A Follow-Up

When responding yesterday to Rudolph Weingartner's column on the deaccessioning at the Rose Museum, we hadn't yet seen James Steward's response in Inside Higher Ed, which is far more eloquent than our dashed off prose and contains some additional excellent points about the value of university museums. He mentions the interdisciplinary nature of the research currently being done and the importance of collaboration across disciplines on campus, calling attention to the fact that even medical schools have found university art museums useful as a training tool for visual acuity. He also puts the answer to "Why collect?" absolutely beautifully:

And why do we university museums so annoyingly feel the need to collect artworks, creating the inevitable drain on resources caused by those pesky stewardship requirements? I offer in answer a fundamental article of faith, that even in the digital age, the sustained engagement with original works of art necessary for teaching, research, and layered learning would be difficult if not impossible if we ceased to be collecting institutions and instead taught only from objects temporarily made available for exhibition.

In the way that great texts live in our libraries, available for revisiting and sustained scholarly investigation, the works of art in our museums offer the possibility of deep critical engagement, close looking, and technical analysis -- made all the deeper when brought together as collections in which dialogues arise through the conversation of objects with each other and with their scholarly interlocutors. Surely a key role of the academy -- the advancement of new knowledge and the challenging of past knowledge -- is that fruit of curatorial, faculty, and student research made possible by the sustained presence of great works of art, whose survival for the future is also thus (and not incidentally) guaranteed.

We're sure this discussion isn't over by a long shot, but we would encourage you to go read Steward's entire piece, which is passionate and thoughtful.

Different Thoughts on Brandeis

We meant to link to this last week, but Rudolph Weingartner, former dean of arts and sciences at Northwestern, wrote a column for Inside Higher Ed on the deaccessioning at the Rose Museum that presents the other side of the issue. Weingartner makes no bones about where he's coming from, even early in the piece:

Understand that my print collection went to Northwestern because I had been dean of arts and sciences there for thirteen years. Understand also that regarding this issue, my experience as dean trumps my love of art and that is why I disagree with the views expressed in numerous articles in The New York Times and one this month in Inside Higher Ed called “Avoiding the Next Brandeis."

He argues that university museums do little to promote relationships with the rest of campus, writing

But why should they be so regarded when, by my admittedly not systematic observations, most of those museums do nothing or very little to deserve to be so regarded? As dean, I had to bludgeon the Block Gallery to present an exhibit of the work of Northwestern’s prize painters, William Conger, Ed Paschke and James Valerio. (This was before the Gallery was transformed into a Museum and long before its current director, David Robertson, came to Northwestern.) Art history departments are mostly held at arm's length by campus museums who prize their (inappropriate) autonomy. Mostly, the museums don’t even know how to communicate with other than art faculty on campus.

But should deans have such an influence over what the university museum presents? Doesn't that tread on curatorial independence? Weingartner's other major argument is that these museums need not own the works they present, that temporary exhibitions would do just as well to promote the study of works of art:

It is excellent, therefore, that this cluster of issues is being looked at. In my view, however, the goals sought by the task force for campus art museums are not likely to be realized by means of works of arts owned by museums, but rather by means of exhibits brought in and often locally curated for specific pedagogic purposes.

But having works on display for a limited time and inaccessible after that period by necessity limits their study. A permanent collection is a huge asset to a campus, not to mention that the acquisitions of university museums are naturally different in intent than the acquisitions of private institutions, private collectors or galleries. We understand where Weingartner is coming from, and, again, he admits his bias early on, but we also respectfully disagree with many aspects of his argument.