Creativity in Museum Practice

Last week, I attended the New England Museum Association's Annual Conference. It was a whirlwind three and a half days in Newport, RI. I attended some great panels, met some great people, and saw some great museums. (Opening night party at the Breakers = amaaaaazing.)

I'll have posts over the next few weeks about my impressions and thoughts, but this one I wanted to get out right away. Linda Norris (of The Uncatalogued Museum) and Rainey Tisdale (of Tufts University & CityStories) held a signing event for their co-authored book, Creativity in Museum Practice. I've been fortunate enough to be a fly on the wall for this book's development process and it has been an absolute privilege to watch it unfold.

Linda wrote about the collaborative process that resulted in the book and its final debut at the NEMA conference, and her thoughts on that process are well worth reading. Also a great read is the website they worked on while writing the book, here.

I got my copy at the conference, and can't wait to read it. If you're in need of inspiration, get your own copy too and then come back here and tell me what you think.

Re-Read of Excellence and Equity

The New England Museum Association's Young & Emerging Professionals group (of which I am a co-chair) is re-reading the classic AAM publication Excellence and Equity. I read it in a grad school class a few years ago, and remember nodding my head and agreeing with a lot of it.

It's 21 years old now, which begs the question: has it achieved its goals? Are we further along than we used to be?

The YEPs will be posing questions on Facebook, delving deeper on LinkedIn, and using the hashtag #yepsread.

Join the conversation!

I'll also be doing blog entries here for the next few weeks with my thoughts on a few things that come up.

Book Review: Monuments Men

The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History


I wanted so badly to like this book. I've had it on my to do read for months, if not years, so it was with eager anticipation that I began reading it several weeks ago. I'm a fast reader; I didn't read this slowly because it was dense, or technical, or long; I read it slowly because it was enormously frustrating.

The Monuments Men tells an utterly fascinating story: the efforts of the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Architecture division of the American military during the Second World War, tasked with preserving cultural heritage in the wake of the most devastating fighting the world had ever seen.

The men who served in the MFAA division were fascinating, talented individuals who came from all walks of life, and many of them went on to serve in prominent, influential roles in the postwar museum world - most notably, James Rorimer of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and George Stout of the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum. Monuments Men identified cultural treasures - buildings, archives, and works of art - in wartorn cities and either worked with soldiers to protect and preserve them before assault on a city or coordinated preservation and conservation efforts after a city had been attacked. After the end of fighting, the division embarked on its most difficult and intensive mission: to find and recover Nazi-pillaged works of art.

The authors are correct in stating that this is a fascinating, previously untold story of the war, and that the world could learn a great deal from the work of the MFAA division - there has been nothing like it since, and cultural patrimony the world over has suffered for it. Imagine if there were a modern version of the MFAA, and how the story of Iraq's museums might be different today.

The trouble is, this book is not that definitive history that the MFAA deserves. It's a cursory, mediocre survey that puts greater weight on movie-style invented dialogue, stereotyped and repetitive biographical development, and the shock and awe value of piles of gold and Rembrandts rather than taking the time to tell a sensitive, thoughtful story.

Inside this book, that story is begging to be told. Instead of an incisive look at the brilliant, tough Rose Valland, the curator at the Jeu de Paume Museum in Paris who collaborated with the Nazis in order to track French patrimony as it left the country in the hopes of recovering it someday, the authors reduced her to a two-bit noir character, full of mystery and coy glances and possible weird (and probably invented!) flirtations with James Rorimer.

The trouble is, the book is popular enough that George Clooney optioned it for a movie, which will be coming out this fall. He'll play George Stout, and Matt Damon will play James Rorimer, while Cate Blanchett will hopefully lend some actual substance to Rose Valland, who deserved better. Until I read the book, I was incredibly excited about the idea of Matt Damon as James Rorimer, on whom I've had a museum geek crush for a while now. Hopefully the movie can gloss over the book's flaws and condense its sprawling, incoherent narrative into a driving quest to retrieve masterpieces from their German repositories.

In conclusion: pick this up only if you want the lightest of beach reads and a very cursory introduction to the work of the MFAA division. Do not expect a quality history or you will be disappointed.

Kindle Museum Book Sale

The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves, and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History is on sale for the Kindle today for $3.99.

It's gotten good reviews, and I picked up a copy a few weeks ago and had planned to start reading it this week, so you'll see a review of it coming soon.

It has attracted enough attention that George Clooney has optioned the story for a movie - it certainly has a cinematic weight to it!

Book Review: Master Pieces: The Curator's Game

Master Pieces: The Curator's Game
Thomas Hoving

I'll be honest: there's not much to this book, and it's only tangentially related to museums. It was a quick read, and for a non-art person it was amusing but not overly compelling.

The basic idea is that the first half of the book consists of detailed close-ups of various paintings in the history of Western art. Each close-up comes with a one or two sentence clue about its origins. Hoving calls this his version of the "curator's game" as they played it at the Metropolitan Museum of Art: trying to identify a painting or an artist by the tiniest sliver of the whole. (Incidentally, Malcom Gladwell mentions this game in his book Blink, calling it an example of "thin slicing" or how the human brain can make astonishing connections by being exposed to only the tip of the iceberg of something.)

Each painting is then reproduced at the end of the book with a short essay from Hoving's point of view about its place in art history. Once again, we are reminded that Hoving brought Velazquez's Juan de Pareja to the Met; the re-re-re-telling of that story takes up half of the essay about the Velazquez that's actually featured in the book. The essay about Uccello's painting is really mostly about how Hoving tried to assemble an exhibition of the tripartite work and everyone scoffed at him, but it would still be a great idea.

I did like the way it set about training my eye and getting me to really look at certain details in paintings. In that way, it was something of a book version of a good museum education program in front of a painting: notice the drapery through the wine glass, notice the orange hues of the window casement, notice the bunching of muscles on this nude.

Book Review: False Impressions: The Hunt for Big Time Art Fakes

False Impressions: The Hunt for Big Time Art Fakes
Thomas Hoving

This book is fairly typical of all Hoving's popular works, which is to say it's uncomfortably gossipy, breathtakingly arrogant, and compulsively readable.

The overall narrative of the book is split into two parts, and for me it didn't really get going until the second half. The first part is Hoving's chronological overview of art forgery through time, starting with Roman forgeries of Greek originals and coming up through the present day. The second part of the book is much more interesting, and follows Hoving himself through several major forgeries that he's unmasked (or tried to unmask) in museums throughout the world.

The first thing to understand about this book is that Hoving is never wrong, in anything. Even the fakes he purchased for the Met were ones that he felt uneasy about to begin with, and his gut was eventually proven correct. Disputes with other curators were of their own making, and they always loved him in the end. Eminent experts who fell for fakes are lesser, gullible, sad specimens. Oh, and in case you didn't know, he was responsible for bringing Velazquez's Juan de Pareja to the Met.

That overwhelming arrogance is particularly on play in this book, as part of his thesis on fakebusters (those who are particularly gifted at detecting forgeries) is that they have an innate sixth sense, a superior eye that allows them to instantly make judgments that ultimately, after further study, appear correct. Hoving himself, of course, has this eye.

In spite - or perhaps because of? - this personal heroism, this book is a great read. Hoving is a gifted storyteller, and he holds nothing back, giving you the constant impression of being let into his inner circle as he shares secrets, gossip, and information that would probably embarrass all sorts of people.

From a museology point of view, I was primarily struck by two things. First, Hoving has a very black and white view of what a "fake" is and he doesn't allow for much sophistication in thinking about the concept. For him, any work of art that is not 100% by the original artist is a fake. No in-the-style-of could possibly be as good as the original. He frequently recounts stories of art that has been so extensively restored that it is now worthless, and no longer original. He doesn't really allow for any further thinking about why someone might imitate a style, or what the line in over-restoring is, or what compels an art forger beyond money. Anyone who paints, sculpts, or otherwise makes art in a style not their own is committing a sin, full stop. Not really any moral gray areas or ambiguities there.

Second, and this one pained me quite a bit as the book went on: Hoving's concept of the museum begins and ends with expensive masterpieces. Money is nothing in the pursuit of a really good piece of art, and the millions spent on fakes by both himself, his curators, and the other museums he tells of are simply the price you pay in the collecting game. Education for him happens almost entirely through exhibitions that expose the masses to what they ought to know. The only time he talks about education "for the public" what he really means is an intensively scholarly weekend symposium that he put together on forgery - and by public, what he really means are rich collectors who might end up donating to the Met. Money is only to be used in pursuit of his particular version of perfection; woe to those who might want to use it to make school tours free, or expand art education in low income communities.

In the end, this was a highly entertaining read that frustrated me at times, but also made me think. It's a good weekend or beach read while still being "on topic" for museum professional development.

Book Review: The Convivial Museum

The Convivial Museum
Kathleen McLean and Wendy Pollock

I actually read this some time ago, but took extensive notes, so I'll work from them for this review. First, I would be remiss if I didn't mention that my copy came to me via a blog giveaway from Paul Orselli at his ExhibiTricks blog. His review of the book is here.

McLean and Pollock's book is a wonderful little overview of their theory of the "convivial" museum, which they consider an ideal form of museum that welcomes, makes its visitors comfortable, engenders trust, inspires action, and fosters relationships. It's an essentially social museum, in which the environment is designed to spark people off one another - and by that I don't necessarily mean the people in the room; the connection can be formed with the people behind objects and paintings, as well.

They repeatedly emphasize the physical environment of a museum, devoting sections to sound, light, space and other basic human comforts. I found their explorations of the ways in which these physical aspects can encourage and deter engagement to be thoughtful and well-done. The use of examples and photographs were also excellent and illustrative, helping to ground some of their more theoretical discussions.

I also appreciated their statement that "in the most convivial museums, a spirit of welcome starts at the top." Front line staff is and always will be crucial in shaping a visit, but to truly foster the atmosphere they're describing, welcoming behavior needs to be modeled at every level of the organizational chart.

I've been wondering if a more traditional book, with more cohesive and voluminous text might have fleshed out their ideas more - it's rare for there to be more than two or three sentences to a page, for example - but it might also have lost some of that sense of stating simple concepts and then demonstrating or illustrating them through museum examples. I remain torn. Ultimately, I think I'd love to have another, longer, more in depth book alongside this one in order to spend more time with these ideas.

Book Review: Up & Doing: The Vermont Historical Society, 1838-1970

Up & Doing: The Vermont Historical Society, 1838-1970
by Weston A. Cate, Jr.

I read this for work, but it fits with my continuing interest in the founding and early years of museums and heritage organizations. The Vermont Historical Society is celebrating its 175th anniversary this year, a remarkable length of time for any organization. (I'm working on commemorative programming such as a Farmers' Night presentation discussing the tumultuous decade of the 1830s.)

Vermont was the last of the New England states to found a statewide historical society, and the early years of the organization were less than auspicious. Its founding president and librarian, Henry Stevens, stored the Society's collections at his home in Barnet, Vermont, and for the next few decades intermingled those collections with his own. It's still unclear today how many of the Society's collections were never recovered after Stevens was finally ousted.

VHS's history is similar to many other early museums and historical societies. It originally focused on documents and books, with a small side interest in natural history items (primarily geological). Its holdings were occasionally consulted, and as a membership organization, it gradually grew into its role as promoter and instigator of scholarly works on Vermont history.

I was particularly struck, in this account, by the Society's long history intermingled with the important events of the state - closely allied as it always has been with the state government - and yet the relative lateness of its serious collecting of objects. "Collecting" as we think of it today, with grounding in historical perspective and a sense of preservation, was almost a foreign concept. For much of its history collectors were still fixated on the idea of the Wunderkammer - with in this case the exception of important portraits, which Cate describes as being added to the collection often by both the artist and the subject, with a flourishing reveal and a special evening event.

In other words, VHS was in a position to gather objects from the Civil War, from crucially important legal battles, from social movements such as abolition, suffrage, and temperance, from cataclysmic societal changes such as the Gilded Age and the Roaring Twenties and the Depression - and it didn't take advantage of its front row seat to history. This isn't to knock on the organization-that-was; almost no one was collecting contemporary objects at the time. (Certainly they weren't thinking about objects outside the mainstream of white male history, either.)

It serves as a good reminder, however, of how crucial it is, now that we have the advantages of a burgeoning and impressive field of museum theory, of perspective on our past mistakes as a field, to keep our eyes trained on the present as well as the past.

Overall, the book was short and well-written but I often wished for more incisive analysis rather than narrative history. Alexander's Museum Masters gave me an excellent template for what I wanted out of short, thoughtful institutional history, and this didn't quite measure up.

Book Review: Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowell

Assassination Vacation
Sarah Vowell

I liked this; I did not love it. It was a quick, engaging read, and I recognize in Vowell's particular brand of tourism a lot of the ways in which I travel, which is to say with one eye always on the lookout for plaques, brown road signs, and other signals of quirky history.

Vowell's heavy-handed emphasis on current events as a backdrop to the historical sites she visits was, for me, more intrusive than insightful. She really, really, really hates President George W. Bush and, for that matter, the entire Republican party after about the turn of the last century. Really hates them. Her anger - however comedically phrased - got in the way of her basically good-natured and eager explorations.

From a museum perspective, she did raise some incredibly interesting points, which can be summed up by this selection, on page 54 of my edition:

A lot of house tours are about the thingness of things. For instance, when one visits Jefferson Davis's White House of the Confederacy in Richmond one learns that his bed was so short because most people back then slept sitting up; one doesn't hear much about how on earth Davis could sleep at all given the fact that he was waging a war to keep human beings enslaved. And when one visits Andrew Jackson's house in Nashville, one is more likely to hear about the painstaking restoration of the wallpaper and nothing much about how Jackson's policies sent one's Cherokee ancestors on the Trail of Tears.

In short, Vowell criticizes many museums and historic sites for missing the big picture: the humanity of their stories. She reserves particular ire for historical sites and historians who ignore figures she considers evil or deranged in favor of presenting a rosier picture - the Samuel Mudd House, for example, and its emphasis on Mudd's favorite recipes rather than his alleged role in conspiring to assassinate Lincoln.

She herself is obsessed with a particular strain of the human story - the assassination of presidents - and finds endlessly inventive ways to track down small pieces of the story. Her travels illustrate the interesting dichotomy in lives lived, and often present a good/bad/ugly of historical interpretation.

I would recommend it as a fun, entertaining read, but not as anything much deeper, unfortunately, because there's a very interesting thread of story that she touches on from time to time but ultimately abandons in favor of quips and rants against the then-current Republican administration.

Book Review: Museum Masters by Edward P. Alexander

I wrote this book review for the Tufts Museum Studies Blog in January 2012. I'm reprinting it here as the first in what will be many book reviews, all indexed on my new bibliography page.

Museum Masters: Their Museums and Their Influence
Edward P. Alexander

First published in 1983 by the American Association for State and Local History, Alexander’s broad overview of energetic museum founders and their famous museums is only a little bit worn around the edges. Much of the information he considers belongs to the historical past rather than the more recent past. Only when he finishes each chapter with small “where are they now” updates and refers to the Soviet Union or East Germany does he really go wrong.

Alexander set out to write short biographical histories of several men and women whose life work culminated in the founding of a famous or influential museum – Sir Hans Sloane and the British Museum, Charles Willson Peale and the Philadelphia Museum, Dominique Vivant Denon and the Louvre, and so on and so forth. The chapters are arranged chronologically and are self-inclusive: each is its own essay, and can be read independently. The structure makes this an easy book to pick up and put down repeatedly, and each individual chapter is 25-40 pages long and can be read in a day.

Alexander’s writing style is lively but informative, and for the most part he manages to organize and present large varieties and volumes of information succinctly and well. Many of the figures he cover had extensive careers even before they turned their attention to museums; in fact, for some of them, their museum work was nearly an afterthought. One of the strengths of his approach, however, was connecting the energy and innovation of individuals to institutions, and then to the larger museum world. He specifically sought out museums whose course was fundamentally altered by a single personality for his study.

I read this book hoping to see how individuals could change the course of museums, and while I don’t think I found the key I was looking for, I did come away with a great deal of respect for the clear visionary leadership that each individual showed. Some chapters stood out in that regard: Denon and the Louvre, Ann Pamela Cunningham and Mount Vernon, Artur Hazelius and Skansen, and John Cotton Dana were all especially good in showing how vision could create new archetypes for museums.

In summary: recommended for those who are seeking out examples of how clear vision can change the museum world, and who are interested in the backstory behind some of the world’s greatest museums.