Everybody thinks they know what a museum is: a great big building in which we see works of art, natural or manufactured artefacts, preserved for posterity. The history of the museum is also fairly well known – it grows out of the Wunderkammern – or Cabinets of Curiosities – that the royal courts of Europe, wealthy aristocrats and merchants began to acquire in the late middle ages, reaching a peak in the 18th century. The Louvre, established as a public gallery during the Revolutionary epoch, in 1793, was a landmark in allowing access to collections that had previously been private. It was expanded greatly under Napoleon from 1801. The Emperor believed his citizens should feel they had a share in the imperial glories of France – and the treasures looted from lands they had conquered.
The other great precursor of the modern museum was Sir Hans Sloane’s collection of 71,000 objects which, left to the nation, would form the basis for the British Museum, created by an act of parliament in 1753. The first great ethnographic museum was the Pitt Rivers, at Oxford University, established in 1884. This beautifully preserved example of a Victorian Museum – a museum that belongs in a museum – is now on the frontline for debates about decolonisation, restitution of cultural property, the ethics of displaying human remains, and so on. But more of that later.
In 2016, the International Council of Museums, defined a museum in this way:
“A museum is a non-profit, permanent institution
in the service of society and its development,
open to the public, which acquires, conserves, researches, communicates and exhibits the tangible
and intangible heritage of humanity and its environment for the purposes of education, study and enjoyment.”
In August 2022, after a long, heated debate, a new definition was adopted:
“A museum is a not-for-profit, permanent institution in the service of society that researches, collects, conserves, interprets and exhibits tangible and intangible heritage. Open to the public, accessible and inclusive, museums foster diversity and sustainability. They operate and communicate ethically, professionally and with the participation of communities, offering varied experiences for education, enjoyment, reflection and knowledge sharing.” [1]
What’s new? Chiefly the statement that museums “operate and communicate ethically, professionally and with the participation of communities,” although “reflection and knowledge sharing” are also added to the equation.
The differences may seem slight, but they are striking. The second version is a compromise that waters down the more radical proposals of new museum professionals while preserving the core values of their more established colleagues. If there is a new emphasis it is on “ethical” behaviour, and the “participation of communities.” Within these words, which sound so inoffensive, there lies a world of potential trouble.
In museums today, what one group considers “ethical” can be another’s recipe for disaster. There are plenty of curators who now believe it is “ethical” to return artefacts to their places of origin, regardless of whether there are adequate facilities for preserving these artefacts and ensuring their availability to the public. Many believe it is “ethical” to ask permission from the decendants of native people before putting historical artefacts on displays or into a thematic exhibition. They believe it is “ethical” to always display your pronouns beneath your name, and put the names of Aboriginal ‘nations’ on wall labels alongside the standard names.
This sense of what is ethical slides, with remarkable ease, into ideas of ‘decolonising’ the museum, which I’ll discuss at a later point.
Needless to say, there are groups that find these practices to be dangerous and unscholarly when it comes to collections, while the pronouns and wall labels feel like a frivolous obsession. For better or worse, I suspect the pronouns and the wall labels are with us for the long haul, even if they tend to alienate a general public that takes a more staunchly commonsense view of these matters – not understanding why it’s necessary to rearrange simple, longstanding conventions in order to accommodate numerically small groups within the population.
What the public thinks – let alone what the public wants – has become a vexing problem for the contemporary museum. There is a fundamental contradiction between the need to attract mass audiences, corporate and private sponsors, and the narrow, politically correct attitudes considered so vital by many leading institutions. In March 2022, the NGA held a press conference to announce its Gender Equity Action Plan[2] – a bureaucratic document of 48 pages, put together by a 15-member Gender Equity Working Group. The plan was to collect 40% women, 40% men, and 20% gender diverse.
This begs the question, what would happen if the gallery had the opportunity to acquire a major body of work by a female artist? Would they stop when the requisite 40% was achieved? One might also ask how these percentages are to be calculated. Is there a fixed number, say 40 pieces by women, 40 by men, 20 by others? How does one compare potential acquisitions? By size? By dollar value? How does the $14 million spent on a single sculpture by Lindy Lee factor into these plans? And what is the criteria for “gender diverse”? Do artists simply nominate themselves for this category?
Questions could be multiplied for a long time, as they could with a “Reconciliation Action Plan”,[3] put together with similar fanfare by the Queensland Art Gallery in January 2022. This is apparently what our galleries did during the COVID-19 lockdown.
Despite the time and effort put into the NGA’s Gender Equity Plan, it is a Utopian affair that fondly imagines all acquisitions could be managed in the most orderly and predictable manner. At best it provides a bureaucratic excuse for not buying certain kinds of work. “I’m sorry, we love the painting but we’ve already filled our quota of dead white males for this year.”
Such politically correct wastage of resources is nonetheless approved by government, as giving the impression the gallery is doing something very cool and progressive. The contradiction arises when the same politicians baulk at the large sums required to pay for the maintenance of public museums, forcing them to raise an ever-increasing proportion of their own budgets. Alas, as the NGA has found, unsexy repairs and upkeep are not things that attract donations from private donors.
To make life even harder, there is the insistence on exclusivity demanded by government tourist bodies which means that even the most well-attended blockbuster will struggle to make a profit, because the huge costs cannot be shared with another venue or two. This, in turn, forces the museums to keep raising ticket prices, which acts as a disincentive for the average punter. What is the premium point at which someone decides it’s too expensive to see a show? We’re still finding out – the hard way.
Even while they clutch at their purses, governments of both political persuasions have been only too happy to endorse the growth of policies directly related to the politics of identity – not just Gender Equity Plans, labels and pronouns, but the choice of exhibition topics and works that are acquired for permanent collections. Do we want more Indigenous themed shows? Yes, of course, cries the chorus. Will they get big attendances. No.
With such matters, politicians and public are caught in a web of lies. When asked, everybody says they want to see more Indigenous shows, but when those shows arrive, the audiences don’t turn up. Politicians wholeheartedly endorse such programs, but complain when attendance targets are not met – and ultimately penalise institutions through the pernicious mechanism of the “efficiency dividend”, which slashes next year’s budget when the anticipated numbers are not achieved.
I’m not for a minute suggesting we shouldn’t do shows of Indigenous art, arguably the most original and exciting work being made in Australia today. I’m arguing that we need a more balanced overview of the entire field, with a greater variety of exhibitions. Striking the same note over and over is a sure way of alienating audiences, creating boredom and resentment instead of building on nascent sympathy. A museum is for everyone, not for privileged “communities” within the greater community.
One of the most egregious pieces of minoritarian virtue-signalling was the AGSW’s Queering the Collection [4] program, which put special rainbow labels alongside works by artists who were identified as gay, or even possibly gay. Rupert Bunny and Margaret Preston, for instance, both scored such labels, even though their so-called “queer” phase was very much in their younger days. Both were happily married for most of their working lives and would have been horrified to be ‘outed’ in this manner. Jeffrey Smart made no pretence about his sexual preferences but would have been infuriated to see a rainbow label alongside one of his impeccable slices of urban realism.
Is it homophobic to suggest that it’s taking an intolerable liberty to highlight an artist’s sexuality in a public museum when it may have nothing to do with their work, and would run counter to how they might wish and expect to be presented?
What are the ethics of such a curatorial manoeuvre? It seems suspiciously like an invasion of privacy. It also creates a false equation between art and sexual identity. When we look at a vase of flowers by Margaret Preston is it at all relevant that she may have had a lesbian relationship in her twenties? Does a concrete flyover by Jeffrey Smart suggest a gay subtext? Do we think of them as greater artists or better people because of these labels?
••••
One of the classic essays on the museum, is T.W. Adorno’s Valéry Proust Museum[5] which looks at the contrasting attitudes held by two great French writers of the early 20th century.
“Museum and mausoleum are connected by more than phonetic association,” writes Adorno, summarising Valéry’s position. “Museums are like the family sepulchres of works of art. They testify to the neutralisation of culture.” [6]
“Dead visions are entombed there… Art becomes a matter of education and information; Venus becomes a document. Education defeats art… there, he says, we put the art of the past to death.”[7]
By contrast, Proust extolled “…the exhilarating happiness only to be had in the museum, where the rooms, in their sober abstinence from all decorative detail, symbolise the inner spaces into which the artist withdraws to create the work.”[8]
Two antithetical views of the museum, both intensely subjective and unfalsifiable. For Valéry the museum was the place where culture comes to die, its vitality drained by an improving, educational “mission”. For Proust, the cold neutrality of the museum is what allows a work of art to truly come into its own, free from the distractions one finds when a piece is encountered in the home of a private collector.
Nowadays these two points of view seem more radically opposed than ever before: not by way of after-dinner debate, but as hard-line public policy. It’s virtually a new stand-off between iconolaters and iconoclasts.
Let’s say that Proust speaks for an older generation of museum professionals, who see their task as preserving and displaying precious relics of the past, making them available to a broad public. He might subscribe to the earlier ICOM definition of a museum.
Valéry provides encouragement for a more radical, iconoclastic position. He speaks to those new generation professionals who believe the museum is a moribund institution that needs to be “broken” or “reinvented”. This viewpoint is rapidly gaining ground as an older generation of curators and museum directors is passing into retirement, being replaced by those who are passionately committed to “decolonising” collections and inviting the “participation of communities.”
The only problem is that the earlier curators were all art historians, whereas their successors are often graduates of a “curatorial studies” program that has equipped them to deal with “issues” and dismiss vast tracts of history because of perceived racist, misogynist and homophobic attitudes.
We see this dismissal of history everywhere nowadays, most spectacularly in the ongoing deconstruction of the Powerhouse Museum, which no longer wants to be known as a “museum” – it’s simply “Powerhouse”[9], in echoes of the Tate, which is now “Tate”; and the Barnes Collection, now known as ”Barnes.” It’s as if the museums have declared war on the definite article. Given the persistent use of weasel buzzwords such as “revitalisation”, it might be more precise to say that this war is being promulgated against the entire English language.
••••
But before going down this path, it’s useful to ask: “Who owns these collections anyway, and who is making decisions?”
The obvious answer, with a public museum, is that we the public own it, although the attitude of governments and museum administrations often suggests otherwise. It’s usually a case of “Don’t you worry, we know best. Your museum is in safe hands.”
This paternalism can be irritating, making such institutions seem hermetically sealed against criticism, good suggestions and advice. It becomes more pernicious in the case of the Powerhouse, still in the agonies of that decade-long “revitalisation” which has been shrouded in secrecy from the beginning. The periodic pretence of “public consultation” has been laughable to behold. Despite making it incredibly difficult to lodge a submission on-line, in the last round of “consultations” (one of my readers told me it left her in tears) a further 138 people responded. There were 131 objections to the “revitalisation” proposals, 3 “comments”, and only 4 in support. In other words, 95% of respondents were opposed to the plans. Will it make any difference? Judging by past experience, not a skerrick.
The official line is that matters are now too far advanced to be halted – which has been the line for several years already. A counter argument might run: No matter how much it costs to reverse these plans, it will be as nothing compared to the ongoing cost to the taxpayer of running three venues that nobody wants to visit. I can conservatively predict it will entail a bill of more than $100 million, year after year.
The lack of response to public concerns is not an accident. Powerhouse CEO, Lisa Havilah actually stood in front of an audience at the Bob Hawke Centre on Adelaide, on 21 June 2021, to give a talk called Unmaking the Institution, boasting that her method was “not respond until it no longer matters, and that’s a very special bureaucratic strategy.” By the way, if you’d like to listen to this talk it has been blocked by the speaker after she copped some criticism for these remarks. It’s the only talk in a series that has been made unavailable. Another very special bureaucratic strategy.
If you could, by some miracle, listen to the talk, you’d find this visionary leader boasting: “I didn’t ask the audience what they want. I ignored the data….”
“In every instance – even when I wasn’t going to – I always asked ‘How can I help?’” [my italics].
She said her policy was one of “…never explaining or trying to educate.” [10]
The same questions of responsibility are raised by the McClelland Gallery and Sculpture Park, which recently decided to deaccession works by Bertram Mackennal, Rupert Bunny, Emanuel Phillips Fox, Clarice Beckett, and Fred McCubbin, to support a new focus on “modern and contemporary sculpture and spatial practice.” Please don’t ask me to define “spatial practice.”
The director’s explanatory statement in the Deutscher and Hackett auction catalogue included a long digression on “the perspectives and cultural practices of the longest living culture on earth, that of Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. This aligns with the expanded role that the museum occupies in the 21st century; it is no longer solely about the preservation and exhibition of objects, but has evolved into a place of social exchange, a meeting point for diverse groups and cultures, and a forum for discourse about culture, vitality, and sustainability.” [11]
In brief, in order to pursue this new ideological program, the director, with the blessing of her trustees, had decided to dump unique historical works from the collection to raise the necessary cash. It might have been hard to explain this decision to Nan and Harry McClelland, on whose land the museum stands. Or to that great patron, Dame Elizabeth Murdoch (AKA. “the Murdoch everyone liked”), whose money was used to purchase one of the Mackennals.
It seems amazingly high-handed for a group of people who have temporary custodianship of a collection to decide that a series of important works can be sold off to support a new, untried program. All the jargon about “social exchange, a meeting point for diverse groups and cultures, and a forum for discourse about culture, vitality, and sustainability,” doesn’t disguise the singular fact that once these works are gone they are gone.
Deaccessioning is a practice fraught with dangers because the items that a museum would most like to get rid of – fakes, damaged goods, doubled-up prints – are generally not attractive to outside purchasers. To raise money from deaccessioning it’s necessary to sacrifice a major work, as the Whitney Museum in New York has done, by selling off works by Mark Rothko and Edward Hopper. But this is a one-off strategy. Every work removed from a collection takes something away from its history, from the patterns of taste and collecting that have formed the institution.
Now we find the NGA talking about deaccessioning again, while under director Nick Mitzevich a series of gigantic works, such as Skywhale, a hot air balloon by Patricia Piccinini, and Jordan Wolfson’s 18-metre long animatronic Body Sculpture, have created unique storage problems. It's worth remembering that any works collected under one director may be deaccessioned by a successor. The public, who are, in theory, owners of the collection, have no say in the matter.
••••
Deaccessioning might seem like a last resort for a museum strapped for cash, but one can easily imagine how it connects with the idea of “decolonising” a collection. Although this can be a vague, ambiguous term, to those who are committed to such a process, it opens the door to some extreme behaviour.
I can do no better than quote Alice Procter, a young Australian art writer, based in London, who has become known as an unspoken enthusiast for “decolonisation”.
“All art is political,” she writes. “Everything in a museum is political, because it is shaped by the politics of the world that made it. If you can’t see the views and agendas coming through, that doesn’t mean they aren’t there; it might just mean that they are close enough to your own for you to take them for granted. Right now, however, it feels as if museums are increasingly at risk of losing their relevance to contemporary society and politics in their pursuit of ‘neutrality’ (where neutrality really just means the status quo). We are living through times of intense turbulence and transformation, but it is hard to see many museums really reflecting this. Art has always been the tool of the powerful, and also the weapon of the dispossessed: official imagery controls narratives of identity and defines what is ‘right’ but these representations can be creatively subverted and destroyed. You have to know the rules of the space to sabotage it. If you don’t – cuts for funding for arts education, for example, stifle these possibilities – then generations no longer have a place to start from, narratives go unquestioned, and nostalgia triumphs.” [12]
There’s a lot to unpack here. The idea that “all art is political” is simultaneously banal and ominous. Politics occurs when there are three people in a room. It’s a cliché to say “everything is political”, but when the term is used in this way it is weaponised against the view of the museum as a neutral, cosmopolitan space, open to the broadest possible public.
The ideal “neutrality” Proust found so intoxicating is here exposed as a mask for “the status quo”, as if some evil power is orchestrating displays of still lifes or marble statues for their own sinister, repressive purposes. Procter’s “politics” are all-pervasive, drawing the museum into the “turbulence” of contemporary life. In this scenario, it is the mission of museum authorities to take a stand against official power on behalf of the “dispossessed” – to sabotage and destroy the institution from within. You may detect echoes of Lisa Havilah’s comments about “breaking the museum.”
The surprising part of this diatribe is the complaint that “cuts in funding for art education” might derail such a crusade. The expectation is that efforts by an art educator or a curator to subvert, sabotage or destroy an institution should be government funded. In other words, the oppressive power should be complicit in its own downfall.
If this sounds ridiculous, once again, we need look no further than the Powerhouse “revitalisation”, which is completely destroying the fabric of the institution, aided and abetted by generous government funding, firstly from the Coalition and now from the Minns Labor government, which chose to betray an election promise and continue the process of “breaking the museum.”
It's telling that Procter’s greatest fear is the triumph of “nostalgia”, as if the entire history of art – if not history in general – had to be remade to align with our current fads and beliefs. These are the kind of sentiments expressed most eloquently during the French Revolution and Stalin’s reign of terror. It’s chilling to hear such statements made in relation to a museum, especially in opposition to mere “neutrality.”
It's worth continuing this author’s discussion of decolonisation and its implications:
“Fundamentally a museum cannot be decolonised without being completely reinvented,” she adds. “Besides, decolonisation is a process rather than an end point, and one that has to be led by the people whose communities were subjugated; it cannot be imposed top-down by a museum’s leadership team, since that leadership is part of the institutional structure. It’s something that I believe has to originate on the outside, but with collaboration and openness from the institution. That is the first stage here: for museums to unlock themselves, relinquish some of their control, open out their narratives. They can start by unpicking the centuries of dishonesty about their acquisitions, and by accepting that they need to take part in anti-colonial work, to go through these processes of confrontation, challenge and acceptance. It’s not enough to just be not-explicitly-racist; you have to actually be anti-racist.” [13]
To be truly decolonised, a museum has to be “completely reinvented” – which is precisely what is happening with the Powerhouse, and to a lesser extent with other museums, such as the Art Gallery of NSW and the National Gallery of Australia.
It may seem like a hair-splitting distinction between being not racist and anti-racist, but it’s one with monumental implications. No-one could argue with any credibility that Australia’s museums are “racist”, but for Procter and likeminded ideologues, this is not sufficient. What is required are explicit affirmations of guilt and repentance.
“Anti-racism” is both a movement and a kind of cottage industry today, with books such as Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility[14] and Ibram X Kendi’s How to be an Antiracist becoming best-sellers.
I haven’t read Kendi’s book, but I did read DiAngelo, and thought it was a farrago of pseudo-scholarship. The book should be subtitled: “Damned if you do, damned if you don’t,” because the central proposition is that if you are white, you are, ipso facto, a racist. Conversely, if you are black you are structurally excluded from being a racist.
Moreover, as the British journalist, Hadley Freeman, puts it: “denying you’re racist proves you’re racist, according to DiAngelo… Unfortunately, admitting you’re racist also proves you’re a racist. But at least if you fork out $20,000 for an anti-racism course, you show you’re ‘doing the work,’ as DiAngelo put it, like Catholics buying indulgences from the Church.”[15]
Freeman left the Guardian after refusing to take part in “mandatory unconscious bias and anti-racism workshops” held by DiAngelo in the paper’s London office. She refers to DiAngelo and Kendi as “grifters”, and the evidence stacks up. The former, who is now answering plagiarism accusations over her PhD thesis of 2015, charges up to US$20,000 for her corporate seminars, while Kendi allowed a Centre for Anti-racist research at Boston University to go bankrupt, despite donations of US$55 million.
These are the shining heroes of the Antiracist movement, whose doctrines are being recommended to the museums of the world. What’s most puzzling is how such an overtly moralistic set of doctrines can be compatible with such pecuniary opportunism. It’s as if one’s Antiracist credentials act as a shield against all suggestions of wrongdoing – which is exactly what we see in the way the NGA has responded to allegations that the APY Artists Collective - which it has heavily supported - might be involved in any form of illegal or fraudulent activity. If there are Aboriginal people involved, apparently they can do no wrong, even if their most vehement accusers are other Aboriginal communities. It may be the same racial logic that convinced the Greens Lydia Thorpe was a good choice for the Senate. Or allowed the Howard government in 1999 to see Geoff Clark as an acceptable Chairman of ATSIC.
It should be obvious that ethnicity is no guarantee of sanctity. Instead of damning all white people as “racist” it would make more sense to acknowledge that there’s always a sense of discomfort in encountering the “Other” for the first time – by which I mean people who don’t look like us, don’t speak our language, don’t dress like us, or hold the same religious, social or political beliefs. The museum is one of the very best places to overcome this anxiety, to learn to understand and appreciate different cultures. Indeed, its “particular character” as defined by the Australian expatriate academic, Nicholas Thomas, is as a “space that elicits and fosters empathy.”
“What the museum is good for,” he writes, “is its sustenance of civil society: it not only is part of the public sphere, but constitutes a space of participation in public life… The point is not just that in an empirical sense, museum visitors are highly varied, embracing a spectrum from the retired connoisseur of medieval coins to the child eager to see the mummies. It is that in principle the museum accommodates and sustains a heterogeneity of interests… various local residents, the inhabitants of a city, migrants, tourists, and others. Their differences need not be negotiated or debated; their coming together is a matter of co-presence and mutual awareness, not one of shared solidarity or shared consciousness.”[16]
This moderate, cosmopolitan view of the museum’s role seems far more appropriate than the radical proposals put forward by figures such as Alice Procter (in theory) or Lisa Havilah (in practice). It is axiomatic that a museum should be a place than brings people together, rather than a site that aims primarily to activate the viewer’s consciousness.
This is not to say that museums need be dull, conservative, anodyne spaces, but there is a vast difference between putting forward arguments or challenging conventional ideas, as opposed to preaching a particular doctrine. The museum should activate our critical faculties, not make us worshipful.
The British sociologist, Doug Stokes, warns that when “it becomes politically acceptable to impose your agenda in the name of social justice and a form of restorative activism,” decolonisation becomes an “explicitly political power play.” [17] Or as the American political commentator, Wesley Yang puts it, the so-called “woke” agenda might be seen as a form of “authoritarian Utopianism that masquerades as liberal humanism while usurping it from within.”[18]
An excellent example of this is Right of Reply, a militant statement posted on the Powerhouse’s website by Emily McDaniel, the “inaugural Powerhouse Director of First Nations.” It proved to be a short-lived appointment, long on rhetoric but short on facts. The writer took it for granted that the museum was simply a tool of colonial repression, not bothering to look into the many, many projects the Powerhouse had undertaken involving Indigenous Australians. It may be worth noting that McDaniel is the only Indigenous person mentioned in this lecture’s cast of contemporary moralisers – all the others are white.
A particular sticking point was the traditional method of collecting samples and conducting research, in this case into varieties of eucalypt.
“Accepting that not all knowledge is up for grabs is typically very challenging for non-Indigenous people,” she writes. “Being okay with not knowing is a First Nations methodology that Powerhouse is beginning to come to terms with.” [19]
In this view of the world, Indigenous people are the rightful possessors of sacred eucalyptus trees stolen and desecrated by white colonists in the search for western forms of “knowledge”. The decolonised approach is to be “okay with not knowing.” This mystical not-knowing could just as easily be called “ignorance” in its explicit rejection of science and research. But when we reject the authority of science, it leaves the field open to those privileged interpreters or guardians of folk wisdom to provide guidance. By virtue of her ethnic heritage, McDaniel assumed this position, dismissing the claims of scientists who may have spent decades studying these trees.
“Are certain kinds of knowledge encoded in racial memory?” writes anthropologist, Adam Kuper. “More plausibly, claims of insight based in identity may be understood as a power play.” [20] That phrase again.
Kuper warns against the idea that “only people with an ancestral relationship to a particular precolonial cult are entitled to say what it is all about.” He cites the example of Mexican shamans being brought into a museum to identify tribal artefacts, possibly for purposes of cultural restitution. [21] The only problem was that these shamans were not as skilled at identifying objects as the curators, who had spent their careers studying these things. They continually claimed cultural ownership of objects that originated with other tribes.
The idea that certain kinds of people are uniquely qualified to comment on objects simply by virtue of their identity, leads Kuper to a simple comparison. “There cannot be many curators in Europe who would support the invigilation of an exhibition of Islamic art by fundamentalist mullahs. Do any Oxford museums insist that only a clergyman may curate a display of medieval Christian art and artefacts?”[22]
Should institutions hasten to return artefacts to people who have no tangible proof of connection with them, beyond their ethnic heritage? Each object needs to be considered on a case-by-case basis, taking all the evidence into account as to whether a piece was obtained legally or illegally, and whether it would be adequately and safely housed upon its return. There is also the argument that returning museum objects to their countries of origin en masse, would impoverish our understanding and appreciation of other cultures, making our societies more insular and inward-looking.
••••
Finally, a word about another form of mystical cult that has been allowed to dominate the museum today – namely the cult of contemporary art. In this construction, artists are the equivalent of shamans, possessed of an innate understanding of objects and spaces that allows them to make installations and interventions in museum collections.
One of the greatest stimuli for this idea – perhaps unwittingly – has been a series of exhibitions organised by Belgian dealer, Axel Vervoordt, at the Palazzo Fortuny during successive Venice Biennales. By bringing together old and modern art, ethnographic artefacts and most anything else that caught his eye, Vervoordt revived the Cabinet of Curiosity for the contemporary era.
The immediate inheritor of this idea was David Walsh’s Museum of Old and New Art in Hobart, which, since its opening in 2010, has continued to exert an influence on Australia’s public galleries. One sees its impact in the jumbled Wunderkammer hangs Nick Mitzevich pursued at the Art Gallery of SA, and then the NGA, where they felt markedly less successful. The Old Master galleries of the AGNSW, have also found themselves festooned with artefacts, videos, photos and contemporary works, intended to “comment” on colonial-era pieces.
At the beginning, such hangs had both shock and novelty value, livening up displays that had grown familiar and a little stale. In time, they have become a convention, and the initial thrill has given way to a sense of confusion. This was most noticeable at the NGA, where visitors may have expected to find a coherent history of Australian art, and were presented with a lot of stuff the curators thought was very clever and creative.
Nowadays, it seems that every second museum is relying on an artist to do something with the collection, showing no confidence in the simple power of the object itself. A new bureaucratic umbrella organisation, Museums of History NSW – another Coalition Frankenstein monster, continued by the Labor government - is dedicated to finding ways to activate sites such as the State Archives, most probably by inviting an artist intervention. Sydney’s historic houses have already been occupied in this way, to little effect.
As usual, it has been the Powerhouse which has taken this contemporary art fetish to its extreme limits. Although more than 40 curatorial positions have been lost under Lisa Havilah, a pet project has been the appointment of Powerhouse Associates, reputedly at Senior Executive Service level on a pro rata basis. It is by no means clear what these “associates” do to earn their generous stipends.
If the artist, Agatha Gothe-Snape is taken as one example, a statement on the PHM website is not exactly enlightening:
This program of work integrates the history of the museum into future programs, as she believes this recurrent folding of time to be essential to the reimagining and renewal of the museum. Creating intergenerational links that demonstrate care and respect has been a central objective across her projects. Gothe-Snape proposes that by inviting artists into the museum and allowing them to work in both intuitive and structural ways, we can continue to reimagine what a museum of the 21st century might be.[23]
According to sources within the museum, what this boils down to, is existing curators being turned into glorified porters and retrievers for those “associates” who wish to do creative things with the collection. As the contemporary art angle has become more important, science and technology have faded from view. The museum’s most significant displays have been dismantled, while the institution reinvents itself as a dance venue, a place to accommodate ‘creative industries’, a home for cooking courses, and much else. In 2022-23 the bill for “artists fees” alone, came to $1.522 million – with virtually nothing to show for this investment.[24]
For a museum director who promised to be “radically transparent,” [25]Lisa Havilah has managed to keep a surprising amount of activity under wraps. The plans for the “revitalisation” have been shrouded in mystery for years, while the role of the expensive “associates” program is almost impossible to define. I could go on and on, pinpointing other mysterious activities that apparently have little to do with anything we might consider to be the historical mission of the museum. Havilah has said this is the perfect time to be “undoing our institutions”, in her efforts to reinvent the museum for the 21st century. So far, there is more destruction than creation in these experiments, conducted with the blessing and generous funding of the NSW government. The new emphasis on communities doesn’t seem to encompass that dedicated community of people who wish to prevent the demolition of the Ultimo building and the scattering of the collection.
The new Powerhouse is the same kind of grand projet as the Titanic, and we can only hope that it doesn’t serve as a model for further museum developments in Australia, such as eight museums of Indigenous life and culture, currently on the drawing board, at a cost of well over a billion dollars, and rising.
What we need, most urgently, in the museum of the 21st century, is a willingness to listen to the public rather than an authoritarian impulse to enforce a set of moralistic, ideological imperatives that transform a space of wonder into a boring, didactic ordeal. The museum of today has to haul itself out of the quicksand of identity politics and consider a greater range of exhibitions that meet the needs of a diverse population. It has to show respect for collections, and for the unique identity of objects – which should not be treated as fodder for an installation by some contemporary genius. Neither should the needs of science and research be placed into false competition with Indigenous forms of knowledge. There is room for everything and everyone in a well-run museum, the difficult part is to free ourselves from those power plays disguised as acts of liberal humanism and find leaders who can articulate a genuinely inclusive vision. In these “turbulent times” the museum should not embrace the revolution, but stand as a monument for those values that define the best aspects of our contested culture. Indeed, they are the safeguard of cultural continuity when ideologues seek to impose their own priorities on the citizenry. We don’t need a Utopian plan to correct aberrant thinking, we need programs that grow audiences rather than repell them. Before we plot to shape the future into a Brave New World, we require a clearer, more open-minded understanding of where and how we live today.
[1] https://icom.museum/en/news/icom-approves-a-new-museum-definition/
[2] https://nga.gov.au/about-us/gender-equity/#:~:text=The%20National%20Gallery's%20first%20Gender,to%20the%20National%20Gallery's%20vision.
[3] https://www.qagoma.qld.gov.au/about/reconciliation-action-plan/
[4] https://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/whats-on/programs/worldpride/queering-the-collection/
[5] Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Valéry Proust Museum’ in Prisms, MIT Press, Cambridge MASS., 1981 (orig. 1961)
[6] Ibid p.175
[7] Ibid p.177
[8] Ibid. p.179
[9] https://www.smh.com.au/culture/art-and-design/what-s-in-a-name-powerhouse-drops-the-m-word-from-its-title-20221118-p5bzd1.html
[10] All quotations taken from Lisa Havilah, ‘Unmaking the Institution’, a speech delivered at the Bob Hawke Prime Ministerial Centre at the University of South Australia, on 16 June 2021. Cf.
[11] Lisa Byrne, ‘Significant Works from the McClelland Collection, Langwarrin’, Deutscher and Hackett: Important Australian + International Fine Art, Melbourne 28 August 2024. p.16
[12] Alice Procter, The Whole Picture: The colonial story of the art in our musuems & why we need to talk about it, Cassell, London, 2020, p.16
[13] Ibid. p. 261
[14] Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why it’s so hard for white people to talk about racism, Beacon Press, Boston, 2018
[15] Hadley Freeman, ‘Robyn DiAngelo, the anti-racist doyenne caught in her own trap’, Sunday Times, London, 1 September 2024
[16] Nicholas Thomas, The Return of Curiosity: What museums are good for in the 21st Century, Reaktion Books, London, p. 56
[17] Doug Stokes, Against Decolonisation: Campus Culture Wars and the Decline of the West, Polity Press, Cambridge UK, p. 83
[18] In Ibid, p. 125
[19] https://powerhouse.com.au/stories/right-of-reply
[20] Adam Kuper, The Museum of Other People, Profile Books, London, 2023, p.348
[21] Ibid.
[22] Ibid
[23] https://powerhouse.com.au/stories/agatha-gothe-snape-artistic-associate
[24] The Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences Annual Report for 2022-23 lists
$1.522m paid as artist fees under operating expenses, up from $385,00 in
2021-22
[25] Lisa Havilah, op cit.