Yahoo Lifestyle Why Museums Are Now Modern-Day Town Squares
Museums are many things, but in today’s day and age they’ve taken on a whole new role in the world.
During Robb Report’s House of Robb at Miami Art Week on Thursday, museum executives and advisers came together to discuss how museums function in the 21st century. One area of agreement? That cultural institutions are serving as a new town square, a place where people come together to discuss the issues of the day.
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“We feel more important now than we have in a long time,” said Christopher Bedford, the director of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. “That’s such a great privilege—to be a gathering place for people to be together, think together, negotiate some of the difficult problems of the day together. . .We shouldn’t be mini dictatorships wherein we advance to you the best artists, the best politics, the best way of writing, thinking, speaking. I think what we’re supposed to be doing is encouraging critical thinking, empowering people to think critically. . .And I think that’s the obligation of the town square.”
Over the past several years, museums have been at the center of many inflection points, whether it’s the pandemic, efforts to advance diversity and inclusion, or the recent war in Gaza. They’ve dealt both internally and externally with those topics, and have served as locations for both protest and resistance. That’s forced them to become even more clear about their own principles, says Madeleine Grynsztejn, the director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.
“Shit will happen, and when it does, you have to be very, very clear—before, during, and after—about your principles, and that’s where your mission and your vision and your stated policies all have to come into play,” she said. “None of that is going to work if you don’t know your principles, if they’re not super clear, and if you don’t have the discernment to choose great artists and put them up on the walls and interpret them well.”
One of those principles, across the museum landscape, is support of freedom of expression and free speech, whatever an artist’s politics may be. It’s a fine line that museum executives walk, but one that Bedford and Grynsztejn agreed was necessary for museums to defend. And to that point, the cultural strategy adviser András Szántó, who works with many museums, added that while these institutions have to stand behind their artists, they also have to stand behind one another.
“We need more of a NATO attitude, so that when institutions are attacked—whether from the center, from the left, or the right—that they support each other,” Szántó said. “There’s a lot of solidarity that may be necessary between museums and all kinds of cultural institutions as these dramas inevitably play out in our cities.”
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