Growing Museum Audiences in a Shitty Economy

by Rebecca Schoenkopf

It must have been the stupidest thing to come out of the panel’s collective mouth, on par with the time a lady panelist said she got a job in this economy, so what exactly were we bitching about? Let’s see, what was it that lady said? Here, let me copy-and-paste it for you:

“We managed to get jobs in narrowing circumstances,” Lazarovici told us, while eating her invisible cake. “You might not get a job this year, or next, but in 2011 there will definitely be jobs!” 

Oh, yes. There it is. I see it now.

So this thing was even stupider, if marginally less offensive: “Only nine percent of museum websites have a biography of the director online!” That, he said, along with a shameful invisibility for individual curators, was shocking. And “shocking” was indeed his word.

The topic of Tuesday’s panel at MOCA was Growing Museum Audiences in a Shitty Economy (I believe that was the exact title, too), and more-love-for-museum-directors was at the top of this guy’s to-care-about list. I was already bored; now I was snitty. I hated him so much, I assumed he was from LACMA, but it turned out instead he was from UCLA. (I missed the intros because I, as usual, was just a few minutes late.) The rest of the discussion yielded a few noteworthy statistics—55 million schoolchildren attend a museum each year, and more people attend museums than all professional sporting events and theme parks combined—but other than that, it was just an unfocused back-pat. Yes, museums are important. Yes, it’d be nice if they had more money. (Although some of them certainly seem to have enough already, and at the risk of sounding like I’m unceasingly picking on them, how many high school art teachers could the same donation have hired for LAUSD?) Yes, and it would also be nice if schools had everything they wanted while the military had to hold a bake sale. We get it, people. Preaching à choir.

Usually I love panels, the duller the better, and have sat through and enjoyed discussions of eminent domain, “Global Capitalism—The Cure for World Oppression and Poverty,” and a sweet little number put on by the Office of National Drug Control Policy on “Marijuana and Kids”—but on this rare occasion the only people on the panel to escape my unusual wrath were the head of the American Association of Museums (because he wisely kept his mouth shut) and a lovely woman named Charmaine Jefferson, of the California African American Museum in Exposition Park. Jefferson used to be head of the Dance Theatre of Harlem and acting commissioner of cultural affairs for the City of New York, and she can run a museum with no budget and South Central tied behind her back, while still figuring out how to send free buses to schools.

Gee, wouldn’t it be nice if LACMA sent her some cash? I mean, don’t, LACMA, if it would interfere with your planned $25 million Jeff Koons.

art by Paul Takizawa

My mother hates museums. She loves art, and not paintings of children frolicking at the seashore, either, but difficult, prickly, hard-to-love geometricisms and abstract expressionism. It’s the forced, sacred hush of museums that gets her goat, I think, and the faceless authoritarianism of the museums acting as monolithic Institutions and arbiters of value. I was thinking about this while I listened to the boringness, and when I talked to her on the phone and told her about the panel, her immediate reaction was, “I hate museums!” “I know!” I immediately reacted right back. She disagreed with my hypothesis about why she hated museums, and then gave reasons for hating museums that were sort of almost exactly what I said, but in different words.

I, on the other hand, hate art—or did for a while anyway when I’d been an art critic too long. It got to the point where I wanted to punch art! In the face!—but I love museums! (Except LACMA, natch, and if you want to read why I call for its burning, along with Ed Ruscha, do click through to this underappreciated cover story in the late LA CityBeat.) I like the forced, sacred hush, and as far as I’m concerned, I can speedwalk all I want through an exhibit until something catches my eye. The onus is on the art to make me like it, I figure, instead of the other way around. I am not a supplicant. I do not need to prove my depth by giving my attention to something that hasn’t grabbed it, and certainly not by sitting on a bench and staring at something for upwards of 20 minutes because that’s how you prove that you’re sensitive.

A speedwalk through the galleries after the panel could have been done with weights on my wrists, but even at a brisk pace I barely endured it. The galleries comprised a warren of sterile rooms featuring the abstractions that always get my dander up (abstractions my mother would love), with a few nods to those of us who need the figure or some other element of the human experience in order to relate to an artwork. There was a room of Arbuses, her well-loved freaks like happily seen old friends, and some marvelous photos by Garry Winogrand of New York protests in the ’70s. There were also the killer-fun light box rooms where just looking at the fluorescent bulbs makes your vision go all wonky and hazy and puts you into the best kind of seizure. If it’s not got a figure, it can at least be a theme park. The photos and the light boxes were all kinds of fun, but looking at MOCA’s Giacomettis and Oldenburgs, I found myself thinking an unwanted thought. I found myself thinking, “Eh, LACMA’s are better.”

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