Thinking Museums Differently From Vancouver

Waiting for the sun on North Vancouver, having spent part of yesterday with Hilde Hein’s tour do force of a book: Public Art: Thinking Museums Differently http://www.altamirapress.com. I need a place without distractions to read Hein as she works at the intersections of disciplines – philosophy, art history, history – with a long view of museums where I can easily get lost without concentration.

The first half of the book carefully builds the argument for no less than a new paradigm for museums, parsing the distinctions between public art, private art, nonprivate art, and art in public places. Precise language carries the argument along with the insistent joy of careful thinking.

I am probably the only person on the planet to do so, but I think Hildi Hein is also a laugh riot for her nuanced word choice:
· Museums…cannot shift gears without massive lubrication.
· …public art thrives in the world of bird droppings and vandalism.

I’ll review this book in full later in the year.

Museums Matter: Confirmed

Attending Museums Matters: A Tribute to Stephen Weil last week, brilliantly organized by Joy Davis at the Cultural Resource Management Program at the University of Victoria, reprised my experienced of meeting Steve and other prominent published leaders when I went to work at the Smithsonian in 1986. I thrilled in the imperative to read, to ask questions of the source, and relished the time to think.

The assembled forty, rising stars and seasoned pros, faculty and student, museum directors and independent consultant included Australians, Brits, Canadians, Americans, and one delegate each from El Salvador, Barbados, and Germany. Papers were delivered and concepts carefully considered, for me food for thought for years ahead.

An introductory highlight:

From Peter Linett, Partner, Slover Linett Strategies, Inc, Chicago, and Books Editor, Curator: The Museum Journal.

Peter coined the term Weilean, provided a careful read of the collected works and pointed to two major themes in Weil’s work: 1) the extension of his thinking from law to art to art museums to the infinitely wider world of museums and nonprofits in general and 2) how Weil moves through a process of intellectual liberalization, beginning as more or less a private, museum professional with a traditional stance through a process of radicalization eventually to become, while always reasoned, the most public person in the museum community, constantly in dialogue, prodding us to question closely held assumptions and to move beyond what even he and we considered possible.

In Weil’s work, and also in Elaine Heumann Gurian’s www.egurian.com (a central Museums Matter’s participant) one can read the evolution of their thinking. This is a great relief as it allows me to release ideas, calcified through the unexamined passage of time. Ah, the discrete pleasure of changing one’s mind. Maybe all adult learning isn’t a blow to the ego!

A closing reflection:

Kay Larson, Managing Editor, Curator: The Museum Journal curatorjournal@earthlink.net brought the forum to a close by asking us to reflect briefly in writing, abstract our reflection, and then create a ring poem from a phrase from each of our abstractions. My reflection follows:

Gratitude for time in a beautiful place to think with colleagues, after the imperative to read. Generates new and better questions. Steve changed his mind and so does Elaine which allows me to let go of so much of that rigid bull I’ve held about museum collections because of being queen of the registrars.

I apologize to those who have written so brilliantly and whose papers we haven’t taken up in discourse. I take responsibility for inadequate facilitation. Good learning for me. Though I think particularly Bob Jane’s idea of corporatism and Hildi Hein’s press for theory have moved at least my thinking along and will do for some time.

Watch this blog in the weeks ahead for additional posts on Museums Matter and other topics of interest to the museum field. Come back, too, with a shout out or just a shout! Mary Case marycase@qm2.org