Museums in Modern Times

Some anguish in the New England art world has been prompted by a shift in mission for the Berkshire Museum in Pittsfield. I have not personally visited the museum, near the New York border. It was created in 1903 as the Museum of Natural History and Art by the head of the Crane Paper Company. In 2008 the museum opened a new 3000 square-foot exhibition space, the Feigenbaum Hall of Innovation, devoted to local innovators like Hermann Melville and Cyrus Field.

The institution houses some 40,000 objects in its permanent collection, including artworks and jewelry. It is putting 40 works up for sale, including a couple well-known Norman Rockwells. Others include Calder sculptures, Hudson River School painters like Albert Bierstadt, juicy Bouguereaus, curious Calders, Federic Church landscapes and Durrie's winter scenes popularized in print form by Currier and Ives. The sale is part of a $60 million re-visioning of the museum and a shift in focus to science and natural history.

The stated goal is re-invention as more of a "learning and discovery center." The museum points to other institutions in Albany and the region with significant historical collections of American painters. The plan is drawing extensive criticism from the art museum community, as might be expected. All museums face significant pressures and crises of relevance in the digital age.

I can't help feeling that the criticism is less about the museum itself, than the fading cultural necessity of museums of great paintings. Patrons tend to invest emotionally in the works with which they are familiar. The fine points of experience in the presence of a substantial work are lost on a digital screen or a book illustration plate, and they often fail to rise above just "a nice picture." For most of America, that difference matters very little. The romantic sense of being "in the presence of genius" has lost its imperative for them.

Museums do face a problem with static life. The largest museums display only 5% of their collection at any time, mostly rotated among the best known works. Smaller museums, such as the Berkshire, tend to display more of their works. Rotation of popular and critically recognized pieces becomes more difficult. It becomes a challenge to engender a sense of the museum as something more than a static archive. Rearranging galleries and fine art lectures are limited answers.

Art, particularly visual art, has become a much different cultural product over the century past. Much of the 20th Century was characterized by sorting out the aesthetics of hand work in the age of reproduction of increasing fidelity. A century ago there was no direct reproduction, no color photography, no digital media. Art products were tangible and dimensional. They could only be understood well through direct contemplation in their physical presence. Museums were the answer.

This isn't a benediction for museums, and the Berkshire isn't the only museum facing this kind of crisis. Predictably, the organizations of museum professionals attacked the sale. They are bracing against the tide. Smaller museums will define broader missions for themselves. Today, it's about much more than pictures and sculptures.

Arthur Dirks July 28, 2017