Museums have long been some of our most treasured cultural institutions and one of the major vehicles by which, in our world today, art is given exposure, legitimacy, and significance. The term “museum” dervives from the Greek mouseion (ΜΟΥΣΕΙΟΝ, if you’re so inclined). The word shows up fairly early on as a reference to “festivals of the Muses” in the writings of Aeschines (389–314 BC) in a slightly creepy discussion of the regulations and restrictions governing the interactions between teachers and young Athenian boys. The more modern usage comes considerably later. While many now recognize that the ancient Greeks displayed fossilized remains of even more ancient animal species in certain temples as curiosities or ... we don’t know exactly why (see Adrienne Mayor’s fascinating The First Fossil Hunters 2000/2011), the term mouseion was not associated with such displays of curiosities or art but instead came to be applied in the Hellenistic period to an “institution of the muses,” that being a university-like scholarly institution of learned folks brought together to study and perpetuate muse-related disciplines such as philosophy, music (etymologically closely related to museum), science, and poetry. The preeminant of these academies was in Alexandria and included the famous library that was founded by one of the early Ptolemies (history is not clear which) and was spectacularly destroyed several centuries later (history is equally unclear about the date or the circumstances). That this was an institution that had no recorded association with visual arts makes perfect sense given its association with the Hellenistic muses—three, four, or nine, depending on the time period in question—none of whom were associated with visual art. Art (and apparently dinosaur bones) had other places to live in these societies, and the mouseion’s knowledge-focused unction perhaps makes more sense for that culture given Plato’s frankly grumpy perspective on all things artistic: We shall be right in refusing to admit him the poet—but we can also read visual artist (worse) here into a well-ordered state because he awakens and nourishes and strengthens the feelings and impairs the reason. ... for he indulges the irrational nature, which has no discernment of greater and less, but thinks the same thing at one time great and at another small—he is a manufacturer of images and is very far removed from the truth (The Republic, book X). The modern sense of the term museum dates from the seventeenth century, where it is used to describe collections of objects that were employed to promote study and advance knowledge. The collections of Ole Worm in Copenhagen and John Tradescant in London were thusly designated, though as collections of objects rather than institutions in their own right. Tradescant’s Musaeum Tradescadtianum eventually moved and became the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford in 1683, which placed its stimulating collection of curiosities and art into a purpose-built building. We can easily see where it goes from there, but crucial is the notion that works of art, scientific specimens, and other cool ephemera came to have a permanent residence where, like knowledge in the ancient Hellenic libraries, they became associated with scholarship and research. Given all that history crammed into a threesyllable word, it’s not surprising that museums are widely perceived as some of Western culture’s most inviolate institutions. While they may sometimes seem a bit fuddy, they’re also popular. Statistics published in 2008 by National Public Radio put annual museum attendance in the United States at 850 million, surprisingly approximately six times that of all major professional sports combined. Museums are usually supported by the state and by the generosity of donors, a number of whom we discuss in detail in the following pages, and they are a permanent part of the cultural landscape of nearly every major city. Or are they? Recently an important ethnology museum in the Netherlands fell on hard times. Amsterdam’s venerable Koninklijk Instituut voor de Tropen (founded in 1864) found itself in an impossible budget situation and scrambled to save itself through extreme measures, losing staff and making few friends along the way. Its death sentence has been stayed for a few years by the Dutch government, but it looks like the writing remains on the wall. Or what happens when an entire city (we’re talking about you, Detroit) is bankrupt? Public museums are usually the property of the city in which they are located and their collections are counted among the assets of the municipality in Chapter 9 filings. The US media has been having a field day with the story that the Detroit Institute of Arts’ collection could be liquidated to pay the city’s estimated 18- to 20-billiondollar debt. As we go to press, there is no real indication that this is planned or even contemplated by anyone other than a very excited news media, but it does raise very interesting questions. Over lunch not long ago, a friend who is also a museum curator raised the cogent perspective that the future preservation of an art object lies not necessarily with its inclusion in a museum collection, which can be far from stable since, aside from such extreme cases as mentioned above, institutions frequently refine their collections by deaccessioning objects they see as redundant or simply unworthy. Instead, its future preservation may lie in its value on the art market. With world records set this year alone for Oceanic art at auction at Christie’s and pre-Columbian art at Sotheby’s, rising prices mean that the object itself has become an item of great value to its owner and, with notable exceptions, something to be cared for, if not for love of art, then by financial necessity. A million dollars is no longer a rare price in the field of tribal art but rather a current hallmark of a particularly fine object. Whether that or the rising but usually more accessable prices found in galleries and shows such as the upcoming Parcours des Mondes in Paris, increasing values can mean sacrifice for the collector to obtain a good piece yet all but guarantees the artwork in question a long and treasured life. Jonathan Fogel Editorial Our cover shows expressionist artist Emil Nolde’s New Ireland collection, which is preserved in Seebüll. © Nolde Stiftung, Seebüll.
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