A Third Way For Museums

Massimo Bergamini

Museums should be thermostats of culture, for it is essential to the survival of any culture that it maintain a dynamic balance in its symbolic environments. And to achieve that, its educational institutions must provide what its economic, political and social institutions are failing to provide.

— Neil Postman (1994)

“A time of complexity and crisis,’ that was how the authors of a mandate letter addressed to the incoming leadership of the Canadian Museums Association last May described this moment in time for our museum community.

While perhaps not quite up to Dickens’ “it was the best of times; it was the worst of times”, the letter and its authors’ framing of the current situation suggested the same dichotomous implications: museums have never been more important that they are today, but never have they struggled more to find their footing.

Social and cultural critic Neil Postman, who died in 2003, argued in a 1994 article that the purpose of museums was to provide answers to the question, ‘What does it mean to be a human being?’

In our own country, the awakening of a new national consciousness based on Indigenous truths rather than colonial myths, coupled with the urgency of reinventing a lifestyle fueled by plentiful carbon, are challenging not just our sense of what it means to be Canadian but our sense of being.

Had Postman cast a cursory glance at the uncertainty and existential turmoil we face in Canada he might have concluded that museums would be at the front of the line providing the solid ground from which Canadians would chart a way forward.

A similarly optimistic but more contemporary point of view was shared by CMA Fellow Bob Janes, founder and co-chair of the Coalition of Museums Climate Action. In discussing the role museums should play in combatting climate change, Janes argued that “…museums and galleries are uniquely qualified to help mitigate the climate crisis and adapt to it, based on their singular combination of historical consciousness, sense of place, long-term stewardship, knowledge base, public accessibility, and unprecedented public trust.”

Adding, “No social institutions have a deeper sense of time than museums and galleries, which by their very nature are predisposed to exercise their larger view of time as stewards of the biosphere”.

Yet, far from being the thermostats of culture or the stewards of the biosphere Postman and Janes envisaged, many museums today are struggling to find their way at a moment in time when they should be leading the way.

For museums, the challenge of finding cultural relevance in a marketplace of information and ideas fragmented by competing and often ephemeral new media is compounded by having to navigate the often-competing agendas of donors and government funding agencies.

After all, as Jenny Gibbs, former dean of graduate programs at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, reminds us “Without margin, there is no mission. Staying profitable is the only way for a museum to keep its mission alive”.

Are museums then destined to fall short of the transformative role that so many see for them?

Are their leaders — boards and directors — forced into a Hobbesian choice: Stick to the safety of the cultural middle ground and keep the lights on, or challenge societal (and political) norms and risk losing your funding?

The answer is no. Fortunately, there are more and more examples of museological institutions that are shedding the shackles of traditional thinking in favour of a third way based on greater community and popular engagement.

And because this model is based on bottom-up engagement, the good news is that it does not have to result in the Disneyfication of museums and heritage institutions.

This model views the museum as a platform for co-creation and co-interpretation.

Much like early Apple products served to unleash and tap unknown sources of creativity by offering them a platform on which to experiment, develop and ultimately monetize their imagination — museums can do the same thing in and for our communities.

This third way requires humility from the leaders of our museological institutions, it requires the shedding of accepted methodologies — most difficult and important of all, it requires accepting the loss of control in a time of great and rapid change.

But as Bob Janes reminds us, “To hold a museum static, while the values of individuals and communities are changing, is to doom the museum at a time when individual and societal values are in great flux.”

Neil Postman believed that museums were different from other “traditional economic, political and social institutions”. But an act of political will, leadership and courage will be needed if these “thermostats of culture” are to fulfill their unique role in our societies. M

Massimo Bergamini
Executive Director and CEO