For museum junkies like me, the video below, produced by the Association of Art Museum Directors in connection with its 100th birthday, is a delight—not only for the contagious enthusiasm and astute insights of museum leaders from around the country, limning the value of the museum experience, but also, in my case, for the chance to reencounter many directors whom I’ve known and interviewed but haven’t seen in years.
As part of his institution’s recent press release announcing an intriguing show that will juxtapose the works of Jasper Johns and Edvard Munch, Alex Nyerges of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (who has a cameo on the video) provided more thoughts about the mission of museums, which strongly resonated with me:
However methods and technologies change, today, as ever, the real basis for the value of a comprehensive art museum like VMFA is its imaginative capacity to make new connections and expand the knowledge of the works of art in its permanent collections.
Screenshot from AAMD video
In an era when digital prestidigitations can sometimes enhance but often distract from deep concentration on the works themselves, Nyerges take us back to basics…as do many of these both familiar and less well known talking heads: