Smithsonian

2 days ago
yesterday
today

So, the Smithsonian has been in the news a lot lately.
Before the current secretary, Larry Small, got there, the Smithsonian was this sort of large, disorganized, somewhat dysfunctional nonprofit. The board of regents wanted a good fundraiser who could run the place more like a business, probably to help stem the endless seas of bureaucracy, so they hired someone from the corporate world. But, according to many people within the organization, Small has had sort of a tin ear about what practices are worth bringing over from the corporate world and which ones really harmfully dilute the entire mission of the organization. For the record, the Smithsonian was founded for the "increase and diffusion of knowledge among men." So clearly, scholarship was meant to be a big part of what the institution does. But it's been clear from the beginning that it was not one of Small's priorities. In fact, it's becoming increasingly clear that Small's priorties pretty much started and ended with providing a very nice lifestyle for himself and his cronies. But that's not what I want to talk about. The Washington Post is doing a fine job of that.

I want to talk about his attitude towards research. I think his position reflects something common in the general public that is really sort of troubling. I'll start out by saying that I don't think I've thought through this issue completely, so I may revisit it in a later post, but here are my preliminary thoughts:

First of all, museums have two broad goals that can sometimes come into conflict: to learn and to teach (or as SI puts it, to increase and diffuse knowledge). I suppose in this way they're sort of like universities. Both hire scholars with PhDs and expect them to do original research (learn) but both also expect them to impart some of their knowledge to other people (teach). Universities (even small liberal arts colleges) can focus more on the research, because the people they're teaching have already expressed some interest in being taught (after all, they've enrolled), and so on average, professors are probably expected to learn (publish) more. Also, in universities, academics are teaching the next generation of academics, so the new research (learning) they do is more easily translated to teaching.

Museums, on the other hand, must focus more on the teaching. In an ideal world, their audience is "Joe Sixpack" off the street. And if you're going to try to teach to someone that didn't even sign up to learn, your biggest challenge is just getting that person through your doors. So instead of just having a lecturer with a slideshow, museums organize shows. They try to be heavy on images and somewhat light on wall text, because honestly, as a frequent museum goer myself, I can tell you that people have a certain "museum stamina." It doesn't seem like it would, but a couple of hours standing around gazing at works of art really tires you out. To further induce people to go through those doors, museums try extra incentives. The Smithsonian has a particularly good one: its shows are free. Other incentives include multimedia displays (people are endlessly fascinated with dumb games on touch screen computers) and blockbuster shows (people never ever ever get tired of impressionists).

So you have two major problems. One is that an outsider like Small is really only familiar with the "teaching" side of museums. Granted, this is the bigger side, but research cannot be ignored, especially since at a minimum, someone should be verifying that what's being taught is correct. Curators are more than glorified fact-checkers, but they're also not just show-organizers. The other is that in solving the "getting people through the door" problem, museums can lose sight of the reason they wanted to get people through the door in the first place. If there's too much superficial fluff (both in terms of popular, but overdone shows, and in terms of stupid multimedia presentations) there's not enough teaching going on. An additional problem, not as much for the Smithsonian, but for almost every other museum out there, is that getting people through the door isn't only what allows you to teach, it's also what allows you to exist. Museums survive in part off of ticket sales and gift shop purchases.

These problems are worse because Small is from the business world. He was brought in to run the organization efficiently but he had no idea of what a amount of research spending would be efficient. So while he was off spending thousands of dollars on limo services and first class airplane flights, museum curators sometimes didn't have the budgets to even travel to see collections whose works they might borrow, or visit archives that they needed for research. Also, as a businessman, he was used to very concrete ways of measuring success. But the problem is, there's just not a good way to do that with museums. Is it better to have 5 million people walk in your doors to be able to say they've seen the Mona Lisa and buy a post card, or 5,000 people to walk through your doors and gain a deeper understanding of the Dada movement and discover for the first time, DuChamp's L.H.O.O.Q. A museum's goal is to teach, right? But you can't measure how much people have learned. What you *can* measure is how many people have gone through the museum's doors and how much they've spent. So that's what Small's been measuring. And the result? The one set of museums best situated to actually focus on original learning and teaching because of their unique position as a publicly funded institution have become increasingly less able to do what they were designed to do.