The Open Door, The Gilded Cage, The Public Museum's Persistent Paradox

“ It requires the labor of a day even to saunter through the innumerable rooms of this magnificent abode. But it will never again resound with the revelries of kings and queens. Royalty has forsaken it forever. Democracy has now taken strange and anomalous possession of its walls. It is converted into the most splendid museum in the world—filled with the richest productions of ancient and modern art. ”

“ In the National Gallery one finds a throng of nursery-maids, and men just come from their work; true, they make a great deal of noise thronging to and fro on the uncarpeted floors in their thick boots, and noise from which, when penetrated by the atmosphere of Art, men in the thickest boots would know how to refrain; still I felt that the sight of such objects must be gradually doing them a great deal of good. The British Museum would, in itself, be an education for a man who should go there once a week, and think and read at his leisure moments about what he saw. ”

“ The British Museum is my glory and joy; because it is one of the only places which is free to English citizens as such—where the poor and the rich may meet together, and before those works of God’s Spirit, “who is no respecter of persons,” feel that “the Lord is the maker of them all.” ”

“ The tens of thousands who flock to the museum in holiday times prove its attractions; and it is with the hope that these attractions may be enhanced by the help of a methodical and homely guide, chattering to the visitor various bits and scraps of pertinent information as he passes from one object to another, that these four visits have been presented to the public. They do not pretend to be scientific books, but simply companions of the hour, that urge little points of information while the mind is particularly impressible ”

“ True, one cannot sleep in the reading-room of the British Museum—not all night, at least—but by day one can make a home of it for years together except during cleaning times, and then it is hard if one cannot get into the National Gallery or South Kensington, and be warm, quiet, and entertained without paying for it. ”

“ It must, above all, believe in the capacity of its own people so to learn from the past that they can gain in judgment in creating their own future. Among democracies, I think through all the recorded history of the world, the building of permanent institutions like libraries and museums for the use of all the people flourishes. ”

“ Under the present system, the Royal Academy, the concert, the theatre, are all private speculations, and the public is exploited for the profit of the speculators. The National Gallery and the Museums are national property, and the nation enjoys the use of its own possessions. In a nation which has gone so far in the direction of providing intellectual amusement, it cannot be pretended that any principle is involved in the question whether or not it shall go further along the same road. ”

“ Nothing more completely represents a nation than a public building. A member of Parliament only represents, at the most, the united constituencies: but the Palace of the Sovereign, a National Gallery, or a Museum baptised with the name of the country, these are monuments to which all should be able to look up with pride, and which should exercise an elevating influence upon the spirit of the humblest. ”

“ The regulations for the admission of the public have fairly kept pace with the progress of those liberal ideas to which the collection is greatly indebted, and of which it is a monument. It will be interesting for the visitor of to-day, to contrast the rules by which he is admitted, with those that fettered his ancestors of the eighteenth century. In the year 1759, the trustees of this institution published their "Statutes and Rules relating to the Inspection and Use of the British Museum." ”

“ After five hundred years of spoliation, these objects fill museums still, and are bought with avidity at every auction, at prices continually rising and quality steadily falling, until a bit of twelfth-century glass would be a trouvaille like an emerald; a tapestry earlier than 1600 is not for mere tourists to hope; an enamel, a missal, a crystal, a cup, an embroidery of the Middle Ages belongs only to our betters, and almost invariably, if not to the State, to the rich Jews, whose instinctive taste has seized the whole field of art which rested on their degradation. ”

“ Others are neatly dressed, slim-looking girls—art students of all nations—timidly trying to reproduce works whose fame has rung around the world. Monday is the copyists' favorite day, for then the great Museum is closed to the general public, and by special permission the artists have the huge palace and its precious contents all to themselves. They are not annoyed by the crowding and rude staring of thoughtless strangers. ”

“ The tendency in England, at least of later years, has been to swallow up all lesser and all private collections in the great national Museum in London, which has accordingly become so enormous and so bewildering that no one can profit by it except the trained specialist, who goes in with his eyes shut, and will not open them till he has arrived at the special class of objects he intends to examine. ”

“ Even the least thoughtful among those visitors who can be said to frequent the Museum—as distinguished from the mere holiday guests, who come only in crowds, little favourable to vision; to say nothing of thought—will occasionally have had some faint impression or other of the great diversity and wonderful combination of effort which must have been employed in bringing together the Collections they look upon. ”

“ Our architectural, painting, and sculptural history is concerned with men now living, or their immediate predecessors. And even such work as we have is pretty largely a cult by the wealthy. This is the more a cause for misgiving because, in a democracy, the arts, like the political parties, are not founded till they have touched the county chairman, the ward leader, the individual voter. The museums in a democracy should go as far as the public libraries. Every town has its library. There are not twenty Art museums in the land.
Here then comes the romance of the photoplay. ”

“ The presence in the institute of a good deal of that rather "tight" and "sugary" painting which came to Chicago at the time of the World's Fair, is to be regretted—a fact which is, I have no doubt, quite as well known to those in charge of the museum as to anybody else. But as I remarked in a previous chapter, most museums are hampered, in their early days, by the gifts of their rich friends. It takes a strong museum indeed to risk offending a rich man by kicking out bad paintings which he offers. Even the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has not always been so brave as to do that. ”

“ There is not a country from which any antiquity could not be removed by sufficient care in smuggling. Every national museum has its underground feeders, knows how to defeat the laws of other countries, and incessantly grows in spite of laws. To seize property without paying its real value is seldom a profitable proceeding in the long run, and that is what every government tries to do with antiquities. The Italian government has confiscated a large part of the values of private collections, by forbidding the exportation of any important picture or statue. ”

“ We move in a vicious circle, the difficulty of supply restricts demand, and the feebleness of demand obstructs supply. Nor, were the demand more extensive, would the public be effectually served by national institutions, so long as the system of private photography and piece-work endured: for the artist must have his profit, put it how you will: and it is this simple, and in the present state of things, legitimate condition, which cripples the library and museum on this side of their activity ”

“ The owners of collections do indeed often allow the public to visit them at inconvenient times, but that anybody should have exclusive rights is an absurdity. If Art were a form of property like any other, the owner could destroy it, and the righteous indignation of the world at the destruction of a Botticelli or a Velasquez would mark the boundaries of private property. Land comes under the same canon. Nothing, perhaps, should be owned which might not be destroyed at will. ”

“ For instance: the public are under a vague impression that, because they have paid for the contents of the British Museum, every one has an equal right to see and to handle them. But the public have similarly paid for the contents of Woolwich arsenal; yet do not expect free access to it, or handling of its contents. The British Museum is neither a free circulating library, nor a free school: it is a place for the safe preservation, and exhibition on due occasion, of unique books, unique objects of natural history, and unique works of art ”

“ It seems that when the museum was first started, about four hundred years ago, the glass blowers agreed to donate specimens of their work, provided their descendants should be allowed access to the museum for models. This contract made it a simple matter for a connoisseur to get reproduced exactly what was wanted, and what was not in the market. ”

“ I have known servant girls as much interested in the collections of laces in the museums, especially the specimens made by poor peasant women in different centuries, as any high-born lady, and much more capable of reproducing specimens of this industry. The costumes of the peasants and the costumes of the kings and queens, and the furniture used by the latter, will attract crowds of ignorant people by the hour in European museums. But who ever sees any but the intelligent and rich walking about in the Metropolitan Museum of New York, or the Academy in Boston. ”

“ The Museum was always open at sunrise, and this was so well known throughout the country that strangers coming to the city would often take a tour through my halls before going to breakfast or to their hotels. I do not believe there was ever a more truly popular place of amusement. I frequently compared the annual number of visitors with the number officially reported as visiting (free of charge) , the British Museum in London, and my list was invariably the larger. Nor do I believe that any man or manager ever labored more industriously to please his patrons. ”

“ Our Museums are getting so extensive that it is becoming a most wearisome task to attempt to master their contents in the limited time sight-seers are generally able to devote to a stroll through them. All the world knows it is one of the most headachey things in the world to spend a couple of hours among the miles of galleries in the British Museum; and the South Kensington Museum is becoming almost as confusing a place of amusement. ”

“ The annual picture expositions in the Champs Elysées are always crowded to suffocation, especially on free days, showing that the common people are not wholly indifferent to art, but for some reason which has never been satisfactorily explained, the celebrated museum, the one-time residence of the Kings of France, with all its historic memories, its priceless pictures and endless rooms filled with sculptures and antiquities is treated with indifference and neglect. ”

“ The public galleries in their turn will be freed from students with their apparatus and from inappropriate specimens, while such objects as remain can be displayed in a more becoming manner.
It is easy enough to see where we have gone wrong. The advance towards democracy has been too rapid, the revolution too complete. We have thrown open everything to the public, to the public's bewilderment and our own undoing. The lot of a curator in a large museum is not altogether a happy one. ”

“ Publicly funded institutions must not be transformed by the market logic of neoliberalism. The role of archives, museums and other cultural institutions, is more and more challenged by capitalism. They need to redefine themselves in ways that allow cultural commodities to be archived, described and shared in the frameworks of open access and open science. ”

“ Cultural institutions should reflect on and rethink their roles in relation to access. While the current policy landscape, lack of infrastructure and the serious budget cuts do not support openness, cultural institutions cannot lose sight of their essential role in building bridges to culture. Preservation must mean ensuring our cultural heritage is always easily accessible to anyone. ”

“ The knowledge and efforts of these institutions are crucial in tending our cultural landscape but they cannot become prisons to our history. Instead of claiming ownership, their task is to provide unrestricted access and free use. Cultural heritage should not be accessible only for those who can afford paying for it. ”

“ Most museums which have come into existence within the last 200 years suffer from the fact that they are mere enlargements of the ancient collector's "cabinet of rare and curious things," brought together and arranged without rhyme or reason. No one has ever attempted to say what is precisely the aim and intention as a public enterprise of any of our great museums, and accordingly there has been no consideration, discussion, or agreement as to the methods of collection, selection, arrangement, exhibition, and storage of the objects assembled within their walls. ”

“ Year after year and age after age it accumulates—this evidence and monument of intellectual activity—piling itself up in vast collections, which it needs a lifetime even to catalogue, and through which the uncultured walk as the idle do through the British Museum, with no very strong indignation against Omar who burned the library at Alexandria. ”