It is rainy and cloudy in the northern Spanish city of Bilbao where I am for a conference on artists, museums, and interpretation held at the Guggenheim. Tomorrow I’m speaking on the Walker’s Civic Engagement Initiative, which I hope will be a good follow-up to today’s discussion about the gallery as a civic space, presented by museum historian and sociologist Tony Bennett. He was the first speaker of the day, bright and early (well not bright, but gray with drizzle) and it was a power punch to start the day.
Among many things, he talked about how the civic function of museums shifted in the late 19th century from centering on the civic improvement of all social classes (this is still a classist notion–the goal was apparently to make better citizens out of the rowdy lower classses by introducing them to rational thinking through science and other objects) to social sites for the new European middle class. (This is discussed at length in his book The Birth of the Museum.) He used this historical analysis to talk about how the civic function of museums today have shifted to include “technologies of tolerance,” or all of our aims to draw in racially and culturally diverse audiences.
His ultimate argument (and I’m skipping over a great number of points here) is that while musuems have done a lot of work to expand audiences to include racial diversity, this diversity mainly comes out of the middle, upper, and professional classes. He presented research where white British citizens and British citizens of Indian, Pakistani and Afro-Carribbean ethnicity were interviewed about their professions and their likelihood to visit museums. The findings showed that people mostly likely to visit museums worked in “professional” jobs, or, jobs that depend on knowledge rather than labor, or people from weathly families. Class was much more of a dividing line than race.
Hmmm. Something we sorta already know, right?
He left us with a big question: “What civic value can be derived from museums that serve only half of the population?” I’ll make no attempt to answer this tomorrow, but I´m hoping that our discussion about civic engagement and inclusion in the museum might creep us closer to ideas on how answer it.
Stay tuned…
PS: Sorry there aren’t many pictures or links to entertain readers in this post. There are a great many things I can’t figure out with this Spanish-language keyboard; cutting and pasting and saving images to the desktop are some of these things! Thanks for your text-only patience.