Museum Practice. Группа авторов

across the museum sector.

      Paul Basu and Nick Merriman presented case studies of shared guardianship in a UK context. Basu, Reader in Material Culture and Museum Studies at University College London, discussed an initiative on “reanimating cultural heritage” through a digital access initiative among five UK museums and archives and collaborating institutions in Sierra Leone. (See Chapter 15, “Reanimating Cultural Heritage: Digital Curatorship, Knowledge Networks, and Social Transformation in Sierra Leone,” by Paul Basu, in Museum Transformations.) The project speaks to broader agendas of access, inclusion, capacity-building, and knowledge sharing. Merriman outlined the Manchester Museum’s work on relational collecting. He described a collaboration with local communities on collecting trees as a means both to promote sustainability and to apply a different lens to the legacies of colonialism within the permanent collection, including botanical collections, live collections of animals, and trees in mythological and symbolic representation (see Merriman, this volume). Both Basu’s and Merriman’s examples illustrated the importance of producing a “social good” by enabling communities to reconnect with their culture and heritage. Jette Sandahl, who has worked in museums in New Zealand and Europe, argued that, so as to avoid becoming mausoleums, museums need to keep collecting, and that relational collecting is an ethical practice. She voiced a powerful reminder that we need to “keep remembering the violence sitting beneath the surface of museum collections” as well as the “loneliness of exile and life as a thing” when alienated from their communities.

      What else emerged from the robust discussions about the challenges and opportunities of shared guardianship? Questions arose about how an aspiration to shared guardianship could be implemented in practice. Some participants described challenges in identifying who can represent or speak for a community and in building trust within groups that museums have wronged in the past. Overall, there is a need for museums to develop more sophisticated ways of understanding cultural value, and to think more deeply about how and why museums collect and display objects. Manchester City Galleries conservator Amanda Wallace remarked that museums have become overly obsessed with the materiality of objects. Many contributors concurred that relational collecting could play a significant role in shared guardianship, with museums developing their collections in relation to important themes to their communities. Poole expressed the idea that if museums do not open up their collections toward shared guardianship, they risk becoming irrelevant in an era that values participation and agency. Davies suggested that the new museums ethics is, first and foremost, about deconstructing power issues, and that the area of collections is highly contested because collections represent both economic and cultural control. Others countered that, within the context of shared guardianship, there is the potential to think about collecting as an ethical good.

      Moving beyond canonicity

      The fourth workshop took a narrow lens to focus on ethics in one particular type of museum – the art museum. Marstine asserted that many of the ethical challenges endemic in art museums and galleries stem from the principles and assumptions of canonicity. She explained how judgments of quality, based on subjective and culturally relative factors including aesthetics, originality, and influence, determine a canon; a canon is thus an exclusionary sifting device that delineates boundaries between insiders and outsiders, the core and the margins. This discrimination leaks from the artistic to the social sphere: in perpetuating canonicity, art museums and galleries implicitly also perpetuate social inequalities that create barriers to participation. Marstine argued that canonicity encourages art museums to extend themselves financially to develop costly blockbuster exhibitions and to acquire high-priced works by canonical artists, and, as a result, many art museums make ethical compromises, from accepting funding from ethically tainted corporations to overlooking conflicts of interest. Despite the focus on art museums, the workshop raised issues relevant to other types of museums, particularly the ways in which canonicity translates to history, science, anthropology, and natural history museum settings. Participants acknowledged that canonicity in these other settings often operates through hierarchies attached to factors such as provenance, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, race, and class. Poole asserted that the canon reinforces the founding identity of the museum as a means of organizing and structuring the world: “it’s difficult to take institutions founded as such and transform them into reflective and responsive spaces.”

      Issues of canonicity illuminate a crisis of values that dissuades museums from tackling inequalities. John Jackson, from the Natural History Museum in London, was critical of the ways in which museums naturalize canonicity without explaining how, and by whom, it is constructed. Matt Smith, a Brighton-based artist and curator, discussed the burdens of canonicity from a queer perspective. He explained how narratives of canonicity exclude LGBT experiences and discussed examples from his own work that refute and unsettle this exclusivity. David Anderson argued that museums invest very little in meaningful social participation and staff assume that the institution itself has intrinsic, rather than instrumental, value. Rather, he said, “[i]t is the objects within them, rather than the organizations themselves, that have intrinsic value.” Basu added that the nineteenth-century notion of the art museum as a “civilizing institution” is alive and well. Merriman championed working with artists to develop imaginative and creative approaches to collections and exhibitions, but Sandahl and Nightingale voiced frustration that one-off artist-driven initiatives too often enable museums to ignore the potential of such projects to produce organizational change.

Professor Richard Sandell of the School of Museum Studies at the University of Leicester explored BP’s sponsorship of Tate and the powerful protest art of activist group Liberate Tate in critiquing this partnership (see Chong, this volume). When questions arose about the assumption that corporate funding is tainted while public money is always free from compromise, Megone cautioned that it is always challenging to analyze the ethical practices of any organization and its supply chains. Jackson asked whether the ethical practices of individual donors should be scrutinized before their contribution is accepted. Merriman admitted that the UK MA ethics committee does not consider cases concerned with museum sponsorship; almost all of its work involves collections issues. Jackson remarked that most museums make funding decisions based on risk assessment, not on ethics.

      Overall, there was no consensus that art museums are particularly weak in addressing ethical issues. Some discussants were concerned that the critique of canonicity was not more widespread and that most practitioners believed that art museums are valuable spaces of creativity, inquiry, and reflection. Sandell declared that quality and social justice are not mutually exclusive. Jocelyn Dodd shared the findings from a long-term RCMG project that evaluated the impact of art works on the perceptions, feelings, and attitudes of young people. Though unfamiliar with art museums, the sample respondents had the opportunity for sustained engagement with a particular painting: Raphael’s Madonna of the Pinks (National Gallery, London). The research showed that age, ability, and previous knowledge of art are not prerequisites for engaging with such canonical works; the experiences of the young people involved were enjoyable, thought-provoking, and in many cases enabled self-reflection and considerable skills to be developed (RCMG 2007). Do projects like this challenge canonicity or legitimize it through public funding? Merriman pointed out that some art museums have taken significant steps to deconstruct canonicity; he cited Kelvingrove in Glasgow, which challenges canonicity by treating artworks like all other museum objects. He also expressed some concern with the “missionary zeal” with which social responsibility was thrust upon museums and galleries, believing it was also important for people to have the choice to resist museums. Others countered that, for many people, resisting is not a choice because the power structures in place do not equally empower diverse publics to exercise their cultural rights.

      What would it mean to exercise ethical leadership in the art museum? IDEA CETL took the lead in asking how the museum sector might find common ground. Megone suggested that museums could look to universities, which grapple with many of the same ethical dilemmas of participation and access, but also acknowledge their moral agency as they challenge traditional hierarchies of disciplines and “ways of knowing.” Partnerships between art museums and museum studies departments could offer new ways