Readers respond to Serota and MacGregor: Why They Don’t Want to Direct U.S. Museums.
Alan Wallach, professor of art and art history and of American studies at the College of William and Mary, writes:
England has a social-democratic political culture (“socialist,” according to the current U.S. right-wing political
lexicon) and the English public takes certain prerogatives as rights
(e.g., health care, free access to cultural institutions, an effective
and relatively inexpensive national system of public transportation,
etc.)—prerogatives that are almost unimaginable in the U.S.Serota and
MacGregor have a point when they talk about the English public’s deep
involvement in museum culture. In the U.S., the public is more accustomed
to a culture of competitive individualism, in which financial might
usually makes right. Consequently, public service is often not high on
the list of museum board priorities, especially since the press, which
could promote the public interest in museums, tends to pay little
attention to board decisions save for the choice of a new director or,
these days, budget cuts. (Museum scandals in the U.S. typically involve
the director, almost never the board.)Meanwhile, hyper-affluent board
members, while paying lip service to the needs of the museum-going public,
often concentrate on advancing their own social and collecting
interests. John Wilson is right to observe that “there is a powerful
board in America, very often fueled by money.”Consequently, the U.S.
public has far less influence on programming and museum policy
generally than its English counterpart.
Aaron Betsky, director of the
Cincinnati Art Museum and former director of the Netherlands Architecture Institute, Rotterdam, writes:
Without getting into the theoretical issues about European vs. American
museums (having directed both), I would just modestly point out that, in
our case at least, all of our exhibitions, now including our special
exhibitions, are completely free. This goes beyond what the British
[who charge for special exhibitions] have done, and allowed us to show the Israel Museum’s collection of
surrealist art to our public for free this spring. This fall we will
present an amazing collection of Chinese paintings with animal subjects
that we are assembling from major art museums around the world. For free.