Memo to Detroit Detractors: All We Are Saying Is Give Keyes a Chance

Architectural Rendering of the New Detroit Institute of Arts
Believe me, I’m as much against “dumbing down” museum installations as the next cultural snob. I rant about this regularly.
So when I attended a press lunch last September in New York, presided over by director Graham W.J. Beal, describing plans for the expanded and renovated Detroit Institute of Arts (closing May 27 and reopening Nov. 23), I was duly skeptical about their stated intention to rethink the permanent collection’s traditional installation. “Thematic approaches,” such as the misconceived installation (now repudiated) that Ned Rifkin engineered when he was director of the High Museum in Atlanta, always get me nervous.
So I buttonholed George Keyes, the Detroit museum’s chief curator, and, in my usual blunt manner, directly asked him the “dumbing down” question that now seems to be animating the blogosphere (here and here). He explained the installation concepts to me in more detail, and they appear to be art-history based—nothing like the dreaded “peoples, places, things” approach. Installation by chronology and cultures, he assured me, were not being abandoned. But within each traditional area, certain areas of focus were being highlighted. For example, the African galleries were to include a section on “Arts of Leadership and Status.” Nothing wrong with that.
When Mark Stryker, author of Sunday’s article for the Detroit Free Press (which has occasioned all this hand-wringing) e-mailed me on May 1 to ask for my take on the installation plans, I replied that I didn’t “feel comfortable opinionating for an article about a facility that I haven’t seen myself yet.”
I still feel that way. For now, I’m willing to suspend disbelief. And, by the way, “labels in plain English” (as Stryker describes them) are not necessarily such a bad thing. It all depends on what that “plain English” is saying.