9 comments

  1. I replied to your original Twitter thread, Ed, but I thought I would expand on that thought here. I’ve been thinking about how the “growth at all costs” mentality from the business world has seeped into non-profit thinking. In museums, this thinking has manifested itself in a few obvious ways: adding new wings to buildings that are already just fine, adding more temporary exhibitions to calendars that are already crowded, and to acquiring more blue-chip works by artists that have little to do with the communities in which those museums reside. I feel that this “we’ve got to do more!” mentality is at least a root cause (if not necessarily _the_ root cause) of so much of the burnout and malaise that others identified in your thread.

    The constant scope creep of “we’ve got to do more!” increases the pressure on staff in obvious ways (exhibitions personnel, curators, registrars, etc. are now redlining the system at all times), but in less obvious ones, too. When there’s little organic push from your community to do these things, the push has to be generated artificially. And that puts enormous pressure on museum marketing and social media efforts (not to mention special events departments, who increasingly bear much of the burden of making a museum “look cool” to The Young People Out There).

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  2. Very interesting post, thank you very much. I am young professional working in the museum industry and I had issues I couldn’t put words on. You just named them. As you say: ‘Methods and models exist in the world that could be inspirations for new ways of being a museum, but they’ll require vision and systems thinking.’ It is an exciting challenge. I believe museums could be inspired by the start-up culture to allow the employees to be more free in their day-to-day activity. Meaning: they get a feel of responsibility over what they are in charge of instead of being sucked-up in the structure of the institution. Just an idea.

    Thank you for your post!

    Maxime

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  5. A surfeit of virtues. There are so many demands for what an exhibit ought to be or do, or how it should be made, that they can paralyze us. Many of these demands seem virtuous in isolation, but some are in conflict with others, and it is impossible to do all of them at once and end up with an exhibit worth visiting. But we have no overarching principle for prioritizing among them, and thus we become so dedicated to being virtuous that we forget how to be good.

    Jay Rounds

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  6. “A surfeit of virtues”? I’m totally stealing that for the title of my first novel, Jay!

    But seriously, I’ve lived through the paralysis you describe, and that idea of trying to be all things to all people really resonates.

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  7. Thanks, Ed! I’ll buy your novel, just on the basis of the intriguing title.
    I’m on board with Koven’s comment about “constant scope creep” and your gloss of that as endlessly adding but never subtracting. That’s the Type One of the “surfeit of virtues.” The question here is pretty straightforward, even if it’s not so obvious how to answer it: How many good ideas does it take to make a bad idea?

    Faced with a new demand that seems inherently virtuous, and operating in an environment where “inclusion” seems a master virtue, The Museum Practitioner Who Can’t Say No adds one more item to his checklist of requirements for a Virtuous Exhibition. Why can’t we say no? Perhaps we all need to go back and read Durkheim’s book The Division of Labor in Society. He wrote that small-scale, traditional agricultural or hunter/gatherer societies are held together by “mechanical solidarity,” in which people are all doing pretty much the same thing. More complex modern societies are instead held together by “organic solidarity,” in which people are interdependent because everyone is doing different things that have to be coordinated to make the whole thing work. The analogy is to the biological body, in which each organ has a distinct function, but they all contribute to keeping the body alive. Not every exhibit, or every museum, has to do everything that is declared virtuous. The burden is distributed across all the institutions of society. What we seem to have lost is faith that museums are a good idea in themselves, with value to society because of their core technology. When you’re confident that what you do really contributes to the whole, you feel okay about not trying to do what someone else is covering. So to be able to say “no” to good ideas, we need to recapture confidence in the core idea of the museum, and–the really hard part these days–faith that our society is still able to function and that others are doing their part. Museums are a good thing and worthy of their place at the public trough; but they are not Prince Hamlet, nor were meant to be.

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