications. Toledo Museum of Art. (1937). The Museum Educates. The Toledo Museum of Art. Wilson, B. W. (1997). The Quiet Evolution: Changing the Face of Arts Education. The Getty Education Institute for the Arts. Zeller, T. (1989). The Historical and Philosophical Foundations of Art Museum Education in America. In N.  Berry & S.  Mayer (Eds.), Museum Education: History, Theory and Practice (pp. 11–89). National Art Education Association.

Board of trustees: inclusive governance As of February 2022, the board of trustees of PAM includes 55 volunteers. Among the trustees are representatives of Nike (a multinational renown corporation based in Portland) a few local companies and banks, and several foundations. The museum’s increasingly inclusive governance is represented by the fact that most trustees are community leaders from different groups in the city, demonstrating the museum’s efforts to build relationships with residents. Moreover, a few artists are also part of the board of trustees, showing the inclusion of creative professionals as decision-makers for the activities of the museum (Portland Art Museum, n.d.)

CHAPTER 8

Participation and Nonprofit Management: Toward Inclusive Governance Eleonora Redaelli and Dyana P. Mason

1   Introduction As highlighted throughout this volume, the art museum’s role has shifted from being solely an object-based organization focused on the acquisition and curation of artworks and historical or other objects to one that is “purpose-based” (Weil, 1997, p. 255), focusing on visitors and the surrounding community and emphasizing its role as a social enterprise (Weil, 1997). The idea of a socially responsible museum requires a shared purpose built on merging experts’ knowledge and community experience (Janes & Sandell, 2019). The literature in nonprofit management can help sharpen the visitor’s understanding of issues around governance, specifically by reconciling management practices with inclusion and widespread participation. Museum governance—a cornerstone of museum oversight—is led by a board of directors who embodies the values of the organization, sets policies, prioritizes some programs over others in budgeting, maintains connections with communities in which they are located, and

E. Redaelli (*) • D. P. Mason University of Oregon, Eugene, OR, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 E. Redaelli (ed.), Visiting the Art Museum, Sociology of the Arts, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12089-3_8

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provides opportunities for feedback and learning. In this chapter we ask, What can visitors learn about participation and the art museum from nonprofit management? By participation, we mean more than simply who attends a museum’s exhibitions. Participation is a political concept used in democratic contexts to address citizen engagement, particularly considering their level of involvement in decisions about the public good. In this way, it is linked to how institutions can contribute to democracy through norms of participation, inclusion, and engagement. Or as Pille Pruulmann-Vengerfeldt and Pille Runnel (2018) state, “The democratic museum (that encourages citizenship) has to consider participation and engagement as modes of communication that help the museum support democracy” (p. 145). This goal centers the role of the museum as the steward of cultural and historical representation in creating, consuming, and belonging. Within this discourse, the literature has focused on the communicative choices of the museum identifying (1) modes and barriers to engagement and (2) degrees of people’s involvement. If participation has been analyzed from the perspective of the museum, what remains less understood is the public’s perspective and their motivations to participate. While empirical studies of participants’ accounts of their motivation have demonstrated how individual motivations are a priority compared to social ones, museums’ participatory initiatives appeal to what participants tend to prioritize, and the social aspect that reinforces democracy remains marginal and not duly highlighted. Specifically, this chapter defines participation in the art museum as the involvement of the visitors in the decision-making process through the lens of the discipline of nonprofit management. To better understand the context of the discussion, it must be noted that the literature in nonprofit management is found almost exclusively in English-speaking sources. In particular, scholars in the United States have led the conversation, directing attention to issues that are also linked to historical changes in the country (Redaelli, 2016). The years after World War II have been characterized by a tremendous growth of the arts field connected to contextual changes that impacted the way arts organizations were structured. The emergence of the nonprofit sector supported by tax reforms, the creation of grant programs, and the rise of mass communication required the development of new management tasks and professions to support the functioning of arts organizations, including museums. These changes led to the managerialization of museums and the entrusting of the

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decision-­making process to two distinct functions: management, for the day-to-day operations, and governance, for the oversight, vision, and mission. In other words, participation in the art museum is a complex issue that includes visitors and community involvement in educational programs, content creation, and artistic practices. But most importantly, to support a more democratic museum, we argue that participation needs to also include the involvement of the public in governance. This chapter starts by providing an overview of the different threads of the conversation surrounding participation in museums and the impact of managerialization on museum’s processes. After articulating the specificities of governance for nonprofit management, we develop our argument stating that inclusive practices and culture support authentic participation. In the conclusion, we discuss the implications of this argument on both the theory and practice of the art museum.

2   Museum and Participation In many local, national, and international agencies, concepts and practices of participation became popular in the 1970s and 1980s (Redaelli, 2012b). However, by the 1990s, scholars, practitioners, and activists grew skeptical of simplistic approaches to participation and highlighted how participation embodied the new tyranny of dominant institutions asking the public to do what they failed to do on their own. Later, the postpositivist literature suggested ways to implement authentic participation based on two-­ way communication that overcomes the citizen-expert dichotomy, where the expert is considered the only party that holds expertise in the matter and the citizen is the passive recipient of that expertise. This shift to authentic participation not only considers who is being asked to participate—with an eye to inclusion and empowerment—but also what the public is being asked to do. The conversation about participation in museums has been led and systematized by Nina Simon’s seminal work, The Participatory Museum (2010). Simon presents three models of participation: contribution, collaboration, and co-creation. These models have been developed by the Public Participation in Science Research team, which classified public participation in science research—known as citizen science projects—and described the level of involvement of citizens in research. In contribution projects, the participants only assist in collecting the data, while the

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scientists design the questions, steer the data collection, and analyze the results. In collaboration projects, participants collect data but also analyze the results with the scientists. In co-creation projects, the public starts with developing the questions, and the entire research is developed in partnership with scientists. These models transfer well to the programming of cultural institutions, in particular art museums. In contributionlevel projects, visitors may offer comments and ideas for an institutionally designed project; in collaboration projects, visitors can serve as active partners in programs led by the institution; in co-creation projects, community members work together with the institution to design the program based on their needs, interests, and visions. Simon adds a fourth model to this typology: hosted projects. Hosted projects are entirely developed by the community, and the institution simply makes space available to host them. Museums have also conceptualized participation through a marketing model that enhances the development of relationships with their different groups of stakeholders, such as customer relationships (visitors and members), supplier relationships (donors and sponsors), lateral relationships (other museums and cultural institutions), and internal relationships (employees and volunteers) (Camarero et  al., 2018). This relational approach moves away from the more traditional transactional view of marketing. Transactional marketing aims to offer a well-timed and well-executed service to the public; relationship marketing develops dynamic relationships with different stakeholders and aims to create long-­term loyalty to the institution. It consists of branding the museum in a way that enhances its underlying values. The literature claims that developing and fostering relationships with all these groups is crucial to nurture the museum’s social value, which includes both value for individuals and value for communities. However, empirical studies showed that there is still considerable room for improvement for museums to invest in efforts that develop relationships with their stakeholders. In addition, programming in museums has been a focal tool for participation. Participatory programs have been praised as platforms of social cohesion that activate a process of formative exchange among the museum and its reference communities. In the context of systems thinking in museums, Ferilli et al. (2017) suggest the use of an action workflow model of business reengineering to describe the phases of the process through which the museum can develop community engagement. First, the exploring phase includes an awareness of the mission and an analysis of the

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context and the community actors. This phase generates awareness of the reality of the museum and legitimacy for interactions with the community. Second, the settings phase is the step involves building local networks, defining goals, and designing the project. Socialization and sharing are the assets generated in this phase. Third, the acting phase consists of implementing the initiatives, building new relationships, and fostering existing ones. Finally, the valuing phase is where an evaluation of the projects records the systems-wide effects generated. In this phase, the museum learns how to further improve participation through the assessment of experts. Finally, discussions about participation, especially in art museums, have been linked to participatory art practices, where the audience participates with the artists in the construction of the artworks. Sarah Hegenbart (2016) suggests how the key factor of participatory art is the inextricability of the ethical and aesthetic dimensions of the work. She conceptualizes a participatory museum inspired by the Athenian agora, where the art has the Socratic role of scrutinizing reality. One of the characteristics of participatory art is that the realm of aesthetics is not separated by day-to-­day concerns; the walls of the museum are not supposed to create a separate realm solely dedicated to aesthetic appreciation. In participatory art, the aesthetic value is embedded with an ethical value. Hegenbart mentions two authors who have differing perspectives on this topic: Claire Bishop has criticized participatory art by rejecting its claims of an ethical dimension; whereas Grant Kester sees the value of participatory art exactly in its ethical dimension that engages participants in dialogue. These various types of participatory projects raise some questions when developed in the context of an institution: How can they be managed and sustained? How can they be evaluated? Simon (2010) claims that a participatory museum requires a specific institutional culture that starts with an open attitude and training of staff. Strategies for participation are linked with the development of strong ties with the community and continues with involvement of all the staff, working in different roles and positions. The management of participatory projects requires varied resources to support sustainability over time. Evaluation brings to the forefront issues of program design that need to consider general goals, specific participatory outcomes, and tools for measurement. These observations lead to questions about what kind of organizational culture does a museum’s program design produce? In other words, at this point is it important to

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understand what the functions within a museum are and how activities are organized and to unpack the role of the managerialization of museums and its impact on its mission, objectives, and activities.

3   Managerialization of Museums In order to support participation, leaders have had to move beyond a singular focus on the artistic or historic vision of the museum. Important questions about the museum’s mission and vision, project design, and sustainability have become crucial considerations for managers. To meet these expectations, museum leaders have turned to the management literature to guide their practices. Managerialization relates to the change in the way museums are run and organized that adopts managerial, or business-­like, perspectives for the organizational structure, administrative practices, and value-creation processes (Palumbo et al., 2021). This shift has been explained by an increased bureaucratization shaped by the values of scientific management, such as the establishment of an incorporated nonprofit and a shift from impresario (authoritarian) to administrator (negotiator) structural models (Redaelli, 2012a). Management as a set of ideas of how to run organizations developed in the twentieth century. Frederick Taylor in his Principle of Scientific Management, published in 1911, argued for a scientific approach to management organized around a division of labor, a division of responsibility, scientific training, and pay related to performance. Managerialization of museums has been studied from different angles, such as manager autonomy, museum flexibility, and revenue sources (Coblence & Sabatier, 2014). Scholars have also highlighted aspects of managerialization that are still neglected in museums, such as human resources management, strategic orientation, organizational design, and interorganizational relationships. In the wake of scientific management, managerialization can also be understood as a mode of running an organization according to specific functions of management, such as human resources, fundraising, planning, finance, and marketing. For instance, one fundamental function of management that has been quite debated in the literature is marketing as a management process to connect the museum with its publics (McLean, 1997). Some of the marketing strategies have been segmentation, pricing, and creating an experience as the museum product. Segmentation of the audience can help managers better understand the differences and

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interests among groups. Instead of considering the visitors as a single compact mass, it divides a museum’s audience into different segments, highlighting how different groups may come to the museum for different reasons or with different backgrounds and knowledge. Pricing implies strategies that offer a portfolio of entrance opportunities that can appeal to the different markets of the museum, such as different tickets prices for different groups of individuals. Experience as a product aims to strengthen the relationship of the visitors with the institution, which is a crucial aspect when considering the museum as an element of democracy, as we have seen earlier in the chapter. However, this runs the risk of Disneyfying museums by creating a wider, commodified appeal instead of developing an authentic connection with specific segments of their community. Over the years, scientific management has fallen out of favor following critiques of scientific management by scholars such as Elton Mayo. In the 1930s, Mayo argued that human relations and workplace culture were more important. Additionally, Charles Handy’s Understanding Organizations, first published in 1976, popularized this human-resources approach. Kevin Moore (1994) also has advocated for a human-relations approach to management in museums. Moore argues that this approach is particularly valuable for museums because of the complexity of human capital and relationships. He states, “Museums rely on highly skilled professional staff, working on creative projects, in an increasingly close relationship with all kinds of community groups and individuals” (Moore, 1994, p. 10). This particular organizational environment makes interpersonal skills and working relationships a crucial resource for the social mission of the museum. Besides the human-resources approach, another management approach invites a scrupulous empirical analysis of the various aspects of an organization—such as actions, decisions, actors, and processes—developing a critical strategic approach toward an ethnography of administration. Luca Zan (2015) suggested a critical approach to management studies that rejects a positivistic explanation. He criticizes a positivistic approach to management because it overvalues both the cause-and-effect relationship and the idea of best practices. Zan frames the theoretical assumptions of a critical approach, stating that management refers to issues of organizing, regardless of the task or the sector; deals with practices more than principles; and needs to consider the specific context of the organization. Critical

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management leads to an ethnographic approach to administration, attempting to grasp the variety of practices in administrative heritage looking for the social construction of economic meanings in a variety of administrative contexts. Instead of prescribing what should be done, this approach encourages paying attention to how things are done. This attention to the “bounded rationality” (Zan, 2015, p. 5) of actors opens up the possibility to study different administrative traditions, a crucial aspect especially in the context of international comparative research. Different countries have different political and administrative histories and cultures. In the United Kingdom, for example, many museum professionals remained skeptical about the use of performance measures, output indicators, and budgeting control even into the 1990s, calling management “the flavour of the month” (Moore, 1994, p.  3). In France, the management discourse has looked at how museums have changed business models. An analysis of the Louvre pointed out the transformation from a growth-oriented business model to a global and innovative model (Coblence & Sabatier, 2014). In China, changes in management occurred as a result of economic development, the rise of tourism, and board governance (Qin, 2021). A survey of visitors to the Shaanxi History Museum, in Xi’an, showed how few management transformations needed further improvement, especially in terms of services and merchandise (Hui & Ryan, 2012). A further critique of scientific management recognizes that focusing on efficiency may constrain a museum’s ability to deconstruct traditional patterns of behavior that lead to unsatisfactory outcomes for staff, volunteers, and the community. These include being disconnected from the community, reducing participation, and mitigating the opportunities for civic engagement and democratic action. If we take that the role of the museum can and should be to support community engagement and maximize participation, a business-like museum using hierarchical structures and processes may weaken those opportunities. Kristy Robertson (2011) writes that museums “can (and should?) be both a locale where systems of power are put in place and are also resisted.” By reinforcing the hierarchy and standardized practices often embedded in business-like organizations, museums may be challenged to meet the common mission of both presenting art while allowing for challenges to the status quo through art, community relationships, and participation.

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4  Nonprofit Governance The different approaches to managerialization bring attention to how museums are managed and governed. We argue in this chapter that it is the museum’s governance that lays the foundation for a participatory and democratic museum. While management focuses on the day-to-day operations of the museum, its governance provides oversight and guides the vision for its operational and artistic choices. The group responsible for the museum’s governance is its board of directors (or trustees). Many museums are structured as nonprofit organizations (Malaro, 1994), and they can be seen as distinct from both public organizations and businesses in that they have a voluntary board of directors and any excess revenue can’t be redistributed to the board of directors of the organization. Nonprofit museums may also operate differently from government-led museums. Bertacchini et al. (2018) suggested that government-controlled museums may perform worse than private museums because they lack adequate incentives to seek additional sources of revenue outside of their government appropriations or may be less likely to consider public concerns when it comes to the types of programs offered. Conversely, private museums may have increased incentives to appeal to the public’s wishes and to be innovative in their offerings to attract new visitors. While government-run museums often come with their own constraints regarding management and governance, the nature of nonprofit organizations, specifically, comes with a unique set of defined roles, obligations, and expectations for its leaders. What sets museums apart from other nonprofit organizations is the fact that they often have two very unique functions: The first is the artistic/programmatic function, and the second is the administrative function (Paquette & Redaelli, 2015). However, regardless of their role, board members have important fiduciary responsibilities to the museum: the duty of care, duty of loyalty, and duty of obedience (Malaro, 1994). Duty of care reflects the requirement for due diligence as a steward of the organization, ensuring the individual takes into consideration all available information when making decisions. Duty of loyalty reflects the requirement to put the organization ahead of one’s personal interests and preferences, and duty of obedience reflects fidelity and financial stewardship, ensuring that the organization’s assets and resources are being used to best effect and that the organization is in compliance with all relevant laws and regulations (Malaro, 1994).

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Board members help to steer the organization by managing the mission statement, reviewing organizational performance, and evaluating the executive director or CEO. Board members also ensure that the museum acts in the public interest with its operations and programs. They also are tasked with providing strategic and visionary leadership for the museum, and the values of the museum are often embedded in the values of the board members. Last, the board protects the museum’s mission, helps to plan for the future, and supports an effective and inclusive organizational culture. It is also important to note, however, that staff may have important governance roles primarily because a volunteer board of directors is often not aware of the day-to-day operations of the organization. Dyana P. Mason and Mirae Kim (2020) found that an organization’s staff provides much-needed information to the board, information that helps them to make the best decisions on behalf of the organization. Ruth Rentschler (2004) provided a typology of board roles in museum governance. She defined it as “two board roles of performance and conformance, and four board attributes of mission, strategy board-executive performance and community relations” (p.  31). Performance takes into account the strategic contribution of the board to the organization, acting as a liaison to the community as well as monitoring the external environment to ensure effective adaptation and success. Conformance defines the role of the board in supervising the executive director, a duty to ensure that financial disclosures are completed on time, and supporting the identification and recruitment of resources for the organization. Put another way, good governance can be defined as “how boards reconcile their value adding responsibilities (strategic direction and business building) with responsibility for financial stewardship (disclosure, internal controls and fiscal rectitude)” (O’Neil, 2002, p. 46). In addition to pursuing a dual function, the board of directors needs to consider the role of the museum in the larger society. Over the last several decades, the economic and social contracts that provide the context and environment for museums and the nonprofit sector have dramatically shifted. These changes have come about due to changing community expectations, a never-ending evolution of funding streams, increased competition, and new pressures to demonstrate effectiveness and accountability. Due to these changes, Rentschler (2004) argued that museum governance needs to be concerned with “the complex and often conflicting demands of stakeholders in government, market forces, community, audience, sponsors and the organization itself” (p.  32). These demands

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might not only be conflicting and complex but also constantly evolving as stakeholder expectations evolve. Scott (2009) argued that a museum’s value to the community and society may be multifaceted. For example, value can be seen in educational opportunities, knowledge building, and community pride. Value can also be identified in increased community cohesion and the growth of social and cultural capital. Museums are, therefore, seen as fulfilling the public’s trust by holding collections for the community. Finally, they may provide value to society by contributing to democratic values of civic participation and modeling civil discourse. These changes in purpose, identity, and values have led to new responsibilities and obligations for the museum governance. Most importantly, they have provided new opportunities for community engagement and participation (Qin, 2021). As museums think about ways to create governance structures, they are thinking about how to empower visitors, provide representation for previously marginalized communities, and create spaces for collective learning and participation (Malaro, 1994).

5   Inclusive Governance and Participation As art museums think about the functions that their board of directors provides to the organization, we argue that it is through the board that policies and practices may help or hinder participation and democratic action. To improve participation and increase its benefits, the board must consider governance structures that create an environment to support the development of authentic community relationships and partnerships, think about how to empower visitors and community members, provide representation for previously marginalized communities and create spaces for collective learning and participation (Malaro, 1994). In other words, participation in museums is an issue of inclusive governance. Rose Paquet Kinsley (2016) describes how inclusion has often been considered in museum practice and governance. She writes, “[T]he idea of inclusion is conceived as a means for museums to ensure and increase public access to their activities” (p. 475). She argues that inclusion in museums is weakened by the fact that museums don’t adequately provide recognition or redistribution of resources to the communities who have traditionally been excluded in museum programming and exhibitions and as visitors. People from traditionally underserved communities may also not be represented among museum employees. From a recognition standpoint, it has been well documented that racial minorities often aren’t able

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to see themselves or their experiences mirrored in the museum’s offerings. This claim is supported by Alexandra Olivares and Jaclyn Piatak (2021), who found that socioeconomic reasons were central to museum participation. They also found that Black and Latinx individuals were drawn to museum exhibitions for cultural heritage opportunities more so than white individuals. Beyond simply offering specific collections or activities around ethnic and cultural holidays (which can be seen as tokenism by potential museum visitors), Kinsley argues that the museum’s values around cultural and ethnic recognition must be realigned to transform the museum’s perception of cultural value. In particular, Ng et  al. (2017) argue that goals for participation and inclusion should be a strategic choice that guides the work of the board in making organizational decisions. Camarero et  al. (2018) found a link between the relationships inside organizations and those outside the organization. The organizations that had a supportive and cohesive internal culture were more likely to also have strong relationships with other stakeholder groups. Kristina Jaskyte (2004) argues that it is the leaders of an organization who play a vital role in shaping organizational culture. For example, a leader’s beliefs, values, and assumptions provide the foundation for the norms and expectations that are then taught to new stakeholders: staff, volunteers, board members, and other participants. Managers and board members translate culture through teaching, mentoring, role modeling, defining how incentives and rewards are set up, and who they select to fill important roles. However, returning to Nina Simon’s (2010) work, she explores that due to inattention to a healthy and inclusive institutional culture, participatory efforts may be doomed to ultimately fail. She writes that participation processes can only succeed “when they are aligned with institutional culture. No matter how mission-aligned or innovative an idea is, it must feel manageable for staff members to embrace it wholeheartedly. Building institutions that are more participatory involves educating, supporting, and responding to staff questions and concerns. It also requires a different approach to staffing, budgeting, and operating projects” (p. 322). Simon also goes on to point out that promoting participatory cultures can be difficult for institutional leaders to pursue. Staff and other stakeholders may feel uncomfortable or even threatened by changes to policies, processes, and culture. These changes may also require that their roles within the organization and their relationship with partners, collaborators, and the public, evolve and change, leaving people feeling deeply unsettled.

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Others may feel that participation among stakeholders is a fad, or they may feel threatened by feelings of losing control. However, Alexandra Olivares and Jaclyn Piatak (2021) argue that having an inclusive culture and policies may support an organization’s effort to increase participation among a wider set of individuals. William Brown (2002) also argues that an inclusive board is open to information and feedback from a variety of sources, demonstrates an awareness of the diversity of their stakeholders, and develops structures and processes to help those stakeholders be able to make meaningful contributions to the organization. In other words, inclusive practices flow from inclusive organizations. Yet, Rachel Skaggs (2020) finds that only half of the local arts agencies in her sample even had mission statements that reflected a commitment to equity and inclusion. In supporting a governance structure and culture that encourages increased participation, museum managers have considered practices such as board recruitment, board training, board retention, and programming. Selecting the right individuals to serve as board members is the first step to supporting a culture that centers participation and inclusion. However, traditional ways of identifying and recruiting potential board members will likely not be adequate to change the organization’s culture. Recent studies have shown that a lack of diversity on museum boards continues to be a problem, with nearly half being exclusively white (Cuyler, 2020). Although many board members have expressed concern about the lack of diversity, there continues to be little change. One option is to recruit board members who are more representative of the communities in which they work. To support these efforts and avoid tokenizing people of color or others from traditionally underserved groups, Ng et  al. (2017) suggest that board member selection should be an intentional process done in close contact and partnership with other community organizations and leaders. William Brown (2002) also argues that systemic board recruitment can help to create more inclusive organizations. One example of a practice to help support board recruitment would be to assemble a board recruitment committee that has a mandate to support board development in ways that help identify internal blind spots and stay focused on the mission of the organization. Another would be to make sure that the existing board has already adopted policies and procedures that demonstrate a commitment to inclusion and participation (Buse et  al., 2014). This helps to set the tone that the contributions of more diverse stakeholders are welcomed in the organization.

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Training board members in their role as stewards of the organization has also supported inclusive governance. It is well known that one challenge facing many board members is often the lack of clearly defined roles and responsibilities. In addition, many board members come to their role with very little experience in nonprofit or museum management and governance (Malaro, 1994). This might not only lead to tension and misunderstandings among board members, community members, and staff but may also prevent the board from being able to develop priorities and to help the museum move forward successfully in implementing them. Malaro (1994) identifies four key dimensions of necessary board training and engagement: (1) The development and reaffirmation of the mission statement and its meaning to the organization. (2) The development and enforcement of policy statements that are consistent with the museum’s mission and values and in line with sector trends. (3) The development and understanding of the various roles in the organization, including where authority lies among the board, staff, and any other stakeholder groups. (4) The development and enforcement of the process a board may use to debate and decide important decisions facing the museum. Museums may offer this training to their board members in many ways: providing briefings and workshops on key governance functions hosting an orientation for new board members, sending board members and others in key leadership roles to training offered by other organizations and at sector conferences, and hiring consultants to work with the board on key governance responsibilities. Board-member retention is a problem faced by many organizations. As volunteers, board members may agree to hold a term of one or more years, but they can resign their appointment at any time. In their work tracking the experiences of a diverse set of board members, Ruth Sessler Bernstein and Diana Bilimoria (2016) found that creating an inclusive environment overall was more effective in supporting inclusion than only implementing specific policies and procedures. By creating a more inclusive culture, board members from different backgrounds will recognize that their contributions are valuable to the organization. This offers a paradox. Board members may be recruited by an inclusive culture, but an inclusive culture may need to first be developed and supported by the board. This paradox speaks to the reality that an organization’s culture is always evolving and growing and is rarely something that can be changed quickly. Moreover, to support board member retention it is important to view board practices through an equity lens. Traditionally, board members are drawn from specific demographic backgrounds—that is, candidates who

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are white and relatively privileged economically and socially. Often, to address this concern, new ways of approaching board retention have been suggested. Although generally not seen as a best practice, compensating individuals for their time serving on boards may provide an additional incentive for those you want to participate, as well as to make participation more likely among those who may be from a lower-income background (McBride et  al., 2011; Tang et  al., 2009). Additionally, much has been written about organizations’ give-or-get policies for board contributions, where board members have to personally contribute or raise a certain amount of funding for the organization. While funders and donors may desire all board members to participate in a give-or-get policy to demonstrate their leadership, such policies can provide an insurmountable barrier to those individuals who neither have the resources themselves to make a large donation or don’t have the social capital to know high net-worth individuals they can ask (Le, 2020). Policies should be designed to support inclusion of more diverse members of the community regardless of their ability to pay (Stein, 2019). Additional policies, such as holding board meetings at times that are convenient for working families and younger individuals, offering childcare, or offering a meal at a meeting, may also help support increased diversity and inclusion. In Chap. 7, programming has been described as the outcome of specialized staff trained in art education. However, museum boards have had a role in developing the organization’s programming. Developing programming with an eye toward the participation of traditionally underserved communities and inclusion has been another way the culture and values of the organization have come to light. Beyond just having a cultural heritage month, museum leaders can develop programming that seeks to include the perspective of a diverse set of individuals regardless of the topic (Olivares & Piatak, 2021). Co-creation strategies can also be powerful tools to balance diverse perspectives in creating a single exhibition. There are also organizational structures and community relationships that may support programming that both draw in more individuals to participate but also can deepen relationships with communities that have traditionally been under-represented. For example, Kinsley (2016) suggests that organizations can develop community councils to provide advice and make choices regarding museum programming and practice. These committees can provide a “transformative remedy” (p. 484) by undermining and disrupting the traditional role of a single curator in making programmatic and

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artistic decisions. Under this model, a curator, by partnering with a community advisory committee, may be more akin to a facilitator or moderator. Second, a community advisory committee is able to challenge notions of expertise and knowledge, including who is allowed to hold that authority. Finally, committees can reorient the understandings of aesthetic and creative processes, although it is important to recognize that the co-creation of knowledge and content among a group (rather than a single decision-­ maker) can be time consuming.

6  Conclusions In this chapter, we argued that participation in the art museum is important, and in particular, we highlighted that it is the organization’s management and governance that lays the foundation for participation and inclusion. We claimed that inclusive governance is a fundamental feature of the democratic museum and that a museum’s board of directors has an important role in managing the tensions inherent in developing business-­ like practices in organizations through managerialization and supporting an inclusive and participatory museum. From partnerships and community relationships to co-creation of content and programming, museums can hold a place in their communities as institutions that protect cultural and social value. Due to the ever-changing role of museums in society, and their importance in supporting community values of civic engagement and democracy, museum managers and members of boards of directors should be considered those who can help position the museum for growth and success. It goes without saying that the art museum, and museums in general, should be considered a central feature in community life. How the organization is perceived by its communities and its relationships with different stakeholder groups are important considerations for those responsible for bringing its artistic, cultural, and historical gifts forward for the public good. We highlighted recent changes about board recruitment, board training, board retention, and programming that may reshape the relationships among the museum staff, board, and community. If further developed, these changes may deepen and enrich participation and build a sense of ownership and commitment to the museum’s activities, mission, and values. They can influence the role of the organization in the community so it represents and builds authentic relationships with its audiences. In this way, the museum can improve a community’s social connections and cohesion, encourage civic participation, and support

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democratic activities. Most importantly, for the purpose of this volume, the illustration of these changes shows visitors how they can interact with the museum in a way that can make them active agents of the museum’s mission.

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CHAPTER 9

Conclusion Eleonora Redaelli

The epistemological journey outlined in this volume unfolds as a journey toward inclusive participation. The museum visit becomes a path not only to experiencing artworks but also to the possibility of participating in museum’s decisions. Through this epistemological exercise, the visit is not simply a moment of consumption; it becomes an opportunity for developing agency in artistic production, both through programs and inclusive governance. An epistemological journey is not just a purely theoretical exercise, limited to unpacking the construction of knowledge. By following this journey, a visitor is empowered to become a critical visitor, a participant, and a decision-­maker. This volume did not present a map of how to engage but rather opened the doors for different paths the visitor could take toward action. For instance, Chap. 8 reveals the mechanism used by museums to make decisions, uncovering strategies they are adopting to recruit their board members from a broad range of people in the community. Visitors can act to be included in these strategies, finding their own way to engagement.

E. Redaelli (*) University of Oregon, Eugene, OR, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 E. Redaelli (ed.), Visiting the Art Museum, Sociology of the Arts, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12089-3_9

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Since the seminal work by Pierre Bourdieu and Alain Darbel (1990), scholars have studied visitors, aiming to understand their agency, in particular studying how their socioeconomic upbringing influences their choice to visit museums. This volume, grounded in the thought of the practice by Carlo Sini, reversed the approach: It did not try to understand who goes to museums and why. The focus was not on understanding visitors’ agency but on giving them agency. By unpacking visitors’ connection with each step of the visit, they became the subject, not the object, of the inquiry. In Chap. 2, Gabriele Pasqui and I explained how through the lens of the thought of the practice, “object, subject, and meaning” emerge from different academic disciplinary horizons (see Fig. 2.1). Throughout the book, visitors gained agency by understanding the complex relationship between subject, object, and meaning and how it is constructed by each academic discipline. By disclosing how academic disciplines construct these relationships, an epistemological exercise is a compelling form of empowerment. The thought of the practices presented the visitor experience as intrinsically interdisciplinary, calling for an epistemological investigation that would untangle this ball of yarn and would identify the thread of each discipline. This volume transformed the visitor journey through each discipline’s exploration of the question, What can museum visitors learn about a specific aspect of their experience from this discipline? This epistemological journey stopped at each discrete step of the visit to shed light on the conversations that are happening in different academic corners of the museum field. Therefore, the emphasis of this volume was on the unpacking of the journey. By unraveling each discipline from the experiential journey, this volume uncovered how object, subject, and meaning emerge from different disciplinary horizons. For instance, through the lens of urban studies, visitors (subject) could grasp that the relationship between the city (object) and the art museum is captured by the concept of a cultural district (meaning); this is one of the concepts that informs the first steps of their visit. By stopping at each step of the experience, visitors can explore what concepts frame the knowledge in each academic discipline and grasp glances of the horizons of meaning permeating their experience. Visitors can take the time to stop and consider all the steps, one of them, or just a few. Each chapter embodied an academic discipline with its priorities, values, and way of writing and accompanied the visitor in a discovery of how each discipline has shaped their narratives and horizons of meaning. Art museums in the city fabric are bearers of civic and cultural values through

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inclusion in cultural districts or as flagship institutions. Their buildings can be classified into three main typologies: existing structures, newly created structures, and hybrid structures. The design of exhibitions showcases how display can be an artistic practice in itself and be organized as an immersive interface absorbing the visitor. The artwork, considered either a single piece of art or the entire exhibition, can be understood as a physical object, a visual experience, and a cultural artifact. From their early history, art museums have organized educational programs and now are increasing their concern for structural inequalities and developing more socially responsive programs. Finally, art museums have framed participation within programming and participatory arts practices. But the idea of participation has been growing to include the issue of governance and demanding greater inclusion in the decision-making processes New museology scholarship has brought attention to a visitor-center perspective, moving away from a singular focus to the collection (Bicknell & Farmelo, 1993; Rodney, 2019; Vergo, 1989). This epistemological journey uncovered how this shift impacted the approaches of all the academic disciplines examined. Each of the disciplines has displayed a shift toward understanding the art museum from the perspective of the visitor. For example, urban studies challenge the focus on museums as spectacular flagship buildings to better consider the landscape of the surroundings and the cultural values of the community, and architecture highlighted the need to balance space for storage and hospitability for visitors, whatever the typology of the building. Design, art history, and art education emphasize the relational nature of the connection between artwork and visitors. In particular, the new trends in design encourage the visitor to become a critical museum visitor who pays attention and interrogates the display, and art history offers useful tools for a critical interrogation of what is presented. Nonprofit management advocates for inclusive participation, which includes a broader representation in governance. The chapters are imbued with examples from around the world. However, three countries emerged as main examples: the United States, with the socially responsive programs at the Columbus Art Museum and the Wexner Center for the Arts and the predominance of American literature in nonprofit management; Italy, with the exposition of the history of display by Sergio Polano; and Japan, with the analysis of the exhibition After “Freedom of Expression” and its artworks. At the same time, this international conversation highlighted few differences in academic traditions among countries. Chapter 5, by Francesca Lanz and Jacopo

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Leveratto, illustrated how museum display is approached differently in academic training in Italy and Anglophone countries. In Italy, museografia is taught in architectural classes dealing with the design aspects of the museum as an overall project, whereas museology is taught in art history programs to train curators. These two types of training lead to different careers that are, however, always in dialogue. Museum studies is a recently established field in Anglophone countries connected with the humanities’ focus on the role of the museum in society and the multiple ways to connect with the visitor. Overall, the issues raised in the different chapters transcend the geographical and cultural context to relax back into the main argument of how to unpack the visitor experience. One of the ongoing conversations is about how museums responds to the current global political climate with a heightened awareness of museums as furthering structural inequities and making biased choices, in particular about curation, funding, and hiring. In this volume, the issue of structural inequalities arose in specific chapters. Chapter 7 by Dana Carlise Kletchka showed how research in art education has helped frame programs to be more socially responsive, starting with reconsidering the positionality of staff members in art education departments who have been asked to make programmatic decisions for audiences with whom they may share few demographic similarities. Art education scholarship suggests a few strategies to identify racist practices and dismantle institutional racism, enhancing museums’ need to respond and act in service of their communities. Kletchka ended the chapter on a positive note, showing how these strategies have already been incorporated into museum programming. She offered examples from two art institutions in Columbus, Ohio: The Columbus Museum of Art (CMA) and the Wexner Center for the Arts. In particular, she identifies the CMA as an embodied example of socially responsive practice that centers myriad community constituencies. Through radical social inclusion and creativity in community-based practice, CMA provides pedagogical connectors to the objects and constantly evaluates what visitors say they learn. Chapter 8 by Dyana P. Mason and I brought attention to governance, which provides the vision and oversight of operational and artistic choices and pushes a more radical form of engagement that addresses structural inequalities by reconsidering the mechanisms the museum has in place to involve visitors in governance. The nonprofit management literature gives suggestions for empowering visitors, communities, and, in particular, previously marginalized communities, aiming at inclusive governance.

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Through an epistemological exercise, this volume highlighted how the museum is a situated reality located in a specific city and subject to the changes of time. The museum is not a sacred space beyond time and place. Rather, it is an ever-changing space in dialogue with both current times and a specific place, which is characterized by certain physical elements and social interactions. In Chap. 4, Zachary Jones and Marzia Loddo reflected on the wide array of typologies for art museum buildings: new, old, and hybrid structures. Each typology frames its specific relationship and meaning between the setting—urban or natural—and the work found in it. In Chap. 3, Massimiliano Nuccio and Davide Ponzini highlighted the complex role of art museums in the urban fabric, which includes being bearers of civic values, economic anchors, and tools for urban regeneration, all aspects that call for a place-based understanding of museums. Buildings, cities, but also countries situate a museum. In Chap. 6, Akiko Walley illustrated the controversial response to an exhibition, in Aichi prefecture, and its artworks that commented on Japan’s imperial past. Drawing attention to how the museum is situated in a specific place brings to light the characteristics of the city and its community, inviting visitors to get involved through educational programs and decision-­ making through participatory governance. It shows that the visitor experience begins before they enter the museum and is broader than what happens within the walls of the museum. Arguing that the museum is situated is also an encouragement to scholars in museum studies and practitioners active in the field to consider the reality of the museum at different scales, from the city to the artwork, not necessarily in a linear way, as presented here, but through a back-and-forth reflection from one step of the journey to all the others, ensuring a constant dialogue and exchange. Ultimately, it is an invitation to embrace the vibrant, multidimensional, and dynamic reality of the art museum.

References Bicknell, S., & Farmelo, G. (1993). Museum Visitor Studies in the 90s. Science Museum. Bourdieu, P., & Darbel, A. (1990). The Love of Art : European Art Museums and their Public. Stanford University Press. Rodney, S. (2019). The Personalization of the Museum Visit: Art Museums, Discourse, and Visitors. Routledge. Vergo, P. (1989). The New Museology. Reaktion Books.

CHAPTER 10

Postface: From Visitors to Users— COVID-­19 Accelerating Change James M. Bradburne

I am currently the director general of Pinacoteca di Brera, an Italian State museum. I am not a politician, and I have no political ambitions. I cannot even imagine what it would mean to remake the global economy or put international affairs on a new footing. But I do know the museum and the ecosystem in which the museum operates. I am also convinced that even if one cannot change the world, one can tend one’s own garden so it flourishes, taking into account the local environment, the local demands, and the local predators. And perhaps if each of us tended our own gardens well, the overall result would be better than if we tried to change the world from the top-down. The COVID-19 pandemic has allowed me to connect many of the seemingly separate arguments I have struggled with for most of my professional life. So in these months when Italy was in strict lockdown, I asked myself what would—or should—a museum look like in a post-COVID world, what is its role, and how should it be supported? This reflection ponders on the challenges we are facing in the post-­ COVID world and describes a concrete proposal that is the fruit of those thoughts. The proposal is a personal one, based on decades of experience,

J. M. Bradburne (*) Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan, Italy © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 E. Redaelli (ed.), Visiting the Art Museum, Sociology of the Arts, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12089-3_10

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and prototyped, at least in part, in half a dozen institutions. My proposal is not in any way original; in fact, the ideas in it have been resurfacing generation after generation, from the birth of the first modern museums in the Conventions of 1793 and 1794, through the debates surrounding the creation of the V&A, London, and the Met, New York, in the nineteenth century, to the writings of John Cotton Dana in the early twentieth century, and more recently those of Frank Oppenheimer, Kenneth Hudson, George Hein, and Nina Simon. Nevertheless, this proposal emerged from a particular context and has been implemented at the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan since September 15, 2020. This reflection will trace its origins, starting with my autobiography.

1   A Bit of Autobiography I have been actively involved in the museum field since 1981 and in museum management since 1991. In addition to the great directors of Brera, among my many influences was the English museum specialist and critic Kenneth Hudson, who many decades ago said ruefully, museums “have become victims of the equation, more = better, and they have adopted policies which they believe could bring them the extra visitors which their employers are driving them to find. They dare not wonder whether going for popular appeal will lessen or even destroy quality” (Hudson, 1996, p. 122). Since I began my PhD research in 1989, I have stubbornly returned to several key themes, which can be seen in all of my professional work. The first is how to transform mere visitors, whose motivation is to visit a museum once, into users, whose value is measured in their willingness to return. This belief that a single visit is not enough to justify the museum project was conceived of in the French Revolution in 1793 as an expression of Enlightenment values. Such thought naturally leads to the conclusion that museums exist for their community (la città in Italian)—however broadly defined—and not for the casual visits that have become the hallmark of mass tourism, which dates from the 1970s. The second theme, inspired by my collaboration with the municipal schools of the city Reggio Emilia in northern Italy, is the importance of informal learning as a continuum that begins at home and includes the museum visit as a single, albeit fundamental, component of an entire learning trajectory, which in theory is lifelong. This position has been confirmed by many decades of research into learning behavior. Finally, I have spent my professional life

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striving to increase access to sites of informal learning to the widest possible public, some of whom may come to the museum while others may never visit at all. In a paper I wrote in 1989, I publicly declared my commitment to bottom-up learning (Bradburne, 1990). Soon afterward, I began collaborating with the Canadian anthropologist Drew Ann Wake, who I have known since 1976, on a series of papers about scientific literacy, better described by the French as la culture scientifique et technique. Our first joint paper, “Découvrir le plaisir de la science” (“Paradox Lost, Rediscovering Scientific Creativity”) (Wake & Bradburne, 1990), was a critique of existing science center exhibitions. We argued for a new approach to scientific creativity not based on right answers and a positivistic worldview. In early 1990, she asked me to collaborate on an extraordinary new project, a feasibility study for the Science Alberta Foundation. Over the next three years, Science Alberta became a laboratory for innovation and a testing ground for many of our ideas about recontextualizing the role of the expert in informal learning environments. More explicitly, it was an institutional example of a commitment to creating a bottom-up community-­driven institution. The definitive expression of the importance of a genuinely bottom-up approach was developed at Science World in Vancouver in 1993 (Wake & Bradburne, 1995). The exhibition Mine Games put the earth sciences in the context of a real-world debate about land use and had at its core an interactive voting theater animated by a live host who worked with every audience to find solutions to a complex social issue involving a new open-pit mine in a fictitious northern community. The issues addressed in 1987–1993 could be expressed by three questions: (1) How to reconfirm the museum as an institution with intrinsic value in creating civic identity? (2) How to create experiences that took into account the user and recognized their diversity?(3) How to create a genuine mechanism whereby the community could participate in a meaningful way in the governance of the institution? The answer to the first question confronted head-on the prevailing wisdom about the importance of museums as components of the leisure industry, wherein their value was largely defined in instrumental terms such as tourism. The second question involved creating exhibition experiences that actively considered the users and their specificity, while the third committed to listening—from the exhibition to the boardroom—in a way that did not merely re-create the traditional top-­down power structure. These questions evolved over the next decades, but it took several decades of experimentation to arrive

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at a single coherent proposal that would take into account the complexity of the issue. Nevertheless, I began putting key principles to the test as soon as I was in a position to do so. As these experiments have been relatively well documented, I will refer only to the most salient ones. At newMetropolis in Amsterdam (now NEMO), which opened in 1997, we faced the challenge of creating interactive experiences that engaged users for longer, were linked to real-life situations, and did not encourage the pinball effect noted in most large interactive science centers (Bradburne, 2000). In addition to large networked games based on systems dynamics, newMet included a real laboratory staffed by working scientists who helped visitors answer their own questions. In 1999, at the Museum für angewandte Kunst (formerly Kunsthandwerk) in Frankfurt, Germany, we launched Europe’s first wireless museum and created Europe’s first curated digital collection. The research project Digital Craft resulted in Europe’s first exhibition on computer viruses, I Love You, and on social networks several years before the birth of Facebook. Among its exhibitions was Blood: Art, Power, Politics and Pathology, which spanned 20 centuries of fine art, applied art, science, and technology. Visitors who donated blood were given free admission, and it included an interactive exhibition on the science of blood. Beginning in 2006, when it was relaunched under the direction of an innovative public-private foundation, the Palazzo Strozzi became a center for experimental exhibitions and contemporary art. Its exhibitions were characterized by interaction, innovation, and outreach, along with a strong focus on family audiences.

2   COVID-19 and the Brera Proposal COVID-19 has been a consequence of the single most important challenge facing the human species: the impact of the growing human population on the global environment. The effects of deforestation, habitat destruction, the extinction of countless species, pollution, and global warming have brought the planet’s ecosystem to a point of near no return. COVID-19, the consequence of a virus jumping from one species to another due to their dangerous proximity, has thrown several issues, which were heretofore considered separate, into stark relief. Directly or indirectly, the many other problems we must confront are exacerbated by the stress on the planet’s ecosystem: nuclear proliferation, undeclared proxy wars, famine, drought, and plagues of locusts.

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COVID-19 has urged us to move more squarely into ecosystem thinking. Aldo Leopold, along with Ed Ricketts and a few others, was one of the pioneers of what we now call “ecology”—seeing all life on the planet as a single related whole in which an alteration to a single element changes the entire system. This basic form of reflection is now being fast-tracked. Ecology has already taught us that it is extremely risky to try to alter a single aspect of a complex whole; the consequences can be alarming and unforeseeable. Above all, ecology warns of the vulnerability of creating monocultures of all kinds: of crops and livestock and, by way of extension, of societies and nations. These warnings have wider significance. The key to biological, social, and cultural resilience is diversity, which requires equality, tolerance, and inclusion but ensures resilience, sustainability, and, in the end, survival. The rapid spread of a novel coronavirus, which emerged in a market in Wuhan, China, in late 2019, caught the world completely unprepared, with worldwide deaths and economic depression as a consequence. In the first three months of the pandemic, the virus did what transformation campaigners have been unable to do in decades of activism: clear the air, put international travel on a hold, and slow consumption. What other latent trends did the COVID-19 crisis accelerate? It has offered us the chance to rethink and reset our basic ways of life and our economic, political, social, and cultural institutions. Let us take a leap of faith. Faith in our ability to innovate in order to survive and faith in the possibility of creating a world that isn’t just a carbon copy of the world as it was before the pandemic down to its carbon footprint. What if rather than rushing to change in order to stay the same, we decide it is unacceptable to reproduce the past as it was before COVID if it means repeating the mistakes we made that are pushing us to the brink of extinction? The correct response depends on understanding what museums are and whom they are for. Kenneth Hudson argued that the museum is, in fact, more like a private club than a disco and that its ambitions should remain modest and its financial health based on its membership base, its users. Like a library, a museum is a shared resource that should serve a broad base of interested and informed users.

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3  The Key to the Transformation: Offering a Museum Experience Online That Is Not Possible in Person In sharing our isolation during the lockdowns necessitated by COVID-19, we became socially much closer than before, and in learning to inhabit shared virtual spaces, we perhaps came to know each other better. This lesson also has an important consequence for our work. In learning to live in virtual spaces, to understand their limits but also their opportunities, we can, perhaps for the first time, imagine what a real virtual museum experience would be like. Above all, the online museum experience must not merely illustrate the appearance of the museum and represent material that can be better experienced in person. We have to accept that the virtual museum—if it is to have the same transformative, inspirational, and educational value as a visit to the real museum—must be of equal value but very different from the physical museum. Although one may complement the other, one can never replace the other. The unexpected consequence of the COVID crisis has been to strengthen the argument for the distinctive power of the online experience while, especially with its restrictions on the capacity of the physical spaces of the museum, allowing us to remagicalize the in-person, on-site museum visit. The pandemic has accelerated important changes in how we live, but these changes do not depend on such a crisis and will not stop when the crisis ends. The requirement to make an online reservation during the pandemic (to avoid queues and crowding) meant that visitors could prepare their visit in a new way. Whereas before COVID-19 anyone could wander by, wait in a long line, purchase a ticket, and enter the museum, this is no longer possible. Spur-of-the-moment visits were discouraged as they could lead to unforeseen gatherings of too many people; cash transactions were discouraged due to the risk of infection; and the necessary barriers to separate ticket staff from the public made buying a ticket unnecessarily unpleasant. The acceleration of a contactless cash-free society married fortuitously to the increased acceptance of online payments. Making online booking obligatory eliminated the risks of overcrowding and the risk of contracting a possible contagion and, for the first time, created a moment where the museum could potentially prepare everyone to get the most out of their visit. For the first time, a person’s first contact with the museum was online. Unthinkable before COVID, now every single person who wanted

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to come to the museum—for the first time or the 10th—had to book online. The visit began at home, not at the front door, and the person arrived prepared, informed, and curious. The visit itself became even more precious—and more than ever the visit may leave an indelible impression. This is a practice that is very healthy and will become the new normal long after the crisis is over. Now is the time to let the museums reduce their footprint radically and imagine adapting their opening hours to meet the needs of the local public while massively increasing the quality of their online production to satisfy the needs of those who want the museum experience but don’t need the immediate presence of the physical object. The museum could be open when its users are willing and able to come. Schools and special groups could be programmed for certain mornings. Late openings could offer the museum experience to younger audiences. By making museums available nine hours a day instead of 11, staff employed as guards but performing other functions could be reassigned permanently to communication, education, or cataloging, thereby strengthening the museum’s competencies without new costs. On the other hand, by providing a valid, engaging, and transformative online experience—an experience impossible in the physical museum itself—the museum effectively becomes open 24/7.

4  From Visitors to Users: From Tickets to Membership What makes a museum visit unique? Let’s compare a film and a museum experience. A film is limited in time and has a fixed duration; a museum visit is elastic. A film is linear and often narrative; a museum is nonlinear and often non-narrative. A film controls emotional peaks explicitly; a museum relies on chance encounters, often with others. A film’s emotional impact is largely personal, whereas the museum experience is profoundly social. A film is like a Disney ride, with every step of the way preplanned and controlled; the museum visit is like a walk in the park: pleasant, relaxed, and full of unexpected discoveries. In the museum, the user is autonomous. Paradoxically, it seems to me that for decades we have been focusing our attention on the wrong place: the visitor. Visitor revenue, visitor numbers, ever more visitors as the measure of the museum’s quality and of its success. But when it comes to inclusion, diversity, accessibility, the concept

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of the visitor seems inadequate and impoverished with respect to that of the user, the subscriber, the member. A visitor is a visitor merely by virtue of a transitory presence at the ticket office, a casual act without any necessary commitment or outcome. If, however, someone decides to subscribe to what a museum does—in the museum, in the community, online—and not merely to what it has on its walls or decides to become a member of the museum’s community, we have to consider how the museum serves its members over time, not just once during the moment of the visit. A one-­ night stand becomes a relationship. A visitor exists as a consequence of a single visit, whereas a member implies a commitment, however casual. Commitment is at the core of the museum’s values, places it back at the heart of our identity as citizens, and extracts it from the leisure industry, edutainment, and diversion and all of the logistics of the tourist industry that have slowly eroded the museum’s real value over the past decades. Banishing the very notion of visitor and replacing it with that of a subscriber/member and selling subscriptions/memberships, which include entry to the museum as one of several benefits, may be the key to reconnecting the museum to a far broader community and could open the way for the whole community to have a real voice in the governance of its museum—its big house. What is needed now is a complete shift of emphasis, from the museum visit—the experience of the physical collection—to the museum experience, which can occur both in the museum itself, and now, as we learned during the pandemic, increasingly online. Both experiences are equally valid—and equally necessary and complementary—but also fundamentally different in kind. The museum’s identity has long been confused with that of its collection, a mistake similar to confusing the music with the score. We have to learn to measure the museum’s value, I will argue, no longer by visitor numbers but by subscribers to its creative output by focusing on what the museum does, not what it has. The rallying cry of Italy’s Minister of Culture Dario Franceschini to create a “Netflix” of culture does not merely mean creating museum-related content; it means creating a Netflix economic model that replaces the purchase of a visit with the purchase of a subscription. For a Netflix subscriber, the movies they watch are “free”, just as my iPhone is “free” when I purchase a two-year contract. In a world radically changed by the consequences of fighting COVID-19, it is time to offer subscriptions—of various kinds—instead of selling tickets while still respecting all the people who have long enjoyed free access to the country’s cultural resources: children, students, teachers, journalists,

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ICOM members, etc. And if in order to see a national collection, an international tourist has to become a member of the museum community instead of paying for a visit, this is only the material recognition that they have not already paid for their access through their taxes. This single shift from the visit to membership provides the means of addressing most of the challenges currently facing the museum in a coherent and sustainable way. By moving away from the single visit as a measure of its quality, the museum can now focus on its prime mission: to transform visitors by encouraging them to stay longer and see more in the objects in the museum’s permanent collections. The COVID-19 crisis has provided the impetus to completely rethink has provided the impetus for museums to completely rethink their business plan. Even within the existing normative and legal framework, it is necessary to repropose a new way of using the museum based on the community in which the visit itself is inserted into a complete cultural trajectory, instead of being the single dominant feature. In effect, it allows us to realize the goal of turning visitors into users. Paradoxically, the pandemic has provided the key to unlocking many of the unresolved issues in the relationship of the museum to its society in the spirit of the last great director of Brera, Franco Russoli, who died before the beginning of mass tourism and promiscuous international air travel. In a post-COVID world, the in-person museum visit is, of course, now more precious than ever, and the art of slow looking is fundamental to get the maximum value from seeing the original artwork. Preparing for a hosting a visit is also more important than ever, and provocations such as labeling, which encourage visitors to look more closely and see more, are fundamental. The museum can now entirely rethink its relationship to the community and integrate itself into its economic and cultural life through mutual support. Just as restaurants moved toward takeaway orders during the pandemic, so must the museum find ways that the community can order the museum experience to take home online.

5  Membership and the Board: Putting the Museum Back at the Heart of the Community Museums fail entirely in giving a real voice to the community they serve encouraging them to participate in the of the institution. In the museum, visitors don’t have the means to express their views beyond the guest

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book, if there is one, any more than spectators at a football match have a role in the management of their team. But members do. They can express their voice through the museum’s annual meetings, committees, and discussion groups and in many other ways. These encounters bring the diversity of the membership base to the attention of museum management in a way that does not happen—and perhaps could not happen—with mere museum visitors. And if everyone is obliged to become a member to access the museum, potentially everyone could have a voice through regular meetings between the board and the museum’s members in which the public can express its opinion, albeit initially in a nonbinding form. Key questions for the public could be what to collect, what the obstacles to accessibility are, and what should be the opening hours and possible activities, events, and programs. By making it obligatory for the board to consult with the museum’s membership (formerly merely visitors), new policies could be implemented and evaluated. The membership could be given one or more seats on the museum’s board to ensure that the diversity of the community at large is better represented. By becoming a membership-based institution, the museum could ensure that the voice of the members is heard. Libraries, which are already a membership institution in practice, offer museums a model to ensure greater diversity and attention to the voices of their users. Other than libraries, the private sector works on this principle routinely: If I buy an iPhone, I am merely a client—but if I buy even a single share in Apple, I am a shareholder and have the right to participate in the annual meeting. By considering our users as stakeholders in the fullest sense, we have the key to ensuring that museums listen to their community, both geographical and international. Stakeholders must have the right to be heard by the board at least once a year, and the board must be obliged to present its strategies and justify its decisions. The core concept is to transform the practice of purchasing a ticket to see the permanent collections into an annual subscription—in effect a membership—which includes free access to the museum throughout the year to be reserved online in advance. In this way, the experience of the museum online—which includes preparing for hosting the visit and providing post-visit activities and events all year—becomes the whole museum experience in which the visit to see the physical museum is a precious opportunity. In this way, ticket revenue becomes zero and the museum is effectively free to all—but only by becoming a member of the museum community. The memberships will be offered at different levels, subject to

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the same general rules as tickets, with the option for family memberships and higher level donations etc. Those already benefiting from free entry can still enter for free by using the online site directly would not have access to the advantages of full membership, which include access to exclusive online content, live streaming, openings, lectures, concerts, etc. Events can also still generate some revenue, subject to governmental restrictions on gatherings, by offering exclusive access combined with exclusive live streaming. For simplicity, let’s imagine that the museum is society’s metaphorical family home, our big house, where we stores the treasures of the past to take forward into the future, treasures that no one individual is in the position to keep privately. Seen in this way, while the decades-old Bob Dylan poster hanging in my home is my own, Brera’s Caravaggio is everyone’s Caravaggio. This big house is a place where everyone should feel welcome. But how can we ensure that everyone feels at home and that the treasures stored there represent everyone’s memories? To answer this requires two things: accessibility, our big house must be accessible to everyone and no one must feel like they don’t belong, and diversity, our big house must contain treasures that belong to all parts of the community, not just those collected historically by those who ran the museum: its board, directors, curators, and donors. In fact, more than merely being accessible, a museum must be inclusive, which is a far broader and more powerful concept. Like all international cities, Milan is extremely multicultural and includes substantial communities of Russians, Koreans, Chinese, Somalis, Senegalese, Nigerians, Brazilians, and Americans, in addition to the already rich mixture of European nationalities and, of course, Italians. But does everyone really feel at home at Brera, arguably the city’s most important art museum? We generally and with complacency answer in the affirmative, as certainly everyone we know—white, middle class, well-educated Europeans—feels perfectly at home, experiencing no dissonance or alienation when they visit. But even a short reflection forces us to answer, in fact, no. The museum, which has a rich collection of Italian fine art from the Renaissance and afterward, largely with Christian themes, does not actually feel much like home to the vast majority of Milan’s citizens. While new citizens are invited to become more like us by adding Caravaggio to their cultural experience of assimilation, not much in the museum suggests a respect for other cultures, other religions, or other heritages. Like a fish in the water, those in positions of power are blithely unaware of the

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systemic exclusion and the fact that our big house is not at all home to everyone in our community. Like powerful white men, we profess that we are color blind and that our collections are universal and belong to all when, in fact, they belong only to a few. How do we ensure that everyone feels at home in the museum? How is the community’s voice heard in the museum, especially in terms of its governance? How are the museum’s decisions about when to be open and what to collect influenced by the needs and wishes of the public to whom the museum belongs? At present, the answer is that the public has no voice in the museum at all, and a look at the board of any Italian State museum would show a complete lack of cultural diversity. Who is represented then? In practice, the workers are represented by their unions, and their voice is extremely loud, although unlike in other European countries, unions do not have a seat on the board. The State, through the minister and the secretary general, are represented by laws, norms, and circulars that set out national museum policy, which rarely takes into account the local situation—in other words, the museum’s actual public. The management is represented by the director, the board, the auditors, and the advisory board, who represent various professional classes, but not the diverse public of Milan. Sponsors have a voice, albeit very weak in Italy, according to what initiatives they choose to finance and what they don’t. At the end of the day, there is no formal mechanism for the public to express its needs, and the informal mechanisms are largely ad hoc and inconsistent. What can be done to remedy this situation without falling into the representation trap, which limits the input from specific groups to predefined categories instead of reflecting the fluidity and diversity of community identity? For example, when a Korean lawyer who is a mother of two and married to an Italian is invited to a committee to discuss an exhibition of Korean crafts, is she speaking as a Korean, a mother, a lawyer, or a new Italian citizen? Does she really represent the Korean community? Let me be clear: If we depend on boards and directors to implement the inclusion changes that marginalized and racialized communities are legitimately demanding, we have not altered the inherent top-down decision-­making structure. Listening and implementing change are still at the discretion of those in power. Increasing the diversity of those in power may help in certain cases, but it is not the systemic change that is called for—a structural mechanism that includes the community’s voice by right,

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not discretion. By making every user a member, we give them the right to be heard independent of the choices and preferences of the management. To insist on the right of the members to be heard at the board level is a revolution in museum governance. Also, if the make-up of the membership is not subject to manipulation for political or ideological reasons, it is a more legitimate means of listening to the community—fluid, mobile, changing—than any possible mechanism of appointed representation. In this way, the museum’s decisions made about acquisition, interpretation, exhibition, and access are informed by the bottom-up invisible hand of the stakeholders, not the top-down heavy hand of the state or the board. Of course, none of this is new. The idea of a community-based museum can be traced to the first museums born shortly after the French Revolution and seen in the writings of John Cotton Dana and John Dewey. However, in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and the spontaneous eruption of the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, it may be the time to return to the future where the museum is worth far more than a visit. As Franco Russoli, argued, “The Museum must be a place where the experience of cultural heritage serves to form consciousness for an action of development, or the transformation of social systems to make people free insofar as they are informed. A place of commitment, not of escape or isolation or separation.” The real question is whether we—as a museum community, as an Italian State museum, as a ministry and as a country—have the courage to put the museum on a new, sustainable, socially responsible footing. It is certainly the perfect moment for radical change, but Italy is also the country of Niccolò Machiavelli, who wrote in The Prince [Chapter VI]: And it ought to be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. Because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new. This coolness arises partly from fear of the opponents, who have the laws on their side, and partly from the incredulity of men, who do not readily believe in new things until they have had a long experience of them. Thus it happens that whenever those who are hostile have the opportunity to attack they do it like partisans, whilst the others defend lukewarmly, in such wise that the prince is endangered along with them.

Only time will tell if we can rise to the challenge, but our future depends on whether or not we can shed our old notions and embrace new ones.

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References Bradburne, J. M. (1990). Beyond Hands-On: Truth-telling and the Doing of Science. Thesis, Mutual Uses of Science and Cybernetics, Amsterdam, Netherlands. Bradburne, J.  M. (2000). Interaction in the Museum: Observing, Supporting, Learning. Alibris. Hudson, K. (1996). The Wrong and the Right Road for Museums. Nordisk Museologi, 1, 121–126. Wake, D. A., & Bradburne, J. M. (1990). Découvrir le plaisir de la science (Paradox Lost, Rediscovering Scientific Creativity). Alliage, 6, 16–23. Wake, D. A., & Bradburne, J. M. (1995). Mine Games. The Science Centre as a Social Forum. LA Revue des Arts et métiers, 10, 30–37.

Index

A Academic disciplines, 1, 3, 6, 15, 19–22, 62, 89, 150, 151 Administrators, 112, 116, 134 Aesthetic, 29, 40, 42, 74, 78, 88, 110, 114, 116, 133, 144 After “Freedom of Expression?” (AFE), 5, 88, 89, 91–93, 95–103, 151 Ahn Se-hong 안세홍 安世鴻, 101 Aichi Museum of Art, 97, 100 Aichi Triennale Organizing Committee (ATOC), 97, 100–102 Aichi Triennale あいちトリエンナー レ, 5, 88, 91, 97, 98, 100–102 Albini, Franco, 53, 69, 77 Appelbaum, Ralph, 79 Arai Hiroyuki アライ=ヒロユキ, 91 Architecture, 4, 5, 20–22, 39, 41, 62–64, 67–70, 73, 75, 78, 83, 90, 113, 122, 151 Arnhem Museum, 77 Art education early art education, 109–112

K-12 art education, 114–118 paradigms, 109, 111, 116, 117, 121 Art history, 4, 5, 20–22, 70, 77, 116, 118, 121, 151, 152 Artistic practices, 5, 66, 75–79, 100, 131, 151 Art museum education, 110, 121 museum, 1, 5, 30, 39, 43, 110, 115, 121, 144 museum policies, 99 public museum, 50, 88 Artwork, 2, 3, 5, 6, 13, 21, 22, 31, 54, 55, 57, 63, 75, 77, 78, 82, 83, 86, 116, 129, 133, 149, 151, 153, 163 mirror of changing sizes, 5, 103 Athenian agora, 133 ATOC, see Aichi Triennale Organizing Committee Audience, 21, 36, 52, 72, 73, 75, 80, 82, 93, 102, 110, 111, 116–119, 121, 124–126, 133–135, 138, 144, 152, 157, 158, 161 Autobiography, 156–158

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 E. Redaelli (ed.), Visiting the Art Museum, Sociology of the Arts, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12089-3

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INDEX

B Baldessari, Luciano, 69 BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, 31 Bayer, Herbert, 76 BBPR, 69, 75, 76 Belluschi, Pietro, 46 Belonging, 16, 31, 77, 130 Bennett, Tony, 2, 13, 50 Bertacchini, E. E., 137 Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milano, 81 Bijutsu techō 美術手帖, 98 Bishop, Claire, 133 Board boardroom, 157 of directors, 5, 129, 137–139, 144 duty of care, 137 duty of loyalty, 137 duty of obedience, 137 members, 137, 138, 140–143, 149 retention, 141–144 of trustees, 128 Bounded rationality, 136 Bourdieu, Pierre, 12–14, 150 Bradburne, James, viii, 6, 157, 158 British Museum, The, 50, 55 Bronze peace, see Peace monument Brown, William, 141 Brückner, Uwe, 79 Brunelleschi, Pietro, 7 Budget, 30, 116 Business plan, 163 C CaixaForum, Madrid, 60 Caravaggio, 165 Castello Sforzesco, Milano, 75 Castiglioni, Achille, 69 Censorship, 88, 98, 101, 102 Centrale Montemartini Museum, Rome, 48

Change, 10, 11, 31, 32, 38, 41–43, 49, 50, 52, 56, 61–63, 70, 80, 82, 90, 94, 114, 117, 119, 130, 134, 136, 138–141, 144, 145, 153, 155–168 Childe, Hassam, 7 Children, 111–114, 162 Chima 치마, 93 Chipperfield, David, 48, 61 City boosterism, 31, 32 City fabric, 5, 28, 36–38, 150 Civic and cultural values, 5, 28–33, 43, 150 Class, vii, viii, 3, 30, 34, 57, 99, 111–115, 124, 152, 165, 166 Clay Figure, 86 Cochiti Pueblo, 86 Co-creation, 131, 132, 143, 144 Cognitive assumptions, 2 Collection, 7, 11, 22, 28–30, 32, 36, 48–59, 61–64, 66, 68, 70–72, 76, 78–82, 86, 99, 112, 114, 115, 117, 122, 132, 139, 140, 151, 158, 162–166 Colonialism, 2, 56 Columbus Museum of Art (CMA), 6, 110, 121–125, 152 Comfort women, 93, 95 Community, 4–7, 12, 21, 22, 28, 32, 43, 56, 86, 88, 92, 108, 110, 111, 114, 115, 117, 118, 120–126, 128, 129, 131–133, 135, 136, 138, 139, 141–144, 149, 151–153, 156, 157, 162–168 museology, 70 Context, 3, 11, 13, 16, 22, 33, 38, 41–43, 47, 48, 55, 57, 59, 60, 63, 69, 70, 72, 83, 87–90, 95, 96, 100, 103, 113, 116, 119, 130, 132, 133, 135, 136, 138, 152, 156, 157

 INDEX 

Contracted vendor, 100 Cook, Peter, 38, 57 Covid-19, vii–ix, 2, 6, 29, 36, 62, 126, 155–168 Cultural artifact, 5, 88, 89, 91, 96–100, 151 Cultural district, 5, 26, 28, 31–36, 40, 43, 150, 151 Cultural facilities, 35, 38, 41 Cultural-led development, 31 Curatorial project, 68, 71, 74, 75 Curriculum (curricula), 4, 69, 70, 111, 114, 116–118 D Dal Co, Francesco, 78 D’Alleva, Anne, 89, 90 Dana, John Cotton, 112, 115, 156, 167 Darbel, Alain, 12, 13, 150 DeBosa, 113 Decision making process, 22, 101, 130, 131 Deconstruct, 4, 17, 23, 136 Decorated shed, 37, 38 Deeper engagement, 86, 103 Democracy, 111, 130, 135, 144 Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, 58 Design, viii, 4, 5, 13, 20, 21, 23, 36, 38, 41, 51, 52, 54–57, 59, 61–63, 66, 86, 100, 110, 112, 114, 117, 132–134, 151, 152 Desvallees, André, 69 Dewdney, A., 113, 116 Digital museum, 63 Display, 5, 13, 29, 48, 53–55, 57, 62, 64, 97, 151, 152 critical, 72, 75, 80, 83 Diversity, 49, 118–121, 124, 141, 143, 157, 159, 161, 164–166 Donors, 120, 132, 143, 165

171

Duck, 37, 38 Duncan, Carol, 13, 113 E Ecomuseology, 70 Ecosystem thinking ecology, 159 Leopold, Aldo, 159 Efficiency, 136 Efland, A., 111, 114 Empowerment, 3, 131, 150 Engagement barriers to, 130 degrees of people’s involvement, 130 Epistemology, 14, 17, 18, 70, 90, 120 epistemological journey, 2–4, 6, 9–23, 149–151 Evaluation, 17, 74, 89, 121, 133 Everyday life, 13, 20 Executive director, CEO, 138 Exhibition exhibitionary environment, 74 politically sensitive exhibition, 99 toolbox of exhibition designers, 80 Existing structures banana warehouse, 54 castles, 53 monastery, 53 prison, 54 residencies of loyalties, 53 salt warehouse, 54 train station, 54 windmill, 54 Experience, 1–6, 8–23, 28, 36, 37, 42, 54, 60–63, 66, 68, 74, 75, 77–80, 82, 87, 88, 91–96, 100, 101, 103, 110, 113, 114, 116–123, 125, 129, 134, 135, 140, 142, 150–153, 155, 157, 158, 160–165, 167 on-line experience, 160, 161

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INDEX

F Facebook, 158 Falk, John, 12 Fallen Fruit Allen Burns, David, 66, 125 Young, Austin, 66, 125 Ferilli, G., 132 Flagship, 5, 28, 31, 32, 39–43, 58, 151 Floyd, George, 99 Formal qualities, 88–90, 101 Fournier, Colin, 38, 57 French Revolution, 52, 156, 167 FRP Peace, see Statue of peace G Gehry, Frank, 40, 51, 55 Gender, 19, 22, 73, 91, 99, 112, 113, 120 Genten 原点, 93 Google Arts and Culture, 63 Governance inclusive governance, 6, 130–145, 149, 152 non-profit governance, 137 Government, 2, 40, 96, 99, 101, 115, 120, 137, 138 Great depression, 114 Guggenheim Foundation Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Spain, 51 Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 28, 56, 61, 63 Gwathmey Siegel & Associates Architects, 61 Gyōmu itaku keiyaku 業務委 託契約, 100 H Halmeoni 할머니, 93–95 Hanbok 한복 韓服, 93 Handy, Charles, 135

Hegenbart, Sarah, 133 Hein, George E., 2, 12, 156 Heiwa no hi 平和の碑, 93 Herzog & de Meuron, 57, 60 Hicks, Dan, 2 Hooper-Greenhill, Eilean Hooper, 113 Hudson, Kennet, 156, 159 Human-centered, 110, 126 Hyōgen no fujiyū ten: kesareta mono tachi 表現の不自由展−消された ものたち, 91 Hyōgen no fujiyū ten, sonogo 表現の不 自由展その後, 88 Hyōgen no fujiyū ten zō ni nattemiru 表現の不自由展像にな ってみる, 99 I Ianfu 慰安婦, 93 Immersive art exhibit, 66 Immersive interface, 5, 66, 79–82, 151 I Myeong-bak 이명박, 96 Installation, 37, 66, 79, 81, 93, 96, 97, 101, 121 Interdisciplinarity, 10, 18, 19, 117 Iwasaki Sadaaki, 91 J Japan, 5, 6, 57, 88, 95, 96, 99, 100, 151, 153 Jaskyte, Kristina, 140 Jeogori 저고리, 93 Jones, Zachary, viii, 5, 153 Journey, vii, viii, 1–4, 6, 9–23, 63, 149–151, 153 K Katō Katsunobu 加藤勝信, 96 Kawamura Takashi 河村たかし, 91

 INDEX 

Kester, Grant, 133 Kiesler, Friedrich, 76 Kim Eun-sung 김운성 金運成, 88, 92–96, 98 Kim Seo-kyung 김서경 金曙炅, 88, 92–96, 98 Kinsley, Paquet, 139, 140, 143 Kletchka, Dana Carlise, 5, 113, 115, 117, 118, 120, 121, 124, 152 Knowledge, 1–4, 10, 11, 13–17, 19, 33, 34, 42, 70, 72–74, 80, 82, 83, 91, 103, 112, 113, 116, 117, 125, 129, 135, 139, 144, 149, 150 Kossmann, Herman, 68, 79–82 Kossmanndejong, 79 Kunsthalle of Bern, 79 Kunsthaus Graz, Austria, 38, 57 L Lanz, Francesca, 5, 151 Leaders, 6, 112, 134, 137, 140, 141, 143 Leveratto, Jacopo, viii, 5, 151–152 Library, 50, 63, 81, 112, 159, 164 Librocielo, 81, 82 Lidai minghua ji 歷代名畫記, 89 Lindauer, Margaret, 71–74 Lindsay, G., 33, 51 Lockdown, viii, 155, 160 Louvre, Paris, 50–52, 136 Lynch, Kevin, 37 M Macdonald, Sharon, 48, 55, 71, 74 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 167 Macleod, Suzanne, 10, 21, 68, 69 Mairesse, François, 69 Malaro, M. C., 137, 139, 142 Managerialization

173

critical management, 135–136 functions of management, 134 scientific management, 134–136 Mann, Casson, 79 Marzia, Loddo, 5, 58, 60, 153 Mason, Dyana P., viii, 6, 70, 72, 138, 152 Mass tourism, 49, 51, 62, 156, 163 Master’s students, 4 Mayo, Elton, 135 Members, 56, 91, 93, 100–102, 108, 109, 118, 120–122, 125, 126, 132, 139, 140, 142–144, 152, 162–164, 167 Metropolitan Museum of Art (MET), New York, 99, 110, 112 Michelangelo, 75, 76 Mirae, Kim, 138 Mirror of changing sizes, 5, 103 Mission, 21, 26, 32, 33, 41, 73, 78, 79, 110, 111, 121, 131, 132, 134–136, 138, 140–142, 144, 145, 163 Moore, Kevin, 135, 136 Moser, Stephanie, 72–74 Motivation, 130, 156 Mount Vernon Cultural District (MVCD), Baltimore, 28, 34, 35 Mucem, see Museum of the Civilizations of Europe and the Mediterranean Museo di Castelvecchio, Verona, 77 Museografia, see Museography Museography, 50, 53, 67–71, 152 museographical project, 68 museographical studies, 69 Museology, 50, 69, 70, 152 museological studies, 69 Museum für angewandte Kunst, Frankfurt, 158 Museum of Ancient Art, Milan, 75 Museum of Fine Arts Boston, 112

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INDEX

Museum of Modern Art, New York, 99 Museum of the Civilizations of Europe and the Mediterranean, 59, 60 Museum studies, 4, 10, 19, 23, 69–71, 74, 83, 152, 153 N Nagata Kōzō 永田浩三, 91 National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., 61 Native American, 86, 114 Neues Museum, Berlin, 61 Newcastle and Gateshead, United Kingdom, 28, 31 Newly created structures, 5, 49, 51, 55–58, 151 NewMetropolis, Amsterdam, 158 New museology, 4, 11–13, 23, 70, 71, 151 See also Museum studies New museum theory, 70 Ng, W., 140, 141 Noda Yoshihiko 野田佳彦, 96 Nonprofit management, 4, 6, 20, 22, 130–145, 151, 152 Nonprofit sector, 130, 138 tax reform, 130 Nuccio, Massimiliano, 5, 28, 34, 36, 153 O Object Stories, 108 Object/subject, 7, 11, 12, 14–16, 19, 20, 23, 50, 54, 56, 64, 70–73, 76–78, 80, 82, 86, 89, 91, 99–101, 103, 111–114, 116, 118, 121, 122, 125, 129, 150, 152, 153, 163–165, 167 Ogura Toshimaru 小倉利丸, 91

Ohio State University, The, 6, 110, 121, 123–125 Okamoto Yuka 岡本有佳, 91, 93, 95, 98, 100–102 Olivares, Alexandra, 140, 141, 143 Ō mura Hideaki 大村秀章, 92, 96, 97, 100–102 Ontology/ontological, 2, 17–19, 23, 71 Ortiz, Virgil, 86 Ottolini, Gianni, 78 P Palazzo Abatellis, Palermo, 53 Palazzo Bianco, Genoa, 53 Palazzo Rosso, Genoa, 53 Palazzo strozzi, Firenze, 158 PAM, see Portland Art Museum Pandemic, 29, 36, 62, 126, 155, 159, 160, 162, 163, 167 Panofsky, Erwin, 90 Paradigms, 5, 80, 109–111, 116, 117, 121 Paradise, 66 Participating artist, 100–102 Participation, 3, 4, 6, 13, 22, 31, 32, 130–145, 149, 151 Peace monument, 93–96 Pedagogical practices, 111, 112 Pei, I. M., 59, 61 Physical object, 5, 88, 91–96, 100, 151, 161 Piatak, Jaclyn, 140, 141, 143 Picture study, 111 Pinacoteca di Brera, Milano, 6, 155, 156 Polano, Sergio, 68, 75–78, 151 Policy statement, 142 Ponti, Gio, 69 Ponzini, Davide, vii, viii, 5, 28, 34, 35, 39, 40, 42, 153 Popular appeal, 156

 INDEX 

Portland Art Museum (PAM), vii, viii, 6, 7, 26, 46, 66, 86, 108, 128 Post-COVID, 155, 163 Practices Praxis, 14 thought of, 4, 10, 14–20, 23, 150 Preziosi, Donald, 21, 88 Professionals, 4, 50, 51, 69, 70, 75, 79, 82, 101, 102, 113, 115, 116, 118, 122, 135, 136, 155, 156, 166 Programming, see Programs Programs, 30, 32, 99, 111, 112, 114, 115, 118, 119, 121, 123, 124, 132, 139, 141, 143, 144, 151, 152 contribution-level projects, 132 hosted projects, 132 participatory, 132, 133, 151, 153 role of board members, 149 socially responsive programs, 6, 108, 121–125, 151 Progressive, 114 Progressive education, 111, 114 Pruulmann-Vengerfeldt, Pille, 130 Public, 2, 6, 10–13, 19, 21, 26, 29, 30, 32, 35–41, 43, 46, 50–53, 57, 66, 71, 72, 78, 81, 88, 91, 96, 97, 109, 111–114, 116–121, 124, 125, 130–132, 134, 137–140, 144, 157, 158, 160, 161, 164, 166 Public school, 111, 112, 114, 115 Purpose-based, 129 R Race, 73, 90, 91, 112, 113, 119 Redaelli, Eleonora, 33, 130, 131, 134, 137 Reggio Emilia, schools, 156 Rentschler, Ruth, 138 Riegl, Alois, 90

175

Robinson, Kristy, 136 Rodney, Seph, 11, 13, 151 Rondanini Pietà, 75, 76 Royal Museum for Central Africa, Belgium, 56 Runnel, Pille, 130 Russoli, Franco, 163 S Sacco, Pier Luigi, 34, 42 Santagata, Walter, 33, 34 Scarpa, Carlo, 53, 69, 77 Scenography, 80, 82 Scholars, 3, 4, 12, 13, 19, 23, 28, 30, 34, 89, 90, 103, 130, 131, 134, 135, 150, 153 Science Alberta Foundation, 157 Science World, Vancouver, 157 Scott, Allan J., 33 Segments, 135 Shaanxi History Museum, China, 136 Shuppin sakka 出品作家, 100 Simon, Nina, 12, 131–133, 140, 156 Sini, Carlo, viii, 4, 10, 14–17, 20, 23, 150 Skaggs, Rachel, 141 Smithsonian, 99 Society, 2, 3, 13, 29, 30, 70, 100, 110, 114, 115, 124, 138, 139, 144, 152, 159, 160, 163, 165 Sociomuseology, 70 Socratic role, 133 Sponsors, 132, 138, 166 Staff, 2, 98, 113–120, 122, 123, 125, 133, 135, 136, 138, 140, 142–144, 152, 160, 161 Stakeholders, 30, 31, 34, 36, 41, 132, 139–142, 144, 164, 167 Starchitect, 40, 41, 55, 62 State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, 63

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INDEX

Statue of peace, 88, 91–99, 103 Stewards, 130, 137, 142 Stocchi, Attilio, 81 Storytelling, 80, 108 Structures existing structure, 5, 48, 49, 51–55, 59, 60, 62, 151 hybrid structure, 46, 59–61, 151, 153 newly created structures, 49, 51, 55–58, 151 Studies (vs. disciplines), vii, 1–4, 18, 19, 22, 90 Studio Azzurro, 79 Subject, see Object/subject Subscription, 162, 164 Szeemann, Harald, 79 T Takasu Katsuya 高須克弥, 97 Tate Modern, London, 11, 32, 48, 60, 63 Theoretical frameworks distributed museum, 113, 116, 117 modernist museum, 112, 113 post-museum, 113, 114 reinvented museum, 114 Toledo Museum of Art, 110, 114 Tours, 63, 111, 113, 114, 124 Transformation, 1, 5, 10, 11, 13, 16, 28, 37, 40, 42, 43, 109, 136, 159–161, 167 Tsuda Daisuke 津田大介, 88, 91 Typologies, 5, 62–64, 110, 132, 138, 151, 153 Tzortzi, Kali, 48, 68, 69, 72, 74, 75 U Uffizi Museum, Firenze, 64 Diffused Uffizi program, 64

Undergraduate students, 3, 4 Urban planning urban redevelopment, 40, 41 urban regeneration, 28, 31, 39–42, 153 Urban studies, 4, 5, 20–22, 27–43, 150, 151 V V&A, 156 Value, 4, 5, 12, 13, 21, 22, 28–33, 42, 43, 51, 78, 80, 111, 122, 125, 129, 132–134, 138–140, 142–144, 150, 151, 153, 156, 157, 160, 162, 163 Van Eyck, Aldo, 77, 78 Van Gogh Exhibition: The Immersive Experience, 63 Vasari, Giorgio, 89 Venturi, Robert, 36–38 Visit booking online, 160 in-person, viii, 160, 163 on-site, 160 Visitor critical visitor, 72, 73, 78, 82, 149 membership, 159, 161–168 tickets, 135, 160–165 users, 6, 55, 62, 155–168 visitor experience, 1–4, 6, 8–23, 61, 63, 68, 74, 80, 150, 152, 153 Visual experience, 5, 88, 91–96, 100, 101, 151 Volunteers, 114, 132, 136, 138, 140, 142 W Wake, Drew Ann, 157 Walley, Akiko, viii, 5, 153 Walsh, V., 113

 INDEX 

Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, 34, 35 Western-centric, 90 Western culture, 109, 119 Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, 6, 110, 121, 123, 125, 151, 152 Whitehead, Chirstopher, 71, 72 Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 52 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 90 Wölfflin, Heinrich, 90

Workflow model, 132 World War II, 51, 53, 61, 75, 115, 130 Wright, Frank Lloyd, 40, 56, 61 Z Zan, Luca, 135, 136 Zanuso, Marco, 69 Zeller, Terry, 110–112 Zhang, Yanyuan 張彥遠, 89

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