Growing up in New York, I had two favorite places to visit -- The Museum of Modern Art and The Cloisters: two places, two environments, two kinds of art.  I was entertained and educated at both.  In this panel we have discussed, thus far, how education and entertainment blend and do not present a strict dichotomy.  In spite of being able to intellectualize about their relationship, many of our common perceptions about the art experience are based on just that difference.  I would like to point out some of the “truisms” that emerge from their historic opposition. 

On the side of education and against entertainment are the notions that: to understand art you need to study art history and to understand contemporary art, you need to know the art of the past; art viewing is a solitary experience and a serious endeavor; art is challenging and contemporary art is confrontational, an unpleasant expereince, like medicine, but good for you; commodification and blockbusters conspire against education and degrade the quality of art and the art experience; and the museum is a temple not a playground, it is for contemplation, not a forum for dialogue.

In favor of entertainment and against education: going to museums is a leisure-time, passive activity; art is an esoteric pursuit; to attract and hold a broader audience (beyond the regular museumgoer, demographically defined as having a higher education and a higher income bracket), you have to appeal to the lowest common denominator and that involves making the museum experience more fun and playing-down content; and museums need to include amenities and enticements, and be better marketed. 

Or, for the art-world connoisseur (we might say, the elitist) -- who is both anti-entertainment and anti-education -- educational and entertaining devices both compromise the true experience of the art object.  But education and entertainment are interrelated and the dynamic between them not only can be positive but also must be grappled with as a reality of our field and our culture.  Embracing the tension, we can take and use and learn from each.  As Marshall McLuhan said “anyone who does not understand the relationship between entertainment and education doesn’t know much about either.” 

To further our understanding of education and entertainment, I think it is important to introduce some other words into our discussion.  The first word is experience.  While we may not all agree, I want to posit that: the art experience is not located solely in the art object.  For this reason, museums have increasingly become seen as not just places for collections but, significantly, for visitors. [Let’s resist dichotomizing, falling into the tendency to view one function as taking away from another, that is, to see visitor services as taking away from functions of collection and research; or opening up to other communities of persons as decreasing the experience of existing communities, like our own.  Instead, let’s hold out the possibility that the multiple roles of the art museum can help to maximize the effectiveness of each individual function.]

Today the function of an art museum is not singular; there is not one use and maybe not a fixed hierarchy.  Museums are open to uses other than art viewing and these come about through visitors services or corporate events as well as the education department.  They take the form of donor-related benefits and revenue-generating uses (the museum as banquet hall, wedding site, and so on).  How can these very real functions be philosophically incorporated into the museum’s identity, cooperatively coexisting with its mandated mission of collecting, preserving, exhibiting, and educating?  How can we engage groups who occupy the museum for reasons other than exclusively art viewing?   Or can we expand the demographic profile of those groups who use the museum for social functions (moving beyond the museum’s own members or corporations who rent spaces and others who pay for the privilege) and embrace community groups in order diversify and strengthen long-term alliances with other audiences and voices not yet evident in the institution?  How can we use so-called profit-generating centers within the institution and related activities to enhance the meaning of the museum as a cultural space, as a part of community life. 

I’ll give two examples.  One is Grand Forks where, in the wake of 1997 floods, the North Dakota Museum of Art (which had been spared) opened its doors to other uses, to organizations--cultural, civic, religious--ultimately making people aware that cultural life and arts institutions serve a critical function in a community and have a place right up there with food and shelter.  Importantly, this occasion also served as a case study for examining the general public’s expereince of contemporary art.  Director Laurel Reuter found that those she welcomed into the museum for their own programs “began to realize how much they understood the works without a formal education.”  They had experiences which were neither entertaining nor intellectual and educational in the conventional sense.  Rather they found ways to make art a real experience.  As they became more familiar, hence more comfortable, with the work, they “were surprised at how much the works related to their own lives,” Reuter said. 

The other example is the 1991 exhibition “Places with a Past” which I curated for the Spoleto Festival U.S.A. in Charleston, coincidentally also in the wake of a natural disaster.  The devastation of Hurricane Hugo of 1989 forced the project to be moved from the gardens of a plantation into the city itself which became the site for the reinvestigation of history through the artists’ engagement of places, people, and the stories they tell.  This exhibition was highly criticized by festival founder Giancarlo Menotti who (like Guiliani in the case of “Sensation” at the Brooklyn Museum) had not seen the actual art.  His argument was based on his belief that contemporary art lacked craft and civility.  Menotti maintained that this work was not important, maybe not art at all, and that the populace must be uplifted by high art, notably opera.  For the institution, this controversy lead to the temporary demise of the administration and board, restored six years later.  But for the public otherwise unfamiliar with contemporary art, these installations had an immediate resonance and power because histories—unwritten and invisible—were the subject of this art. 

Both examples tell us a great deal about how art is experienced on a broad, popular level, and when engaged not for the primary purpose of viewing art (in the former instance, it was a backdrop to other activities, in the later, a backdrop to a festival and daily life).  Because the constituencies served were “Other” than the regular museumgoer, present for other purposes, and of another class and background, these examples might seem outside the demographic definition of your audience.  These audiences, however, can be thought of within the entertainment model where the marketing reach aims toward a more inclusive constituency.  In doing so, we might be able to see how audiences, such as in the two cases cited, are engaged in art in deeper ways than we conventionally associate with entertainment and, from that, to contemplate what their experiences can mean for museums.

Another word to consider is time. We know that people have a limited amount of time to spend in the museum.  We think of entertainment as fast, a well-packaged use of time.  But we also need to think about investing time in those whom we seek to engage in the art expereince.  It is important to think about organic processes which develop over time.  We need to have ways of working by which we can change over time -- begin with a series of questions and, through a co-investigation with the public, arrive at answers that work for that given situation, if not all.  Entering into a mode of inquiry is a useful strategy not only for drawing the visitor into the work of art, but also for enabling the museum professional to design programs. We need time to enter into a self-critical process and to bring staff from different museum departments into the discussion in order to analyze, reflect, and think—emotionally and intellectually— about what a program aims to do and what it means for the concept and meaning of your museum. 

Most of all we need to value the public experience, which brings me to the word respect.  This involves thinking beyond standard, marketing study-driven audience profiles and imagine who is or could be the museum visitor. To respect audience is also to understand that people do come to museums to learn.  The public doesn’t have to have a type of anesthetized learning, to be entertained and then surprised they were educated in the process.  The information we give does not have to be simplified and reductive because we are addressing a broader, so-called uninitiated public.  More complex, deeper meanings do not necessarily mean more information (have more art history packed in), but can come about through a participatory process.  We don’t need to prescribe to a deficiency syndrome by which we view the audience as lacking knowledge.  Learning, understanding, and appreciating art can start with what people already know and build other meanings from there.  In encouraging visitors’ stories to emerge, museum staff can become both teacher and student in an exchange that can re-inform our practice. 

Finally, I want to focus on the word stories.  Museum education is not just an issue of telling a story better, but of telling multiple stories around the same object, of which the museum’s narrative is one.  These are not stories in a linear or progressive sequence but different and conflictual versions.  To encourage this to happen, we need to allow for multiple routes of access to art.  Lisa Roberts, in From Knowledge to Narrative (Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997), defines education in ways that point to this possibility: (1) entertainment, linguistic and cultural forms that are comfortable to people and may fall outside traditional forms of cognitive engagement; (2) empowerment, people allowed to speak to what is meaningful to them from their own experiences, to take an active role in defining meaning according to individual and cultural context; (3) experience, the context and character of the visit; and (4) ethics, recognizing that educational content emanates from a belief system and these values need to be revealed as to their role in the construction of meaning—not just the values of visitors but of the museum and of the artist.  For Roberts, education is a narrative endeavor. 

How does a museum impart information while also engendering personal narratives?  How can alternative meanings be negotiated? How can the museum create an environment for posing questions, leaving itself open for questioning, too?  How does a museum allow for conflict which can be a corollary of acknowledging multiple meanings?

In his book Trickster Makes the World: Mischief, Myth, and Art (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998), Lewis Hyde discusses the Latin word articulus (which can mean joint in a body) as part of the word group with the ancient root –ar, meaning to join, to fit, to make.  From this we derive ars or art (skill, artifice, craft), a performance, a work of art) as well as artus (joint in body).  Hyde goes on to speak of artists as artus-workers, joint workers, tricksters who can rearticulate things for ends which have larger social and spiritual implications.  Trickster artists shift relationships between things, move our thinking, and change the shape of things.  They are able to traverse boundaries and facilitate communication.  They are the translators, the boundary crossers who, in articulating things, connect them. Thus, artists exist between realms, inhabit a place between fixed points or polarities in order to bridge differences.

The notion of trickster may lead us to a way of defining the function of museums in regard to audiences and the culture-at-large.  Museums serve the role of communicator and educator.  As places that can be forums for understanding differences, museums can begin a process by which visitors can evaluate art and ideas, comparing their own perspective to other narratives (that of the museum, critics, other persons, and so on).  The audience’s engagement in viewing art is a critical activity.  It is one of inquiry: posing questions but not necessarily answering them, examining art critically and discovering the right questions to think about when viewing a work of art.  Education is to teach this critical thinking, showing us how to think about art and about the world, and how to negotiate meaning in both the realms.  Through education we can enable museumgoers to determine which interpretations and ideas are true and meaningful to them.  This will, hopefully, lead them to discover how art can have meaning in their lives.  If we can do that with the tools of entertainment, too, then great.  Entertainment per se is not a critical tool for evaluation, but it can help enhance the job of education— and herein lies the greatest difference between education and entertainment.

A few notes.  We need to be involved in this process, not hand over the job to experts, but view education as everyone’s job in the museum and determine how all departments can be engaged in critical analysis, reflect on all functions and aspects of the institution.  We must be directly part of the experience of rethinking the museum experience.  This is beginning to happen, for instance, at Bard College’s Center for Curatorial Studies where I teach; there students are using education as a creative and critical process intrinsic to exhibition making.  It is happening, too, with artists who have been trained during the last twenty years to think and act critically.  Artists can aid us immensely in this task and, in doing so, we can also learn about what artists do and why they are important to society.

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