Transformation in the College Museum

PDF: Transformation_in_College_Museum.pdf 

Saturday, April 8, 2006
Panel Discussion
Transformation in the College Museum

Ivan Karp, NEH Professor in the Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts, and codirector of the Center for the Study of Public Scholarship, Emory University
Sharon Macdonald, Professor of Cultural Anthropology, Department of Sociological Studies, University of Sheffield, UK
Jock Reynolds, Director of the Yale University Art Gallery

Moderator: Margo Mensing, Associate Professor of Studio Art, Skidmore College
Introduction: Susan Bender, Professor of Anthropology, Skidmore College

Conference transcript editing by Sarah Goodwin, Professor of English, Skidmore College; copyediting by Kathryn Gallien.


Susan Bender: I would like to introduce now the moderator for our final panel, Professor Margo Mensing in our Studio Art Department. Margo has been involved with the museum project here at Skidmore in a number of ways, two of which have been highlighted in this conference. She was co-curator, with Ian Berry and Mary Crone Odekon, of the Very Liquid Heaven show, which was our last faculty-curated exhibition. It was in our main Wachenheim Gallery last year at this time, and it was an enormously successful and beautiful show. Margo also worked together with Debbie Fernandez and David Porter in staging a performance surrounding a John Cage piece, as part of that exhibition. So she has also been engaged in bringing novel kinds of performance into the museum. Margo is also an accomplished fiber and conceptual artist.

Margo Mensing: Thank you Susan. I just would like to note that it was actually two performances, one related to a John Cage piece, Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano, and the other was George Crumb’s Makrokosmos III. I would like now to introduce our three panelists, beginning with Ivan Karp. He is the National Endowment for the Humanities Professor at Emory University, teaching in graduate studies there since 1993. He is also the codirector of the Center for the Study of Public Scholarship, which focuses on museums and societies. A social anthropologist well known for his study of African cultures, he was curator for African culture at the Smithsonian Institution from 1983 to 1993. His writings reflect on the museum, its methods of representation, and the relationship between museums and their constituencies. His publications are standard references in the field, especially Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display and Museums and Communities: The Politics of Public Culture. His new book Museum Frictions: Public Cultures/Global Transformations, from Duke University Press, will be published this fall.

Ivan Karp: There are flyers on the table. [Laughter.]

Margo: Sharon Macdonald, who is visiting from the UK, currently holds a chair in cultural anthropology in the Department of Sociological Studies at the University of Sheffield. This fall, her new academic home will be the University of Manchester as a professor of social anthropology, where she will bring her expertise on the study of museums to the new Centre for Museology. She has researched extensively within the field. Two of her best-known books are Theorizing Museums [:Identity and Diversity in a Changing World] and The Politics of Display: Museums, Science, Culture. She has just published Companion to Museum Studies, which I just saw on the table. And forthcoming is Exhibition Experiments. Her current project, funded by the Alexander Von Humboldt Center, involves her in research on the heritage of Nazi artifacts and institutions present in Nürnberg.

Jock Reynolds is the director of the Yale University Art Gallery. Prior to coming to Yale in 1998, he was the director of the Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts, for nine years. Before that he was a director of the Washington Project for the Arts in Washington, D.C. He collaborates frequently with his wife, Suzanne Hellmuth, and their work is often in response to museum commissions. He has written essays for many books, the most recent being Portraits of the Hazleton Public Schools, a documentary with Judith Joy Ross’s photographs. He has received two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, a Fulbright fellowship, and several NEA grants for art and public places projects.

So, we have here two social anthropologists concentrating in museum studies and the politics of display, and a museum director. What new topics do we wish to address? The issues we have already addressed from many perspectives and with rich examples are the ideas of the dual or multiple audience; collaborative strategies among various levels of personnel, museum staff, faculty, students, and potentially others; the various models of museums, from a new museum on an existing campus to revamping established museums; and as we have just heard spoken about so eloquently, relinquishing control on many levels—some would advocate on all levels.

On this panel, we will address that ever-slippery word transformative: can the college museum be a transformative experience? And we will begin with Ivan.

Ivan: That’s the Monty Python approach: “And now for something entirely different.” This is a difficult panel to be on, because it deals with words and concepts that are slippery, that are difficult to grasp. So I decided for this presentation to do a kind of keyword approach and simply try and describe what I think are some of the issues involved in notions of transformation and exhibition in the museum. The approach I am using is taken from Raymond Williams: I am going to discuss the terms in which we describe and think about museums, and treat them as what Williams calls keywords. Keywords for Williams are central concepts that organize our thought and discourse at the same that time as they exhibit conflicts and resist definition. One man’s transformation, I will say again a little later, is another man’s state of decline, and anybody who works in a museum knows that. (Don’t tell your presidents.) Keywords are often historical documents in themselves. They are history, and the changes in definition that they have undergone exhibit the conflicts and structural changes that institutions like museums and societies undergo.

In addition, keywords are what philosophers call essentially contested. That means that you cannot go to the dictionary and find a definition that you can apply in a precise and clear and key way; the very definition of a keyword arises out of disputes and the debates that people have about it. I do not think that there is a single definition of museum, nor do I think that there is a single kind of museum, not even the art museum. And what a museum is arises out of the discord that surrounds it. One meaning sometimes of a keyword is foregrounded at the expense of another; but the other is always there lurking in the background, ready to take over and overthrow the dominant meaning at any given time. The result is that they are always deployed in contested ways. As I said in the first publication I ever wrote about museums: in essence, to paraphrase Karp, there can be few places more contested than museums.

Let’s start with the notion of museum itself. I will give a definition that tries to get to some of the essence of the contest, paralleling Walter Benjamin’s famous comment about his library. A museum, to adapt Benjamin, is a disorderly collection whose disorder is matched only by the order of its catalog. And what we do exists in the space between the collection and the catalog. We strive to have the kind of openness and possibilities available for museums, on the one hand; on the other hand, we strive to present the disorder in a way that has some kind of coherence, that enables people after all to grasp something.

Museums exist in a triangular space between the personnel in the institution, the collection, and the audience. They are continually negotiating what they are in that triangular space, which is continuously contested—continuously and always contested—sometimes by the audience, sometimes among the personnel, sometimes in an adversarial relationship with the collection itself.

In addition, museums are organized according to type and to genre. There are kinds of museums. We tend to identify them by discipline, which seems to me a highly problematic endeavor. There are art museums, there are (believe it or not) natural history museums, there are history museums, there are community museums, there are national museums, there are universal survey museums which don’t have universal collections (which is itself an impossibility). That is the environment in which museum professionals exist and in which they have to work. I think it is an environment they have to both work with and work against. The Tang is a very good example of the kind of museum that works both with and against its environment. It has, it seems to me, engaged in what I like to call genre bending activity: many of its exhibits work across the boundary of the genres science and art, ethnography and art, photography and other kinds of art, and so on. But it does so, it seems to me, primarily at the level of content, not at the level of forms of display or even at the level of the basic definitions of the genre itself. What would the Tang look like if for one exhibit it turned itself into a natural history museum? We might see something quite different, something that causes the students to think seriously about the very nature of museumgoing itself. This is a challenge that a self-defined teaching museum such as the Tang faces. It is a challenge, it seems to me, that asks it to engage in shock, to interrogate the categories that enable its very nature and definition, and to move from crossing boundaries maybe to cross-dressing, or even in a more radical kind of way to undergo an operation and to go into a real gender transformation (and we will get to transformation later).

But whatever they are, whatever happens in museums, they are a general category of which the college museum is or may be a special type. My problem is that I don’t know what kind of museum a college museum is, since it is divisible into other genres of museums. College museums don’t do anything different than other museums do; they engage in teaching, they engage in display and other things. There are some differences of emphasis, however. At worst college museums are parochial places where accountability is rather low and you don’t have to do much to get on from day to day. At their best, they are locations for experimentation and learning. Perhaps they are places where the opportunity cost of doing something not so popular, something that is challenging and crosses boundaries, is itself very low because these things exist in the college itself. They are certainly places where the life expectancy of a director in his job or her job is higher than at most other museums.

What is it that college museums are asked to do? Apparently they are asked to engage in something called transformation, the very subject of this panel. What is transformation? It is a difficult word and even more difficult concept. As I said, one man’s transformation is another man’s state of decline. It also raises questions of perspective, as well, because transformation implies the movement from one qualitative state to another; but a state itself is something that is in flux and labile itself, so usually we only know a transformation in the past. It is something you can hope for in the future, but you only know it has happened when it is over. And so therefore our question of perspective: the perspective we have on transformations is looking backwards, even though the claim we make when we talk about transformation is that our perspective is moving forward. When you are engaged in a transformation you very often draw on models from the past. Marx taught us that: the first time is tragedy, he said; the second is farce. Well, sometimes you might not want to be in a transformative mode, at least not always; but if you are, what does it mean for a museum, besides existing in a state of radical uncertainty?

The museum transformations that I am most familiar with are from South Africa. This is a society that has engaged in transformation for the last 10 years. It has certainly asked its museums and museum services to transform themselves, because if they don’t, in most South African municipalities and governments—and they are mostly government museums in South Africa, except for some of the apartheid museums which have gone private—they will be closed down.

So what is transformation, and how does it work in South Africa? First of all there is a whole category of museums which have had to transform themselves from one thing into another thing. These are the cultural history museums which were museums actually dedicated to exhibiting the superiority of European culture over African culture even though many of them had massive and extensive African collections. They moved from one set of names to another: they are now known as MuseuMAfricA, or the African Window. Very often the transformation was effected first of all by hiring a publicity team and doing focus groups to see what kind of museum you could have. Nonetheless, some of the displays that they have done are absolutely extraordinary. You haven’t lived till you have gone to MuseuMAfricA in Johannesburg and gotten into the elevator in which you become a mine worker going down into the mine, subject to the abusive language of your bosses; or till you have seen the exhibit on one of the major apartheid trials, in which photographs of all the participants who were charged in the trial were put up around the room, with a little pad put underneath it. South Africa is a small society; you want audience participation. As people came in, they began to document what happened to these people, many of whom had just disappeared: so and so went into exile; him, he died in Tanzania; so and so disappeared; so and so was killed by the apartheid police. People turned the exhibit into a form of mourning for people lost and celebration of changes to come. It became a transformative and cathartic way of engaging with society.

The museum that perhaps has gotten the most attention in South Africa and internationally is a community museum called the District Six Museum. It started out as a work of installation art in which an artist was going to do a little thing. District Six was one of the districts of forced removal where people were moved out. If you were white, you got two weeks; if you were so-called “colored,” you got a few days; and if you were black, you got no notice and the bulldozers came and just bulldozed down your house. Because it was the arts district and on such valuable land and so politically dangerous, nothing could be built, so people began to start doing an installation. It was a map. And then someone thought, well maybe what we ought to do is have a cloth so if anyone who comes who was from District Six they can add to it. Then a guy came forward and said, “I ran the demolition teams and I have the street signs,” which was illegal to have at the time. The community pored over it; they said, “That’s wrong, I didn’t live there, I lived here,” “No, so and so lived here,” so they redid the map. The cloth is now a kilometer and a half long with comments. The first exhibit signs and the street signs became permanent. A museum grew up around the exhibit. It documented the center of Cape Jazz; it documented the arts, the poetry. The second exhibit, Digging Deeper, began to look at the history of diversity of families in District Six: Jewish families that had communists and Zionists in them, black families that had been moved out to the Cape flats.

Suddenly there was a new government in charge, and this vacant land was going to be reallocated to its original owners. The board of District Six got together and had a debate: Do we need the museum any longer? Should we shut it down? It’s a museum that was run by a community designed to serve a community, that then professionalized its personnel to become a full-fledged institution and museum. They founded a network of museums of conscience—this includes the [Lower East Side] Tenement Museum in New York—now called the International Coalition of Historic Site [Museum]s of Conscience. The acts of transformation they performed involved revising history, providing voices for people to articulate experiences that had otherwise been silenced. They brought in new personnel. They altered the sense of who owned objects and how collections could be used. They created a kind of partnership between museum and community, where the museum is the instrument of community development, a location of identification for the community, and as such a place for community debate about identity and the future. This puts it all in a very dangerous position: the best-known South African museum is the one not funded by the government. It was funded for a long time by the Swedes, and then by the Rockefeller Foundation.

I could go into other things, but all of those show how complex and partial transformation is, depending on what aspect of the museum you are talking about, and what you are trying to do, and what you want to do. In a college museum, the place to start with transformation is the act of learning itself. What a college museum can do is engage in what anthropologists call meta-learning: learning how to learn. When I did a consultancy at Skidmore three years ago, when the Luce grant was being considered, one of the faculty told me about a course she was running on critical writing. She said it was very interesting; the kids in her course could write brilliantly about music, they were terrific on theater, they could do all kinds of things, and you sent them into a museum and they fell flat on their faces.

Going to a museum is a highly skilled activity. Now, it is not that people don’t know how to go to museums. I once was documenting the Wattis Hall of Human Cultures in the California Academy of Sciences. This was their anthropology hall—all the cultures of the world, ostensibly. They were in a rectangular room on two grids: hot to cold and wet to dry. No matter what period or time the representation was, they were all in the present tense, except for the American Indians, who were in the past tense, and the Japanese, who had a future. I was over there in the hot/dry corner of the room looking at a display of the so-called bushmen. Suddenly the room was filled with little people, all about four feet high. It was the most massive school group you have ever seen, and they knew exactly what to do: they all got up, pushing and shoving in a line exactly where I was, and pushed me out of the way in order to get a glimpse of the bushman’s penis. Now, this was done instantly. It wasn’t like they discovered it; this is knowledge on how to go a museum transferred along the generations.

Museumgoers are very skilled. They don’t necessarily exhibit the skills that we would like, but they have them. On the other hand, when we ask people to engage in certain kinds of activity, we don’t necessarily give them the wherewithal or participate with them in acquiring it. I once led a tour group of a museum class at the University of Sussex to a museum, and I discovered that even though they were taking a museum class, this was the first museum that they had ever been in. How in heaven’s name could they make sense of it? It was an exhibit of African art. African art is little, by and large, and museum rooms and buildings are big. They have tall ceilings. You’ve got a design problem, and the design problem effects how the display is done. If you can figure that out, you might be able to learn and appreciate a little bit more about the objects that are being displayed, but we keep it a mystery. We keep the meta-learning to ourselves and don’t share it with the audiences.

But in a college, there are opportunities. Students can go to an exhibit, they can go back to their class, they can write about the exhibit, they can debate what they have written about with their professors, they can come back to the museum, the curators and staff can tell the students why they are all wrong. A college museum is a place for a kind of discipline that involves viewing and understanding in a way that is not so readily available within a public museum. In that way, it creates the possibility of transforming the visitor from a simple museumgoer, from a simple member of an audience, to someone who understands, appreciates, and uses the museum.

I think I’ll stop after those two keywords: museum and transformation.

Margo: Thank you, Ivan. Now Sharon Macdonald.

Sharon Macdonald: I want to begin by saying thank you very much for inviting me here. I began by feeling that I might be something of an imposter, not only as the person from England, but also I don’t work in a university museum. Rather serendipitously, part of my new post is to liaise very strongly with a university museum. I have noticed during this debate that there have been very different views on university museums, ranging from the very rosy and positive to the downright gloomy. I suppose at this point I have a fairly rosy account, but maybe in five years’ time you will have to ask me whether I have moved along that spectrum to some other point. One of my interests in university museums has come out of simply being a museum watcher, noticing that there does seem to be growing interest in the university museum and in the kinds of things they are doing.

What I want to do though in this talk is to pick up on some transformations that I think we can see more widely in the museum world, changes that have implications for university museums. In some cases, I think university museums have been at the forefront of these developments. I am absolutely not saying that every museum should be doing this. The whole nature of transformation is often partial, and not necessarily always positive. And there are many different sorts of museums and different issues involved. I am going to pick some examples, especially from our forthcoming edited collection called Exhibition Experiments, which looks at some of the different experimental strategies we found. My coeditor was Paul Baru, from Sussex. We found there has been increasing willingness in many sorts of museums to experiment in different ways with their exhibitions. We weren’t only looking at art museums, but also places like science museums and natural history museums.

My first example is from an institution that some of you might really think shouldn’t even be considered a museum, never mind a university museum, and that is the Center for Media Arts in Karlsruhe in southern Germany. It doesn’t have collections. It exhibits media arts, and it has played a remarkable role within the city of Karlsruhe in urban regeneration. Across Europe, it is looked to as an example of something that you can do with museums. Although it is not formally a university museum, it was set up to have very strong links with the university there, so that is another kind of model.

I want to talk about two exhibitions that were curated—I don’t know if that is quite the right word in this context, and I am sure the authors wouldn’t like that term—but they were coproduced by a whole range of people, and especially spurred on by the sociologist of science Bruno Latour. He is the author of Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts, and has written very interestingly on objects. In 2002, he was involved in two exhibitions: one called Iconoclash [:Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion, and Art] and then just finishing last year another one called Making Things Public [:The Atmospheres of Democracy]. Both of these exhibitions—as you can see their names imply—are about questions of representation, putting things on display. Both of them are very, very broad: they cut across politics, arts, and science. They purposefully use exhibits from right across those fields, posing questions about politics and the nature of public display. They are extraordinarily hard exhibitions to describe because they are full of multimedia, and they juxtapose images of all kinds of things. One feature is that they will mix originals, reproductions, and all kinds of media. In Making Things Public, they wanted to explore Walter Lippmann’s idea of the phantom public: the idea that the public is fleeting, it is not something that you can easily pin down, but nevertheless it has effects. Latour commissioned two artists, Michel Jaffrennou and Thierry Coduys, to produce a work that would help express this idea. What they produced was not a single piece, not something that you could take and put in another exhibition. It was an exhibit that responded to visitors, not necessarily as individuals, but in groups. It is really difficult to describe this, and actually in the edited version in our book we went through many accounts to try and get at it. What happens with this exhibit is that different parts of the whole exhibition get activated depending partly upon different visitor movements within the exhibition. It is a very complicated technology. In relation to some things, lights would go in some areas and some exhibits would whiz and whirl in relation to other bits, or films would stop or start. There are also external features; for example, what the weather is like in Karlsruhe at that time also affects the overall mood of the phantom and how it responds to visitors. What should happen is that visitors should get the sense that, yes, they are playing some role in how the exhibit operates; sometimes it might be quite direct, but more often it is as part of some sort of group.

So that is one example. At the very other end of the spectrum was an exhibition at the University of Coimbra at the ethnographic museum. The Center for Media Arts has lots and lots of money, and by contrast the university museum of Coimbra has very little money; but where the Center for Media Arts doesn’t have collections, Coimbra has very, very rich collections from its colonial history. Almost in response to having very little exhibiting money, they have had to think very hard about just what they do and how they do it. They have drawn very strongly on ideas from reflexive ethnography in their displays. Nuno Porto, the author of the article in our book who is very involved in this work, writes about a number of exhibitions. One in particular was about the collections of the Angolan Diamond Company. He wanted to look at the regimens of public education and surveillance which the Diamond Company itself was involved in, especially via its own museum. He did want to show materials from the collections, but also to raise questions about representation; so he showed other areas of the colonial regimen in which data were collected about people, and what was done with those. He used a variety of exhibition techniques. For example, he would show a film and then a still from that film, first in large format and then in a booklike format to show how images might circulate through different kinds of spaces. He and his colleagues thought through how to build in the ideas of surveillance: in parts there were one-way mirrors, so you are either being the surveyor or the surveyed within the exhibition.

All of these can, I think, be seen as examples of what some German exhibition theorists have been referring to as Inszenierung, or staging, and suggesting that this is a kind of more extreme form of exhibiting than just the earlier reflexive exhibitions. What they involve is a total installation; it is not just an assembly of existing pieces. You may build an entirely new piece, creating a kind of total scenography, as George Marcus has described it. This draws on ideas from theater, perhaps ideas about performance and ritual, rather than seeking either to display particular objects or represent some particular history or story. These exhibitions are also altering the position of the audience in relation to the exhibits, so they actually become implicated in these. They find themselves in the position of altering the overall visitor experience for other people, with the phantom for example, or being surveyor or surveyed in the Coimbra exhibition.

I want to talk quite briefly about a few other recent exhibition strategies. It has struck me that we haven’t talked much about objects. While we might see some exhibitions as moving us away from objects, in other places there seems to be a real return to the object. Stephen Bann has written very interestingly on this return to the object as curiosity. This is worth thinking about, because it has some wider implications for college museums. Bann noticed that there is a revival of the Wunderkammer—the curiosity cabinet—both in that some have been restored and in that exhibitions are taking this form. And what we see here again is a movement away from objects as either examples of some system or story. Instead they become nexus of meaning themselves. He argues that this invites multiple ways for people to engage with them, rather like Nicholas Thomas’s ideas about “entangled objects” [Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific]. Bann’s own term is “typological exuberance.” There is something about objects, he suggests, that means that they don’t have to fit any one concept; they are not neat or absolute.

There are also some good examples from university museums. The one that I have come to know best is the exhibition showing the rediscovered collections of the Humboldt University in Berlin. They found a whole trove of collections in the basement when they went to look one day, just these fabulous collections of anatomy, natural history, geology, and so on. They displayed those partly as artworks, partly not, alongside innovative modern art, and they were astonished at the massive response and the number of people who came to see them.

As for the college museum: I like the idea that we don’t necessarily have to cast off our own disciplines, that we have our standpoints—not positions—and they might be really important. I would be sorry if in the rush to be interdisciplinary—or better, transdisciplinary—people lost their particular subject expertise. College museums potentially can allow that kind of transdisciplinary work to happen. There is another thing that is relevant there, which is about the kind of easiness and difficulty of exhibitions. In science museum exhibitions, one change we have seen is a shift from the very simple toward trying to be more challenging. I like George Steiner’s theory of what he calls tactical difficulty, where we don’t necessarily want immediate purchase. I would argue quite strongly that the more typical strategies of familiarity, which quite a lot of public education has employed, can lead to banal and unchallenging exhibitions. These aren’t necessarily what people would want, and they are not transformative. Yes, college museums are good spaces for doing the kind of exhibition I am talking about: transdisciplinary and challenging.

It is an exciting time to be working in college museums, and in the museum world more generally. As Barbara Stafford has argued in Artful Science, young people today have grown up in a world less strongly configured by linear and logocentric learning. She suggests that they easily change the visual into sophisticated interpretations of it and can make quick-click connections between realms we might think of as different. They don’t expect or want to be confined to the books. At the same time, the relentless presence of the virtual in people’s worlds today may also be invigorating a kind of shared curiosity, a sense of richness and of exuberance about object-based learning. In that context, museums and exhibitions and perhaps especially college museums do offer distinctive opportunities for learning and a transformation. Thank you.

Margo: [Introduction of Jock Reynolds inaudible.]

Jock Reynolds: Thank you very much. I just want to echo Sharon’s thanks to the Tang for inviting me to be a part of this. I look around the room and I see many faces of good friends and colleagues I have collaborated and worked with and learned from over the years. My own practice, as you know, is very much informed by the work and values that many of you hold, so it is good to be here together.

I want to tackle the last question that was sent to me in our group: “How can a college museum transform itself, moving from one phase to another as it seeks to respond to new demands from its campus and new ideas in the museum field?” And then the subsequent question: “What inspirational stresses accompany such major changes, and how can museum staff deal with them?” My talk is going to be pragmatic in that regard. I would simply say that I will leave it to others, since the term transform—and I would agree with you, Ivan—is a complicated one. I will leave it to others to judge in the future whether the Yale Art Gallery will become transformed at any point in time during my tenure; but one thing I can tell you is that it is going through quite a bit of change. It is going through what I would call a very interesting rebalancing, and the rebalancing involves things that it has done well in the past, as well as things it would like to do in the future.

For a moment I would like to backtrack to say that the first 15 years of my career were spent as a working artist and university teacher, helping cofound an artists’ space and then run another one, often with budgets that were $100 a show, no endowment, seat-of-the-pants all the way, but often involved in the most interesting forms of discourse and dialogue with artists’ communities and students in San Francisco and Washington, D.C. The last thing I ever expected was to be invited back to my prep school, Andover, to run the Addison Gallery of American Art in 1989, but I took it as a very interesting opportunity. I was a young boy of 14 in that very museum—and I am sure you saw a few pictures and heard from Adam Weinberg last night who followed me there—and it was a place in which young people were given a primary experience of truly great works of art, great original works of American art. At the same time—in my era it was still an all-boys school—we were given a direct engagement with studio art courses in which we literally had to make things: we had to make paintings, sculptures, photographs. We walked right out of our studios and into that museum and measured our work against the work of other American artists who made things. We had to begin to understand what we were doing with materials and what they had done, and the experience frankly for me was transforming. I was a biology student, and those are the only two subjects that I was any good at there. I was a pretty miserable student, otherwise; but what I realized was that in those two areas I was being strongly reinforced with the ability that I had to be a good visual observer. I learned that my intelligence lay in my eyes as much as it lay in other aspects of my intellect, and I was lucky to have teachers and resources that reinforced this gift. It was a wonderful experience to come back to Andover and to work with that collection from the perspective of a student who had been influenced by that very curriculum in that very collection. It gave me a chance to give something back and to work with living artists, many of whom had been trained there, and to do all the things that needed to be done to get buildings and programs up and running and to do the things we did there.

Leaving Andover was a big decision for me. I think Adam told many of you last night he felt it was the happiest job of his life, so you know what it was like there. The only thing that tempted me to leave, when I was recruited by President Levin to come to Yale, was that it was going to be a much more complex situation, a much bigger challenge. It wasn’t simply an American collection, but in fact an encyclopedic collection from many, many other cultures and times, a broad university with many more constituencies, academically superb students, and a major urban community to be contended with. There were also major problems, such as deferred maintenance of buildings and collections and things I had been through at another level before; but at this point, coming to Yale, it was going to be an incremental escalation of work. Frankly, I wasn’t quite sure I knew how to handle it.

But very quickly I was joined in this enterprise by a wonderful president who truly believes in the value of arts at Yale and a wonderful chairman of our governing boards. Richard Levin and Frederick Mayer, who were really my initial partners in all this, were great mentors and teachers. When people talk about my role in leadership, I am always interested in talking about the leadership partners I have in what I do. They are extraordinary people. At both Andover and Yale, one of the first invaluable things I learned about leadership was that I needed to come in and, as quickly as possible, understand something about the full institutional nature and history of those places. I was surprised that neither of them had ever written a history, neither the Addison Gallery nor the Yale Art Gallery, so in both places we actually did that. I believe that you don’t necessarily know where you want to go if you don’t know where you have been. In both cases, at Yale and Andover, there wasn’t an illustrious history, but there was a story to tell. In truth, there is not an idea or anything we are doing now at Yale, or did at Andover, that someone hasn’t done before. Maybe they didn’t do that much of it, or they did it a little different way; but they have been working with artists-in-residence, they have been doing all kinds of innovative exhibitions, they have been working with every constituency imaginable. We didn’t have to truly reinvent things; we had to assess all the kinds of things that had been done. When we move toward suggesting a lot of change or shifts in an institution—and that implies some of the stress that many of you are under—it’s a valuable thing to bear this in mind.

The other thing that immediately became apparent to me at Yale was that my relationship to a number of constituencies was going to be a challenge; I was going to have to learn about triage. I was very interested in the curator on this side of the room this morning who said he felt more and more like a programmer rather than a curator. I guarantee I feel more like a fund-raiser than about anything else right now. I probably spend 60+ percent of my time raising money. But given the things that need to be done and where we want to go, that’s the kind of time I need to spend.

There are other members of our staff who can certainly speak to you informally about how they assess the sense of stress involved in working through change. For me it was contending with the fact that there were at least eight constituencies that I felt I had to deal with. I had to deal with the senior Yale administration (we heard wonderful examples from the previous panel of how important it is to have the support of one’s presidents or provosts—and if you don’t have it, of what happens). No one has mentioned governing boards or boards of trustees. The single most important group I deal with beyond my own staff is the governing board at the Yale Art Gallery, about 40 people who are collectors, artists, curators, or former museum directors. They are the prime supports—alumni for the most part—behind our museum. Of course the staff, the people I work with every day, my colleagues, are my major constituencies; the faculty, the students, the alumni, these are the people we are out seeing all the time. Those of you who are students now—believe me Skidmore students—the Tang will be after you in a number of years. If you have had a formative experience here, expect someone to keep track of you and come see you in a while.

One thing that is very important at a place like Yale and New Haven that is different from some university museums—for example, the Fogg [Art Museum at Harvard]—is that we are also a community museum; we have been affiliated with the city in a way that some others aren’t. The Fogg always could say, well, the MFA [Museum of Fine Arts] and other institutions took care of that. Jim Cuno [Director of the Harvard University Art Museums, 1991–2002] and I used to talk about that quite a bit. New Haven doesn’t have an MFA; the Yale Art Gallery performs that function.

It is also worth mentioning that Andover and Yale are environments that support the arts very broadly. I am working in the most privileged situation imaginable, so I always feel a bit awkward when I talk about what we do or don’t do, because we are privileged. Andover has the oldest teaching museum at a prep school; and Yale founded the first university museum in America in 1832 with the Living Artist collection, and the first university arts school in 1866. We don’t get up in the morning and have to argue about whether art matters or not. Yale is the only “ivy” school with professional schools of music, architecture, drama, and so on. Practitioners, people who make art, are respected, granted a stature that parallels other academics, and that’s an enormous privilege and something that we hope by example maybe other institutions might find strength from. That gives us an edge that’s really rather remarkable.

And then the other thing that is extremely important, as I have said, is our relationship to our constituencies, in this case meaning our peers in the field. This is a time when there can be more collaboration amongst teaching institutions. In some ways this is the golden age right now for college and university art galleries. I wouldn’t want a civic museum job—I wouldn’t touch one with a 10-foot pole, not just because of my own position, no. I say that because we really do have the best of all the worlds. We are not being driven by the blockbuster mentality; we often have governing boards and alumni who are truly behind the academic and educational mission and don’t mess around with it.

But I wanted to also say something about the other things that I think are primary duties and responsibilities at a time of major change. The internal constituencies are very important. The key thing a president or director does is to hire the very best people you can get. Hiring is probably the single most important thing you ever do as a leader. If you are trying to be a good leader, maybe the best thing you can do is try to hire people who are better and smarter than you in every position, and give them the power to do what you want them to do, what you as an institution agree on when you help set the mission. That is your goal as a leader: to help set the artistic and educational mission of the place. Once you do you would be wise to bring together the smartest and most talented people around you to set the objectives and goals. Then you keep reviewing those with each other constantly to make sure you are headed in the right direction.

Again, I would say what gets me through the tremendous ramping up and stress of what we are changing right now is that I hired many extraordinary people. There happen to be three right here in the room: Jessica Sack, associate curator for public education; Pamela Franks, curator of academic initiatives; and Anna Hammond, deputy director, programs and external affairs. These are all people with wonderful backgrounds either serving major community-based museums or working directly with living artists. In some cases they have trained as both artists and art historians. I spent a lot of time getting these particular people, as well as others, on the staff. You want people working with you that you really trust and then feel hungry to go out and get the resources for them—because, dammit, they come up with so many ideas and projects that just have to fit into the budget.

As you may know, we are renovating three historic buildings. We are also going to build a new building; we have built a collection storage and a conservation center; and we have renovated staff offices. The bricks and mortar is not really a big deal in my mind; the real interest I have in all this is: how are we going to make these objects more available directly to all kinds of people under all kinds of circumstances? How can we add more wonderful object-based learning experiences like the ones we have seen here at the Tang, and invite more faculty members and more participants from various communities to come and feel that they can really have at this collection? How can we give more people faster access to the collection? This brings up the other aspect of change that I don’t think anyone has addressed here, too. When we are building up bricks and mortar for a lot of these institutions, we don’t talk much about the support staff that is needed to back that up: the number of art handlers, registrars, the guards—all of this is part of growing the staffing that is required to give people the experience that we envision. The part of fund-raising that is most exciting to me is the money we are raising to endow positions and to endow programming people. What gets me up every day feeling enthused is not just the bricks and mortar, it’s making sure the buildings really frame these collections and offer them in a way that is as readily accessible as possible.

I have asked our curators to realize that at a place like Yale or Skidmore you do have to have a genuine interest in teaching. If some of them don’t actually want to teach an undergraduate or graduate seminar using the collections, that’s okay; then teach in some other strong way, through internship programs, say, or involve the students in publications or projects that you are doing. We have asked for that commitment to teaching to rise in our staff. At the same time we have certainly not wanted to denigrate what I call the value of deep scholarship and wonderful publications and what I would call the respected traditions of the museum community. One does not necessarily thrive at the expense of the other. That may not seem true when the lack of financial resources means that tough choices are made; and at that point curators may think it’s the museum educators who are favored, and vice versa. The challenge is to get them thinking instead about how we can build a culture of people who really work collectively and cooperatively toward a common goal.

Of course, the bigger the institution gets, the harder it is to manage that sense of common direction and keep it alive. When you go from a staff of 18 to 20, which is what I was always comfortable working with, to a staff of 135, and you have 130 students working in every part of your museum as well, you are not as in touch in quite the same way. That’s another reason you end up really needing to rely more on the leaders you have brought in.

I want to spend just one or two minutes to talk about the governing board. One of the smartest things we did at Yale to engage our alumni was to transform the board structure. They used to have a lot of committees: a development committee, a program committee, and so forth. We eliminated the development committee—you think that’s totally counterintuitive!—and the program committee. We only kept two committees: a collection committee, and a newly-created education committee. We said, “Our core value here is this collection and how we use it, and our other core mission is our education. We want the board to rotate between those two committees. When you come to campus, you are going to meet with our curators, our educators, our students, our faculty members, and our community members. You are going to see them in person; you are going to see what they do. We want your feedback. You are also going to see the objects, the ones that we are buying, the ones that are being given to us, and we’ll talk about why they are important, why they are coming to the collection.” We were confident that this would really excite them, and if they were excited and interested then frankly the checkbooks would come out. I have to tell you it works, it really works. If you find out what you are enthusiastic about and can share that from an institutional perspective, as an educator, curator, or whatever your role might be, with an alumnus or a provost you are trying to convince, whoever they are; if you can do that, it is very likely that you will find the support you need, intellectually, emotionally, or financially. That is a big part of what it takes to create the kind of change that many of us are after in this room, and many of you are doing it well. I think as a field we are in a wonderful moment, a moment where we could be doing even more to support each other with conferences like this, by exchanging shows, and with collaborations. Thank you.

Margo: Thank you, Jock. Let’s open it to the audience for questions.

Audience member: Could you say a bit more about collaborations, and what we might do in that regard?

Jock: Lots of you in the room have done this. I can certainly say this it the kind of thing we are doing a lot of right now. One of the things we are doing to keep our curators’ interest engaged while we are partially closed for renovations is to share exhibitions with other institutions such as the UCLA Hammer Museum and the University of Texas at Austin. The collaborations come about through the networking of museum people who get to know one another, spend time with each other, and start to say, “Well, what are you doing?” or “What shows would you like?” Then in many cases we get together and try to figure out how to do that more cheaply. I see Tina Dunkley in the room. When I was at Andover, we spent five years working together in a consortium. She is the gallery director at the Clark Atlanta University in Atlanta. We worked with six historically black universities and colleges, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Addison, and the Williamstown Art Conservation Center. We pulled together over 1,000 American artworks from those six colleges, with student interns and conservation grants, and then toured it to six major museums. We were able to raise huge corporate and foundation money—way out of scale to what any of us could have done individually—because we did get together. So there are lots of models for collaboration. The ones at the Addison and Yale are by no means the only ones. Some of you who are younger curators haven’t yet had the chance to travel and get to know one another. One of the most valuable things people can do is to create the personal relationships that give both a sense of ideas and values and the trust it takes to begin working together.

Elaine: A lot of collaborations are possible, including collaborations between public museums and college museums, which can bring together different skill sets, resources, and collections. Of course, you still have to raise the money; almost all institutions can save money by sharing, but you still have got to raise the money externally. But collaborating on fund-raising also is one of the possibilities.

Sharon: One model from my experience in the UK is that somebody from the university has been doing research on a particular topic, and they have used that to liaise with various museums, and then they have obtained research funding.

Lisa: Jock, could you explain in more detail how you manage your board decisions without a budget or finance committee?

Jock: Well, Lisa, actually, at Yale, the only fiduciary responsibility our governing board has is to approve acquisitions costing over $10,000. We just treat them like a full board of trustees, even though the Yale Corporation is the actual governing body of Yale. The difference that I see at different universities is the way the universities do or don’t support the directors in their ability to fund-raise directly from those alumni constituents and allow them to go at them. Before you arrived at Williams, I was on your visiting committee for eight years. Williams would let people go out and really chase them. At Yale, that core group of 40 people is our primary fund-raising group. They are giving scads of money to us, and the university recognized that these people would not only support the museum, but they had the greatest disposable wealth and they would give to other things if they were excited by what was happening at the gallery. This gets back to the point that sometimes one even has to educate one’s president and provost.

Audience member: What kinds of things do your board members do, Jock?

Jock: Well, we have a great example. John Walsh is retired from the Getty, and he is the head of our education committee at Yale. He has just been phenomenal in helping Anna Hammond and Pam and Jessica articulate the value of where we want to go educationally, in exposing that to the whole rest of the board and to the administration, and in working with us to create a whole group of fund-raising goals and aspirations—which then he also pushes people to get in and support. People who work with you need what I call the three Ts: people can have treasure, they can have time, and they can have talent. All three are valuable. Some person who can’t give you any money at all might have ideas and talent that can leverage huge things of value to the institution. I like to say I have probably spent as much time in my recent life curating people as I used to spend thinking about curating objects. Meeting people in person and creating that trust, that interpersonal bond, is crucial to good working relationships.

Audience member: How have you addressed security at Yale?

Jock: This goes to the heart of what Elaine was saying earlier, about what happens when people first walk into your space. If they don’t know whether they belong there in the first place and then the first thing they are told is all kinds of rules, that can be intimidating. I have generally found that people are respectful of art collections and art museums. In both institutions, we have never had any vandalism or damage problems. But we did address this question of security at both places. We call them “visitor services,” and our security is even kind of low. Even the name conveys that at the Yale Art Gallery the guards’ role is to welcome the public and the students. They need to be observant of the works that are in their care. It’s also possible to use students for security. As I recall, at Smith that used to be done: is that still the case? Do you have students who sit in the gallery?

Audience member: No, not any longer.

Jock: No longer, so only professional guards now. There was an interesting case of a college that reopened its gallery, hired professional security guards and then, to offset the cost of that, charged admission. Now that was a bad thing in terms of town relationships, and so you ask yourself whether that cost is worth it for the $50,000 or so that two guards cost.

Sharon: Can I comment on that and tell a story? One of the things I have done as an anthropologist was to work in the Science Museum in London. I looked in detail at one exhibition in particular. Part of its philosophy was to break down barriers between visitors and exhibited objects. Very quickly after the exhibition opened, staff at the museum were absolutely horrified by what they termed vandalism. This was an exhibition that mixed different kinds of media, so you would have some old packing machines, for example, an authentic object, but you would also have things that you could play with, interactives. People didn’t understand where one thing began and another ended, so then they stuck carrots in the mouths of some of the models and things, in a way that just continued the kind of philosophy that was built into the exhibition. This is not actually a security point. I feel very, very strongly that we need more understanding of how visitors do respond to exhibitions, to different kinds of exhibits, to questions of boundaries. The research on this at the moment is miniscule.

Ivan: We actually have an ex-museum guard in the audience, Fred Wilson [laughter], who did an exhibit on it. This may seem to have gotten us a little far away from the subject matter of transformation, but actually not, I think. We’ve heard a lot of discussion today about openness and visitor choices, etc., and then when it gets down to brass tacks what we find out is we have more guards in a post-9/11 environment there is more surveillance, there is more monitoring, there are more other sorts of things as well. Am I hearing this right? Is what I am hearing from this audience that it is very nice to talk about transformation, but the actual history of the museums is in fact one of control?

Jock: Let me just make a comment that kind of interfaces with your concern, Ivan. I do think there is increased professionalism throughout the field. The ways we courier and pack and ship and conserve things, and the increased value of artworks, all have created a lot of concern and anxiety amongst people who are truly responsible for these things. Often I find that I have to mitigate against a certain person’s sense of what should be allowed to happen because basically this painting is worth “X” million dollars and is going to “X” place. This is another role where again the leadership—whether it’s the head of the department or when it finally comes to the museum director—has to set some policy. It needs to be clear what kind of risk one is willing to have for real access to original works of art versus the sense that they are so precious that no one can deal with them. As we all know, if the work isn’t actually being seen, there is no sense is exhibiting it. What really happens in cultural exchange is when someone stands in front of something and sees it. That is when an artwork is alive. It is not alive when it is in storage or in the paper drawer. What art does happens between a person and the work, the object itself.

Ivan: Well, I think we are all wonderful people with terrific values and I salute us all, but we live in the world, and 9/11 changed the world. One of the things that happened after 9/11 is that every public institution by and large instituted more forms through which we control the behavior of the people who come into those institutions. Smith College represents an example of that. Emory University, where I teach, represents an example of that: there are fewer docents and more guards in the museum at Emory now. My concern is not with what we are trying to do and how good we are about doing it; my concern is about how the world is impinging upon museums in ways that work against the goals of transformation. It seems to me that is a real thing and not a small thing.

Audience member: I am a historian, and I deal primarily with historical art. We haven’t spoken very much about the obligation of museums preserving and conserving art. When you are thinking of transforming a museum and you are seeking to balance very complicated budgets, where does conservation fit in? Actually, this isn’t a question, but a comment. Conservation is important too.

John Weber: Yes, that’s right. There has also been a lot of talk about transforming relationships between the museum audience and faculty, but nobody has really talked about the relationship with living artists. Does anyone have thoughts about ways to change that relationship?

Jock: That has been one of my passions. One of the reasons that I got into directing the first museum I did at Andover was that it had a major endowment for visiting artists. We were able to expand it and create studio space and apartment space, so we could constantly have the artist as a presence within the institution. This was something that went all the way back to 1946 when my teacher, Bart Hayes, had Charles Sheeler come as the first artist-in-residence and let it rip from there. A lot of university museums have been particularly active in bringing living artists to their campus. Fred is a great example of someone who has been present very recently at Dartmouth and many of our institutions. The Addison and others have hosted his work. One of the projects we did at Yale was to create a major endowment for artists to come just as researchers and residents with no expectation whatsoever that they had to create a show or product of any kind. We treat them the same as we would if we invited a great physicist or geneticist or historian who would come. They can make use of whatever professors or people are here, or whatever library or museum collections. We say, “We want to support you just to do the research. Then if you want to propose something, our curators and educators are interested in seeing if we might realize it, but you don’t have an obligation to do that.” Jim Cuno always said—and someone quoted his wonderful essay—that these institutions stand on the shoulders of artists. If artists weren’t making stuff, whether it was yesterday or 800 years ago, we wouldn’t have these collections; so not to include them in our discourse and in our visits would be a great mistake. It is one of the great riches of the college and university art systems that they are very hospitable to artists generally. Many schools not only have museums but they also have studio art programs, as you do here at Skidmore, with a long tradition before this museum was even established.

John: One of the things that I inherited here at the Tang—and a lot of things people have been giving me credit for are things that really were done before I ever came here—is that Ian Berry and Gayle King and Suzy Kerr and others here have a rich tradition of working with living artists and bringing people in to do installations. College museums are well situated to do this. We are often not quite as nervous about what is going to happen as you might be if you have a multibillion-dollar budget; so we can give artists the chance to try something out and not know exactly where it is going to end up. I have been in other institutions where that happens, but I will tell you it is lot harder to push it through. It’s a battle you keep fighting again and again in a larger museum.

Fred Wilson: Artists can also contribute in other ways beyond producing work and installations.

Jock: Yes! At Yale, Maya Lin is on the Yale Corporation, which is the true heavyweight that governs Yale. And she is there, respected very much not just as an artist, but for her knowledge of architecture. She has a huge role in reviewing the campus plans, for example. You are right, Fred; artists can contribute at all kinds of levels, whether it is on boards, or teaching, or residencies.

Audience member: Visiting artists can also bring in areas that a museum doesn’t have well represented, for example African art.

Christopher: Yes. I think one of the challenges for African art is that historically it lies at the intersection of anthropology and art history. Because it straddles the two worlds of the natural history museum and the art museum, there is some confusion now about how to present it, how to think about it. The confusion comes out of that collision of disciplines in the last 20 or 30 years.

Sharon: Actually, I think African art historians are fueled by resentment in a lot of the work that they do, particularly resentment towards other art historians. African art has been, conventionally, within art history itself a subject matter that is slighted, ignored, marginalized, stuck in the corners of museums. The whole history of museology begins with a critique of the Western canon, so it may very well be that that kind of resentment generated a valuable scholarly critique. One of the things that happened, if I can put it in more neutral terms, is that among the fields that deal with so-called third world arts, African art is one of the largest, even though it involves a relatively small number of people. There aren’t enough Oceanic art people to count on the fingers of both hands, for example. African art historians, like African historians, began in an embattled environment. The first Ph.D. on the subject of African art was submitted to the University of Iowa in 1958 by Roy Sieber. That’s it; there was no one writing on that subject matter in an art history department before that. It is a very new subject matter, and it did not have legitimacy. It generated a group of people who go out and do field work in Africa, participating in the lives of Africans; they have a certain sympathy for the colonial organization, for the structure and nature of this world, so that their work shows qualities of sensitivity and sympathy.

Audience member: African art historians are still struggling for legitimacy.

Sharon: Yes. To give you an example: the present chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities spent his life as a professor at Indiana University trying to drive African art history out of the art history department.

Margo: One of the issues that seems worth raising today is the dreaded “assessment.” Any of us applying for funding know that our proposal is going to include the question about how you are going to assess the impact of a show. How much do we know about visitors’ responses?

Sharon: This is one of the trickiest and most difficult areas of anything to do with museums, and it has also generated some of the silliest research on the face of the earth. The first research in art museums on visitors had as its hypothesis that the length of time someone looked at a work of art was a measure of how great the work of art was. We had a whole generation, 10 years, of that kind of research, if you can imagine. There are so many variables for what we might call the museum effect that it is an extremely difficult phenomenon to deal with. One variable is time: what I say about an exhibit the day after I see it is not the same thing that I say two years after I see it; yet we are only just beginning to measure the effect somewhere down the road. One thing research is beginning to show is that an exhibit will have an effect on people if for some reason they have talked about it, discussed it, contemplated it after they have gone to it. Would it be possible to build that into the museum experience? But when you say that, you think, “Oh my god, how am I going to put that into an assessment for a funder?” It becomes very difficult, because funders don’t want that kind of assessment. They want something that is quick and dirty, and something that is quick and dirty is not necessarily good. It becomes a matter of finding indirect measures, and for a lot of proposals it is actually a matter of faking it.

Jock: The question of the longitudinal assessment is the key one: what is going to happen in two years, or five years? Right now, as Sharon said, we hardly know anything. I would say we know virtually nothing about longitudinal strategies and assessment and how to get them going. The only place I have heard that is doing anything like that is the Monterey Bay Aquarium, and they are using e-mail as a way to try to keep up with people over six months or 12 months. I think the Exploratorium has been working on it too; but so far I don’t see anyone out there with a golden bullet for a longitudinal, deep assessment. I do wonder if this is another area where a college institution might be able to make a real contribution. A college museum has the great capacity to hang onto people and to talk to them later on. That means that we may have the capacity to do meaningful longitudinal assessment of what happens to people in the museum. But the way we interact with our audiences is more formal and more disciplined than you get in the traditional civic museum, and so I don’t know that we would be a good test case for them. We could be a good test case for us in terms of understanding what kind of learning is happening. Getting back to that meta-learning that Ivan was talking about: because we will have the opportunity to talk to people in five years, 10 years and even 20 years, maybe we can get to that level. My approach is if they punch you with assessment, counterpunch: okay, we are interested in it, but if we are going to do it, we want it to be meaningful; we don’t want to just jump through a stupid hoop; we want to find a really meaningful hoop to jump through. [Laughter.]

Sharon: There is also some good work in relation to art museums, some of which isn’t yet published and has been done by Ph.D. students. There is a very good chapter in my book, not by me, but by Eileen Greenhill, surveying the whole field. There is also another on spacing text, which is a kind of technique that is being developed. It involves actually looking at people’s movements, not just the question of how long they spend there, but coupling that with other observations. There are new techniques using technologies, such as video, and there are some longitudinal studies. I know that it can be very difficult when you feel that you are just doing it because you’ve got to meet the funder’s expectations. But there are people around who are doing interesting things, things worth doing.

Jock: Again, within the university or college context you have a built-in sense of measurement through your alumni: what have they done; who has become a scholar, curator, museum director, teacher, collector; are they giving works to your collection; are they endowing things. There are so many things that can demonstrate what colleges and universities do in terms of their graduates that I find some of the stuff we are being asked to do by some of the funders preposterous. Frankly, we are pushing back on some of that. We have decided in some cases not even to apply for certain grants, where reporting is so onerous that it is much easier to go out and raise the money one-on-one. You take in some alums and watch them with the graduate teachers and they see them in action, and if they are wonderful collectors they will write you a check and you are not reporting 40 pages to the commission on the arts for a $13,000 grant.

Audience member: Not all of us have constituencies that will do that for us the way Yale’s will.

Jock: No, but I do think that you are going to be in that same situation here at the Tang before long. You are just newer, you are younger, but you will be in that same situation sooner than you realize.

John: To a certain extent we already are.

Sharon: Here is just a tip if all you want to do is come out with something that shows it went well. Nearly always, when museum visitors are simply asked, “Did you enjoy the show?” they say “Yes,” because it is nice and quick and they can get away. So if all you want to do is show your funders that people had a good time, you just need to ask that.

John: Well, I want to know what is going on in people’s heads, I actually do. The more I work in museums, the more curious I am about what the heck is happening up there when people are looking at the things. What’s happening, what do they think tomorrow and the next day?

Jock: Michigan State has used a wonderful device. They give people tape recorders, and they tell them to talk into them as they go through the exhibit.

John: That works great for that day, but what happens in a year?

Margo: I think we have come to a point that brings us back to Susan Schwartzenberg’s first comments. We are trying to figure out answers to all kinds of questions—scripted, didactic, linear. Are we bringing in audiences for our museums, are we bringing in investigators, how do we interact with them, what exactly is happening? We are looking for answers. As we work through those kinds of questions, I would just like to circle back to how Susan ended her talk. She said that a museum or laboratory is not really so much about the place or the buildings, it’s about what happens in them; it’s about the people that we bring into those spaces. Elaine would tell us that we should welcome people into the spaces; we don’t want to greet them with barriers. How do we make the place fit the people? And what do we want to have happen with the people? This is one of the most important strains that I heard coming through these comments. I very much appreciate everybody’s wonderful comments and contributions on this panel. Thank you all.

John Weber: And I will just offer a couple of comments to close this conference. I am grateful to everyone who came here today and yesterday, to all of the panelists and session leaders, and all of you who have participated so much in the dialogue and discussion that we have been hearing during, before and after, and in between. I am sure it is going to continue for the next few hours and long after that. I hope there will be a chance to continue this dialogue again, if not here then maybe at some other place close by. We have heard rumors. I would welcome a chance to continue the kinds of discussions that we have had here. I want to say a big thanks to the Henry Luce Foundation for funding this opportunity, and I want to say thanks to Fred Wilson for having been funded by them and coming here, and again thanks to Gary and Carolyn and the students who performed last night. The last thing I want to do is to put in a shameless plug here for a project by Ray Giguere, who is in the corner there; we are working together on a show about molecules. We have talked a lot about art, but Ray and I have been talking about molecules in the 20th century and how they have changed our lives—things like isooctane and aspirin. If any of you in your museums are interested in a crossover, with science moving into art, and want to talk to us about molecules over a glass of wine, we would love to talk to you about that. Finally, thank you, thank you, and thank you.