In the News

The New York Times has its special "Museums" section online currently, although that link is sure to expire. We highly recommend you take a look at all the articles contained therein.

Carol Vogel's "In Lean Times, Museums Find New Ways to Reach Out" discusses the ways in which museums are attempting to expand their audiences and function as general cultural centers, from yoga at MOMA to the Metropolitan Museum of Art's "It's Time We Met" Flickr contest.

In "When the Gallery Is a Classroom," one of the most interesting and relevant articles to GMOA, Dorothy Spears writes about increasing the diversity of museum audiences and integrating museum offerings with school curricula.

Carol Kino has an article on the reopening of the artist's studio at the Norman Rockwell Museum, which contains this fascinating tidbit:

Along the way, there have been a few quandaries about where to draw the line between preservation and accurate depiction: for instance, how to handle the dented, blackened brass bucket that Rockwell kept beside him, which offers some insight into his personality.

Rockwell generally used the bucket as a receptacle for turpentine-soaked rags. But surprisingly for someone who had already lost one studio to fire, he also used it to knock out pipe ashes. “The rags would often catch fire,” said Corry Kanzenberg, curator of archives. “Then someone — maybe Rockwell, maybe his assistant, maybe his secretary — would throw the bucket out the door of the studio. That’s how it got dinged so badly.”

Rockwell appears to have cleaned the bucket only once, for the October 1960 photo shoot. Should it be polished up again? The curators finally decided against it. “If we take away the surface layer,” Ms. Kanzenberg said, “it takes away part of the story.”

One story we're following with particular interest, due to the involvement of our director, Bill Eiland, is the introduction in New York state of a bill regulating deaccessioning.

Finally, our shop manager, Amy Miller, sent out a link to this article in the London Times about why people go to museums. The article focuses in part on what's particularly British about such an activity, but Hugo Rifkind certainly makes some points relevant to not only U.S. museums, but also specifically to ours:

Neil MacGregor , at the British Museum, agrees. “The Great Court has become London's village green,” he says. “It's where you bring the children. It's where you meet a friend. It's the space that belongs to everyone.”

Free entry has a huge amount to do with this. That should probably be Theory 4, the credit-crunch theory. People are going to museums because museums are free. Most of Britain's biggest museums have been free for years, but, as MacGregor puts it, it's the rhetoric of free admission since 2001 that has had an impact, as much as the fact. When the Tory culture spokesman, Hugo Swire, spoke of reintroducing entry charges in 2007 there was national uproar, and a few months later David Cameron sacked him.

When I asked Redmond his best tip for getting people into museums, he snorted and said “create a recession”. Everybody going to a museum approves of free entry, even if (and this is the crucial bit) they are then paying extra to see a special exhibition, such as Picasso at the National (£12.50) or Shah Abbas at the British Museum (£12). Free admission to museums has given the public a sense of ownership over them. This ties into Theory1, and the way that many museums no longer feel like somebody else's country house. They feel like they are ours.