The 'exclusivity' of museums and the hegemony of curators. The Italian case

Written on 17 July 2015.

The Art and History Museum of Geneva once showed some 18th century chairs of the local "bonne femme" style which prevailed in Geneva and the Franche-Comté. Some time later the curators apparently considered these chairs too humble and replaced them by some elegant Parisian chairs of the same period. The local "bonne femme" furniture which is much more interesting than the ubiquitous Parisian models disappeared in storage.

Many museums are black holes which have swallowed incredible quantities of works of art, most of which disappear forever in storage, never to be seen by the public. Miles and miles of shelves full of often poorly identified artefacts constitute the invisible part of the iceberg, only the top of which is considered  "the museum".  Young and inexperienced art historians are often baffled and overwhelmed by the variety of treasures they find hidden in basements and storage sheds, and may even need the advice of an experienced private collector to identify objects.  For the trade, selling to a museum may mean saying goodbye to an object probably never to surface again.

This is only one of the many problems afflicting museums. Museums were conceived and are still managed for the precious few cognoscenti, not for the masses of tourists following the lure of famous brand names. Francesco Antinucci explores the shortcomings of museums today.

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italiano

The 'exclusivity' of museums and the hegemony of curators. The Italian case 

by Francesco Antinucci

   The situation of the museums in Italy is very different from that in the rest of Europe, and this is due to historical reasons of various nature (many of which are mirrored by the improper expression “the country with the richest cultural heritage in the world”).

   In the other countries the works of art are far fewer and gathered in a dozen or so of historic museums – not to mention the enormous difference existing between the number and richness of the archaeological sites in Italy compared to the rest of Europe.

• • • • People choose the museums according to their name, not to their content
         
      • The specific value of cultural assets lies in their being bearers of culture and vehicles for the building of the cultural identity
         
      • The exhibition structure of a museum is designed to allow the critical study of the works of art, not the understanding of their communicative message

   Though to the majority of people the state of affairs of Italian museums (using the term in a broad sense, to include monuments, painting and sculpture galleries, archaeological sites, and so on) appears to be very prosperous, showing in the last fifteeen years an average increase in the number of visitors of 3.5% per year, when we take a closer look at it, we see that this success is only superficial, hiding a situation that is rather critical.

   The telltale sign of this state of affairs is the distribution of the rising tide of visitors. Some figures will help us to clarify the point. Of the approximately 40 million people who in 2013 visited the 423 Italian state museums, a half crowded into only 11 of the museums.

   This means that 50% of visitors were absorbed by 5% of the museums, while 412 museums had to share the other half of the public. And this is not all. Three quarters of all visitors – approximately 30 million people – were distributed among only 36 museums (that is, 8% of the total).

   Finally, 90% of all the visitors were distributed among 99 museums, 23% of the total. This means that less than a quarter of the Italian state museums absorbed almost all the visitors, while 324 museums (423 – 99) had virtually no public.

   Things look even more drastic if we consider all the Italian museums, and not only the state ones. Thus, the overall picture is of 4588 museums (more than ten times the number of the state ones) with 104 million visitors.

   Here, 43.3% of the visitors were absorbed by the first 36 museums, which amounts to less than 1% of the total (to be exact, they are 0.8%). A 69% of the public visited 3.6% of the museums and 92% – once again, almost all of the public – visited 22% of the museums, which leaves 3579 museums virtually without visitors.

   The dimension of this concentration is so vast that it appears immediately clear it cannot have any 'objective' cause. In other words, it cannot lie in the nature, the quality or the quantity of the artefacts of the different museums. To use the language of economics, it is a scenario of oligopoly: a few manufacturers/suppliers seize the majority of the demand and leave the several other manufacturers/suppliers only marginal shares of it.

   There are many reasons why a market gives rise to an oligopolistic condition, one of which is particularly interesting for our discussion. I am referring to the phenomenon of 'branding', when the success of an item is determined not so much by its material constitution, but by its 'name'.

   The markets characterised by 'designer' articles, like those of sport brands, from t-shirts to shoes and equipment (skis, bikes, etc.) are typical examples: the product differences existing between articles belonging to the same category are small (if not minimal) and definitely not proportional to the difference in their demands and resulting success, which, on the contrary, is huge.

   In short, all this occurs because people choose the name, not the object (and this explains why the building of the name, the brand, absorbs nearly all the efforts of the companies, if compared to the productive aspect of the articles to be branded).

   So, what I am suggesting here is that we can identify the phenomenon of branding behind the concentration in the distribution of visitors among Italian museums: people choose the museums according, not to their content, (or the 'product' they offer) but to their 'name'. The Uffizi, the Colosseum, or Pompeii are brand-names that act as powerful attractors, seizing for themselves the vast majority of 'consumers'/ visitors.

   The fact that the element of attraction is their name and not their content is well illustrated by some 'minimal pairs', that is to say, pairs of museums that differ minimally in their offer but greatly in their demand.

   For example, Pompeii and Herculaneum differ minimally for a common visitor wanting to see a Roman city of the first century destroyed and frozen in time by a volcanic eruption. Nonetheless, the visitor aims at the name, and Pompeii is a well known trademark, while Herculaneum is not.

   As a result, Pompeii has about ten times the visitors of Herculaneum, exactly as an Adidas or Nike shoe has dozens of times more 'wearers' than a shoe of an unknown brand, no matter if they have the same technical quality.

   In the field of cultural heritage, though, this branding effect has very serious implications unknown to the other sectors, since cultural assets are not commodities to sell or to give away as a gift. Well, they are not commodities at all.

   The specific value of cultural assets lies in their being bearers of culture and, as such, fundamental vehicles for the building of the cultural identity of individuals, nations and humanity as a whole. This is why we tend to be very happy when museums become popular: it is not because it means that we are selling many tickets – as is the case with football stadiums – but because we assume that the visit will lead to an improvement in the value of the human person who is experiencing it. And this is exactly the reason why we take school classes to museums and not to stadiums.

   However, this reasoning is based on the assumption that the visit to the museum will generate that phenomenon of 'cultural transmission' which is at the core of this process of improvement. But the fact that the huge increase in visitors is driven by the name of the museum, by its brand, seriously puts into question this assumption, because it shows that these visits are not based on the museum content. And they are not based on the content because the visitor is not in a condition to understand or appreciate it.

   The average visitor, in fact, cannot evaluate the content of a museum going beyond very general concepts (like 'antique', 'Renaissance', 'Roman', etc.) because he or she does not have the conceptual tools necessary to gain access to the cultural message.

   The result we sadly witness is the one invariably reported by the 'museum visitors’ studies' that try to analyse the effects of the visit in terms of cultural transmission: whatever the measure small, very small, nearly of no importance. Often it is hard to find something that persists in the memory of the visitors even just after the experience (aside from curiosities).

   Cultural objects speak to those who are able to understand their language, that is, to those who master their language and possess the knowledge understanding their messages presupposes. But these two conditions are very difficult to be found in the vast panorama of those who nowadays visit museums.

   This code and this knowledge are no longer part of that background, that once, we could take for granted in the visitors. However, while visitors have changed – and especially the composition of the vast majority of them has changed – the museums have not. As a result, now there is now a huge gap between what the museum exhibition requires for the cultural communication to occur, and the actual skills possessed by those who represent the target of this communication.

   If the museum has to carry out its tasks as a public cultural institution, it must fill this gap. Unfortunately, this is not a very easy task. The building of interpretative tools really capable of working is an endeavor far from being obvious. We just need to watch the attempts of some  museums in this direction to understand how difficult this is.

   In these cases, in fact, the tendency is often that of filling the museums with texts: wall panels, enormous captions and leaflets in every room. In short, a veritable verbal flood. After all, this is the most candid and simplest idea: providing the visitor with the knowledge and information needed to understand the exhibit in an explicit way, verbally, like in textbooks.

   Yes, but just as we know well from school, it is very difficult to assimilate concepts offered in this way. At school, in fact, to achieve this goal we have to study, and studying is a strenuous activity which requires a high degree of attention and concentration, no distractions, and above all a strong motivation (internal or external) to do it. None of these conditions occurs in a museum, while standing in front of a work of art. We lack both the cognitive and the motivational premises.

   This road precluded, which incidentally is the only one accessible to the qualification and training of the 'average' museum curator, it is easy to understand that the task is much more difficult. We must find other means, less verbal and more visual, avoid all those explicit formulations that require to be 'studied', and find some ways to arouse and foster attention and motivation.

   It is difficult, yes, but not impossible: we have to put together different kinds of expertise, such as those of communication experts, storytellers, directors, multimedia graphic designers, to name a few – all figures that abound in the real world – and work closely with them. But this does not happen. Why?

   The justification most frequently advanced is always the same. It would be nice, but how can we do it? There is no money. Well, it must be said very clearly that this is not true.

   In general, yes, there is little money, but when money is found and beyond that needed for indispensable measures like restoration and maintenance, it is systematically used for new furniture, the remaking of showcases, expensive (and very often unnecessary) new lighting systems, often signed by some well-known architect, and so on.

   In short, it is invariably used to embellish the museum and never to enhance  cultural transmission. The truth is that as long as it comes to spending for things that do not affect the traditional structure and way of operating of the museum, even if only for accessories, the money is always raised. On the contrary, if the proposal involves some change in these fundamental aspects, then there is no money. At best, it is only possible to change the labels, and with big efforts.

   We must be aware that all this is not related to money at all. It is only an excuse behind which one can entrench, glimpsing a potential danger. And this danger is precisely that change in the structure and operations of the museum that a communicative approach would require. Museum curators are fundamentally hostile to any change of this nature, and this is the essential reason why nothing ever happens, regardless all the evident problems and their equally evident solutions.

   The point is that they consciously or unconsciously want to firmly preserve the actual function of the museum exhibition, a function that is not designed to ease or even allow the cultural transmission: a function that is not that of restoring the communication circuit between the works of art and the public who visit them.

   Since their creation in the second half of the eighteenth century, in fact, museums have maintained an organisation reserved entirely for the insiders (or to those who, more or less amateurishly, can identify with them). The exhibition structure of a museum is designed to allow the critical study of the works of art, not the understanding of their communicative message. After all, curators themselves do admit it openly when they get a sense of the situation.

   “The paintings had specific relations to the church or the palace for which they were created, and had the task of transmitting those specific messages that had been selected before their creation. In the museum, they were put close to and compared with other paintings, and prompted to express mainly the historical-artistic paths identified by those who studied them, art historians, connoisseurs, museum directors; and from that moment on, in their arrangement they have mirrored the state of affairs of the specialized studies.” (A. Mottola Molfino, Il libro dei musei, Torino, Allemandi 1992, p. 45)

   The current organisation of the museum asks the visitor to become a small art historian or a critic, that is to say, to be an expert in history and art criticism, and, of course, it assumes that the visitor is able to decode and understand by him or herself the exhibits, without any help.

   On the contrary, if we want a museum that fosters and facilitates the communicative functions of the single work of art, we must radically change this organisation, starting from the number of the exhibits. In fact, the overcrowding typical of museums is very useful to the comparison of many different works of art – a comparison which is the core of every critical or evolutionary discourse – but it is very bad for the understanding of the message conveyed by the single exhibit.

   In fact, it generates confusion, loss of attention, difficulty of identification, and so on. Thus, it should be drastically reduced. Then, we must change the arrangement: the combinations of works of art should help people to understand their message rather than to allow a stylistic comparison between them; they should focus on the 'content' and not on the 'form'. Finally, the exhibits – every single exhibit we want to be understood – should be accompanied by 'dramatic' (and not 'didactic') reconstructive and explanatory devices.

   In this way we would have an extremely different kind of museum, both conceptually and physically. Most of all, in this way we would ask those who preside over museums to stop using them as exclusive mirrors of their expertise, that is, mirrors of the historical-critical study of the exhibits: in other words, to stop using them as a means of confrontation within the clique of the insiders.

   But this, as it is easy to see, is like asking them to commit career suicide: through the museum exhibition a curator can vie with his or her peers on the ground of critical studies. How could he or she lower him or herself to a confrontation based on the very different (and probably completely devoid of interest for him or her) ground of the successful communication with the general public?

   Bear in mind that this contradiction is the real core of the problem. The matter isn’t not knowing what to do, or not having the money to do something; everybody knows that there are people able to do what is needed and that there would be the money to do it (it would be enough to spend a little less in furniture). The point is that this kind of change will never occur as long as the museums are under the exclusive jurisdiction of the current figures of curators.

   And this happens not because they are not able to do so, but because they do not want to; if necessary, they will fight fiercely and die hard to maintain the status quo. We must stress this point: for what concerns curators, museums are not designed for the general public, but for them, their colleagues and those who can equate to them.

   And so? So it is clear that the only possible solution must be a political and not a technical action. But this requires a strategic statement of our position regarding those aspects we consider to be the interest and the priority tasks of a public institution.

   If we decide that museums’ role as cultural vehicles is the fundamental reason that justifies their opening to the public, and that this public – the real people that actually ask to go and visit museums, not the fake public suited to insiders’ private use – has the right to be and feel evaluated and respected in its fundamental rights, being the primary subsidizer of the museums, then we must have the courage to remove the main obstacle on our road: it is necessary to remove from the current museum curators the exclusive jurisdiction over what is related to the public exhibition.

Translated by Diana Mengo

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