BlogBack: The Clark on the Barnes

Mark Ledbury, associate director of the Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Mass., replies to Clark Bars the Barnes?:
We here at the Clark always read your blog with great interest. However, in respect of your Sept. 11 post, “Clark Bars the Barnes,” I feel that a short response might be in order.
Please let us reassure you there was no intention to bar the Barnes, devalue the special nature of their collection, or even not to talk about them. Institutional relationships between the Clark and the Barnes are excellent. Moreover, papers at our symposium which are “synthetic” like Dario Gamboni’s or Anne Higonnet’s, will no doubt discuss the Barnes. And the ample time for discussion will allow the Barnes to emerge as a talking point if that is where conversation takes us.
Other collection museums, like the Menil, the Cognacq-Jay, the Jacquemart-André, etc., etc., could also have been discussed, and probably will be, but organizers of such events must always make choices. I should point out that our symposium, entitled as it is, “Private Realm and Public Space: The Collector’s Museum in the Twenty-first Century,” focuses on those collections that have become full public museums. One of the distinctions the Barnes always likes to make about itself is that it is an institution dedicated to education and appreciation of art, and not, in a strict sense, a museum. They scrupulously avoid using the word “museum” in all their literature.
Thus they aren’t quite in the same category as the Gardner or the Wallace or the Clark, even though the Barnes Collection is clearly one of the most important of its type anywhere in the world and in many respects it is utterly unique as an institution. We hope that by inviting curators from two of the most famous collector’s museums (the Wallace and the Gardner) and the director of a “new model” of collector’s museum (Schaulager) to provide enough concrete examples to anchor a wider discussion of the genre and its variants.