Museum

     You are sent to interview Thomas Chamberlain, who has recently joined the staff of the Chicago Art Institute as an assistant to the director. He is visiting colleges and universities around the country to learn about new techniques in the management of art museums. He is 29, has graduate degrees (M.A. and Ph.D.) from Brown University and his B.A. from the University of New Mexico. He was born in Grand Junction, Colo., is married, has no children.
     Your editor wants a piece for the Sunday Leisure section on his opinions about museums. Chamberlain has been abroad on a study tour of museums and is just about finished with his U.S. tour, the editor says, and should have strong opinions about art. You interview him and you find he does have such opinions. Here are some quotes:

     One of the key questions in art museum work today is whether to maintain the museum for the discerning person or to reach out to the masses. That may be a crude way to put it, but if you go to some museums you will see what I mean. In some, children are everywhere. Hordes of them. Sitting, bored out of their skulls, in front of a Rembrandt while some poor soul lectures these seven-year-olds on his use of somber colors.
     The art student, or the person who wants to look at the genius of a Rembrandt that day, simply hasn't a chance to contemplate the work. Nor can he or she find quiet refuge anywhere in the museum most days.
     But let's look at the other side. Museums are public institutions—many of them anyway. People are entitled to make use of what their money is paying for. More important, isn't the function of art in a democracy to uplift people, to take them from their daily pursuits of money, prestige, power, material possessions and the like?
     Why shouldn't Rembrandt be for them? Why shouldn't his genius, his incredible humanity reach all of us? That outreach was the belief of Thomas Hoving at the Met in New York, and it was one of the many reasons for his stormy tenure there.
     Ah, but that's only the beginning, and you people are going to have to face the problem here when your local art museum board or curator or director makes policy. By emphasizing the museum as "art accessible to all," do you take a small but definite step toward the majority culture of entertainment? Do you start to entice the crowds in with tricks; do you spiffy up the exhibits; do you somehow make your artists "relevant"?
     Is there something to be said for high culture, that it should be kept from popular culture's lowering hand? Everything today in art and culture has become marketable, even the museum. The bottom line is all-important. Move in that direction in high art and it becomes lowbrow.

     You interrupt Chamberlain and ask him what his own feelings are about the subject. Should the local art museum—any art museum, for that matter—be administered for those who seek education, inspiration, edification or should it consciously reach out with programs, tours for children, large-scale exhibits and the like?

     What worries me is that when you reach out for the many you end up with a leveling process, and although the low may come up, the high goes down. Exhibits are geared for the person who has never heard a Mozart quintet or seen an El Greco. I know this sounds old-fashioned, even undemocratic. I like what Robert Brustein, the theater critic, says about how the traditional lines between culture and show business broke down. "Something happened in the Fifties," Brustein says, "something symbolized by the marriage of Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe...."
     Everyone wants culture with a capital C delivered in easy and digestible bites. Well, why not put the "Polish Rider" on the back of a cereal box? Or have a Renoir doll in every nursery? That doll would really sell, and it would take culture into every little girl's playroom.
     Great works of art should not be inaccessible to people. But they cannot be mass marketed with the idea that they are as easily reached as some situation comedy on television. Hard work is involved in reaching out to the artist. Effort that makes the understanding all the more enjoyable.
     Read The Great Gatsby or Wuthering Heights slowly. The language, the emotion open up to you. You cannot get it on television or in the movies—not the splendor of the creation, the beauty of the language and the depth of meaning. Those books are to be read, reread, to have people stop in the middle of a paragraph and look up and wonder. The same with art. You should certainly have all the guidance and help you need to meet the artist on his or her terms. But finally, it's as they say in football—or is it basketball?—it's one on one. You and the artist. And the museum should make that confrontation possible.
     Use the schools, use the lecture halls for education in art. But keep museums for those confronting the artist's work.

     Write 750 to 900 words. Include background from research and interviews with members of the fine arts department, museum specialists.