Still searching for the reimagined museum.
It’s a very Canadian thing to do: when you need help, expect government to come up with a solution. But shouldn’t an advocacy organization lead with ideas?
To celebrate International Museums Day on May 18, the executive director of the Canadian Museum Association, Vanda Vitali, published an article in iPolitics carefully positioning the substantial value galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (GLAMS) deliver to Canadians. There’s no questioning the sector’s importance: its organizations enrich lives by helping citizens understand themselves and the world and, in hard terms, over 150 million annual (pre-COVID) GLAM visits generate $8.6 billion per year in economic benefits. But the sector needs to reimagine not preen.
Post-COVID recovery requires new ideas and leadership. As the leading association of museums in this country — the sector’s thought leader — the CMA should have been able to come up with ideas for a turnaround strategy. Instead, it delegated the job to the Ministry of Canadian Heritage, hoping it would take responsibility for a new national museum policy with new paradigms, approaches, and solutions to improve GLAM sustainability.
Three days after the article appeared in iPolitics, New York Times writer, James Farago, provided the ideas the CMA wasn’t able or willing to produce.
The most important lesson of the pandemic year, writes Farago, is recognizing museums have been undermining their unique identities for years by flogging imported blockbusters. The nimble post-Covid museum will rebound, he says, by promoting its own identity through redeploying its own collection — and they’ll think beyond traditional exhibitions by putting the mission in motion in a hundred different ways: Farago wants every exhibition to become a Zoom classroom, a podcast lecture, a Twitter thread. Museums, he says, need to dive into subject matter through conferences, publications, podcasts, reading groups, and film screenings.
Farago reminds readers that digital platforms and in-person programming aren’t the same thing. While he applauds museums that had their collections photographed and available online before 2020, he points out that online audiences want a faster, less polished museum experience that is native to the web, not simply repurposed. His best innovation example is The Frick’s “Cocktails with a Curator” series, a cheap-and-cheerful lecture series about Flemish painting. It was shot in a living room with no special equipment, featuring the chief curator sipping on bourbon and wearing a dressing gown (as one does). Simple, unpretentious, and fun, it became the biggest hit in digital museum programming, racking up more than a million views.
These things aren’t free, of course, but when developing content get pricey, Farago encourages museums share the costs and the glory. Post-Covid museums, he says, should co-produce. Why shouldn’t a years-long research initiative, including a program of exhibitions, debates and online projects, span two or three museums? It’s a good question: years ago when I asked the then-head of the Canadian Museum of Civilization why the national museums of Canada didn’t collaborate with its fellow nationals on communications projects, he said “because we don’t like each other.” Well… it’s time to get over that.
The cliché of the pandemic is that things will be different, but clearly the CMA hasn’t spent the last year reimagining a “different” future. Its iPolitics article only tells us what we’ve always known; changes aren’t on the horizon. If museums are to be vibrant and sustainable they need help telling a broader range of stories to a broader range of audiences. That’s the idea the CMA should be putting in front of government.