What’s wrong with museums?

Today, there is a museum for everything from aviation to Walt Disney; Los Angeles alone has over 800 museums. Although museums lead with the mission of education and public service, the organizational structure of many still makes these institutions inaccessible to a wide variety of audiences. 

Specifically, for encyclopedic art museums, there are a few common characteristics no matter where you are in the world: didactics that provide a guideline to visitors’ experiences of viewing, glass cases that simultaneously protect the art and construct a barrier between the object and visitors and a sense of detachment that hangs in the air. 

As outlined in Eilean Hooper-Greenhill’s 1992 book “Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge,” the origins of the present-day encyclopedic art museum can be traced back to Florence, Italy, with the Medici family and their extensive private collection held in the Medici palace. 

By displaying intricate wooden cassoni, velvet tapestries and large-scale paintings that were bought with the money made from their successes in banking, the Medici family marked the beginning of the association between wealth and culture. Their high-class role in Florentine society from the 15th to 18th century only became affirmed through their acquisitions of global objects that hinted at their sense of worldliness. 

The idea of a private collection put forth by the Medici family may have evolved through time, but the intersections between prestige and culture persisted. 

16th-century Wunderkammer, German for ‘room of wonder,’ or more typically referred to as cabinets of curiosities, were filled with rare and strange oddities, emphasizing the collectors’ knowledge of the wonders of the world to an exclusive group of their choosing. The 18th century saw the emergence of art institutions like the British Museum and the Louvre that finally made private collections available to the public. 

In his 1986 book “Inside the White Cube,” Brian O’Doherty describes the modern gallery space as built upon laws similar to a medieval church; the interior of the gallery becomes sanctified in its exclusion of the world outside. Lack of windows and bare white walls create a static environment, which is supposed to let the art speak for itself, but rather makes visitors feel as if they are walking into a crypt; here, the art’s dynamism and vitality die. 

Although museums and galleries are vastly different settings for the exhibition of art — the former often operate as non-profits geared towards public education whereas the latter are businesses first and foremost — museums have the same potential to create possibly unwelcoming atmospheres.  

Glass cases lock away looted objects from their communities and countries of origin. High admission prices remove the degree of ‘public access’ that many museums pride themselves upon. Wall texts that rely upon art history jargon intellectualize works without letting viewers come to their own opinions, ones based on lived experience instead of academic expertise. By rejecting this approach, art can be reduced to its fundamental purpose: making one feel something. 

But, wall texts can also be used as an opportunity to construct pathways of connection between the artist and the viewer. Emphasis on the artist’s mission and the context that they created their work in can possibly reveal more to an audience than precise meaning of mimesis. 

Collections themselves are also a way that museums can either become spaces of inclusion or exclusion. 

Since the 1970 United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) convention on the illegal import of cultural artifacts and subsequent legislation implemented in 1983, it has been against the law to acquire cultural property without a clear transfer of ownership after the year of 1970. 

Before this convention, cultural objects occupied a grey space: there was no punishment enacted for their illegal acquisition, but it was widely acknowledged as immoral. Now, all objects brought into public or private collections after 1970 are subject to provenance investigations to determine a clear record of ownership. However, this also means that all objects obtained — legally or illegally — before 1970, are legal property of respective museums, even if the community that was stolen from says otherwise. 

Due to this law, the British Museum’s history of looting in its collection of Benin busts, Greek marbles and the Rosetta Stone is legal, making the institution unlikely to return these artifacts despite massive claims for repatriation. 

To some, the pilfering of cultural artifacts is seen as a necessary sacrifice to educate museum visitors on global histories without having to travel around the world. But, this perspective undermines the damage that occurs when people are not allowed to learn their own stories, traditions and craft practices; vital information becomes lost to time when it is not passed down generationally. 

In the modern museum, curators share the responsibility to spread this cultural knowledge to visitors, filling the integral role as ‘explainer.’ With their years spent in school towards a doctoral degree and selection of art historical specializations, the curator is often seen as the expert within the space. Although the field of curation has the potential to ease the dissemination of information, it can also create an intellectual barrier between visitors and the works themselves. 

Curators can easily be cast as the creators of knowledge, positioning visitors as the receivers of knowledge.

The role of curators is an important one, nonetheless, but it can become problematic when museum attendees are made to feel as if only their opinions matter. Paulo Freire’s comments on the authoritative nature of the teacher-student relationship in his 1968 book “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” can be transposed to museums. Education that transforms audiences into empty vessels for curators to dispense information into leads to the erosion of the museum’s mission as a space for dialogue and discovery of knowledge. 

In many ways, the problem with museums today is that the views and opinions of visitors are not taken seriously and properly weighed by museum executives. The public has little say over what enters the permanent collection or which narratives should be highlighted in special exhibitions. Even though museums contend that they want to engage the public, the structure of most museums do not facilitate this relationship.

But what alternate models can act as inspiration for museums to live up to their missions of education, equity and excellence as espoused by the American Association of Museums in their 1992 report? 

Can an ethnographic approach like that of UCLA’s Fowler Museum be implemented in other museums to explore the diverse cultures of people from around the world? With a specific curatorial focus to collect and exhibit works outside of Europe, with a few exceptions, the Fowler museum provides a showcase for artistic prowess in Africa, the Americas and Asia throughout time. The exhibition of objects like urban Senegalese restaurant doors, Japanese bamboo baskets and Peruvian ceramic stirrup spout bottles in the same space charts the evolution of craft, religious and social practices from the ancient period to the 20th and 21st centuries. 

Yoruba sacred arts, Guatemalan masks and contemporary Sikh art are just a few examples of past exhibitions at the institution, all of which exposed UCLA students to the value and utility of art around the world. 

Furthermore, the Fowler’s 2024 voluntary return of seven royal objects taken from the Asante Kingdom in the Republic of Ghana in 1874 provides an example of repatriation and genuine commitment to honoring global histories that other museums could follow suit.

Or can museums take cues from collections like Derek Fordjour’s “Nightsong” at the David Kordansky gallery, where the curator takes a backseat role in crafting the visitor experience and instead allows the artist to lead. In a world imagined and implemented by Fordjour himself in collaboration with architect Kulapat Yantrasast’s design studio WHY, a third-party curatorial party was obsolete as the artist became an authority on the experience “Nightsong” should communicate to patrons. 

As visitors walked through the dimly lit gallery, they were transported from Motown studios to the lush forest as Fordjour engaged with Black musical traditions through live performance, sculpture and painting. 

By engaging visual, auditory and olfactory senses, “Nightsong” allowed visitors to lead with their hearts and bodies while gazing at his collection; an impact that was not driven by the desires of the curator but the artist himself. 

Or can the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles’s first artist-founded museum, and their collaborative “Monuments” exhibit with the Brick, become an example of how museums can engage with the pertinent issues of the present? Curators from MOCA and the Brick along with the artist Kara Walker, whose work heavily engages with the legacies of slavery within the Black community, came together to exhibit decommissioned public monuments alongside contemporary pieces that engage with the legacies of post-Civil War America, prompting visitors to consider the legacies of the Civil War in our present. 

The curatorial decisions to juxtapose these works — historical artifacts of America’s past and art reacting to these traumas today —  in “Monuments” continues the conversation on monuments’ powerful role that followed the 2017 Charlottesville Unite the Right rally and 2020 Black Lives Matter movement. 

The wide-spread acclaim of each of these innovative exhibits remind administrators that no matter which inspirations museums decide to take, the traditional model must be changed to engage and bring in a bigger audience. Only by doing so will museums fully live up to their mission to be in service to the public.