OpenCulture

I was lucky enough to be invited to speak yesterday at the West Midlands Museums Federation event on A Sustainable Future? It was interesting, partly because it has coincided with a real rush of Green Museum events and discussions elsewhere this week, and partly because I think that some of the messages coming out of yesterday have a much deeper resonance across the rest of the sector.

The first thing that struck me, as I arrived at the BMAG Collections Center in Duddeston, was Chair Phillipa Tinsley’s badge of office, suspended from a ribbon festooned with the names of past chairs stretching back to the mid-Fifties. Here, in the form of the Federation, is an organisation that is all about the long now. Outlived only by the Museums Association, it has seen strategies, wars, strikes, recessions, changes in practice, the invention of the Internet, and has calmly carried on serving a useful purpose through all of them.

In a world in which Twitter helps us look at a resolution of ‘23 seconds ago’, and the Election is pushing us to look at a resolution of the next 6 months, it is really useful to remember that the further back you stand, the more these incipient crises resolve into the flutterings of a general trend that is moving forever upward.

I was invited to keynote, and inspired partly by the general air of implacability, took the opportunity to take a very harsh look at the realities of the current environment. The main thrust of my presentation was that there can be no doubt whatsoever that the Golden Age of cultural funding, which began with Chris Smith in the mid-90’s, is coming to an end, and that there are two ways we can respond.

The first is to shrink back into our shells, abandoning in the process the great advances in museum thinking over the past two decades, and wait until the sun shines once again on culture. The second is to embrace this inevitable transition from one professional model to the next, and to try and proactively seize it as an opportunity to consolidate and shout about the new narrative of how Collections can serve society.

We run the risk, as organisations trample over each other to demonstrate their public value through exhibitions, acquisitions and outreach, of abandoning one of the most important achievements of the past decade - which is the unification of Collections and public service as two parts of the same process. We risk a return to the old polarity, and in the process a loss of that tremendous momentum towards ensuring that culture is reflective of life, and not reductive.

This, to me, is the risk of trying to preserve what is now (which is only, after all, the professional reality of the past 10-15 years and not some immutable fact about the world) against the colossal, epochal shifts in the wider political and consumer environment.

On the other hand, we can regard the current chill wind as a natural part of the cycle of the sector, and one for which we can prepare by ensuring that we are suitably provisioned and equipped to deal with it. I put forward the idea that the best way of working with the grain of the current emergent situation is to go back to first principles, and make sure that we are confident in the basic tenets of our profession.

To the meeting, I offered the following points, and I offer them also here for comments, thoughts and criticism!

1. I suggest that, in some appropriate forum, we strip things right back to the very first principle - which is the question of why society should care about Culture. I think that the majority of people working in Culture share a common belief, which is the belief in what happens when someone stands in front of something they have never experienced before, could never experience anywhere else, and come away having been transformed by it.That is the basis of our contribution to society, and on it are built great inventions, great cultures and great advances for humanity.This is the unique power of Culture, and it is telling that so many people I speak to have lost touch with it. So many people are so entrenched in fighting the battle that they have lost sight of that divine spark of inspiration which says that this business is worth protecting, and worth committing a career to.If this is what we, collectively, believe then we have everything we could wish for - a common, powerful motivation. From this, we can ask ourselves the questions of how it should best be achieved, whether the museums of today are the best vehicle for achieving it, how we can imagine a future in which we do it better. But the first step in weathering this particular storm has to involve reconnecting with the intrinsic wonder of working with Collections and people.
2. The second proposal is that we drag out into the cold, harsh light of day our collective family secret, and deal with it. We have way, way, too much stuff and we are looking after a lot of it really badly. We have more stuff than we can keep safe, more than we can document, more than we can preserve. And having too much stuff does profound damage to our ability to look after, interpret and protect the stuff that does matter.Worse than this, the secret of the crap we’re hanging onto is accreting like an undigestible lump in the pit of our collective stomach. Every cupboard bulging with material, every unaccessioned object, every corner of the store piled high with unmarked boxes to be ‘dealt with one day’, every single one of these things is holding us back, and staining us with an indelible mark of unprofessionalism.Because that ‘one day’ is here. While we were rushing towards the future, sustained by the rocket fuel of easy funding, it was ok to ignore a few incomplete accession forms here and there, to put that broken cartwheel to one side. But not that growth has stopped, that the fuel is spent, now is the time when we have to confront those easy decisions and make up for them.We have to deal with this legacy of poor and incomplete practice swiftly and decisively before it becomes toxic, before it critically undermines our ability to advocate for what the sector has achieved in becoming more progressive and open than ever before. I suggest that to do this, we look to the mantra of the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People ‘do it, delegate it or delete it’. With our collections, we must use them, hand them on for someone else to use, or dispose of them. And we must do it proactively, positively, in plain sight and in open consultation with our audiences.
3. The next proposal, which builds on the last, is that we go back and query that other great tenet of the museum faith - that we should own everything. We must ask ourselves as a professional community whether the first responsibility of museums is to own things, or to curate, interpret and present them. Because if our real endgame is ownership, then we are going to fail in our mission to collect and reflect contemporary material. The market for art and antiquities is global, and while in some collecting areas is may be possible to use public funds to collect material, it is no longer tenable to use public investment to participate in a competitive art market that has lost all touch with notions of real value. Public Private Partnership is neither a sin nor a political trick - if you take the capital letters away, it is about two different communities with different but mutually complementary aims working together to achieve both their own singular aims and those of the common good.
4. My next proposal is not really a proposal at all, but an observation. That in Tony Butler’s No-Growth Economy, in this brave new cultural economy that will start in 8 weeks and continue for the next 5 years, the first and most fundamental principle has to be sharing. No museum is an island, although they sometimes behave as though they were when the chips are down. But survival in this economy will depend in part on your willingness to share - large institutions will become small, small ones will band together, unweildy top-down structures will have to become more agile and connected.And in the process, a new mantra is emerging of shared infrastructure, shared services, shared people, shared knowledge, shared time, effort, even comfort. Solidarity is likely to become the new byword as people overcome the short-term discomfort of living in closer proximity to each other and depending more on each other than they had to in the past.But it is not only with each other that Museums will need to share. They will need to learn to share resources, spaces, audiences with other sectors - be they private, public, commercial, non-commercial. Wherever our interests are in common, we will need to explore how best to work with other people to achieve our objectives.And we will, I hope, also continue that vital golden thread of the past 10 years of learning to share with our users. As the hyperbole about Web 2.0 and crowdsourcing recedes, what is left is a return to the basic idea of a volunteer economy - and this is an economy which has continued throughout the past two decades of development.It is telling that of all the sub-divisions of the Culture sector, the one that is set to weather this incipient storm with greatest dignity and fortitude is the National Trust - which has been constructed since its foundation on the twin principles of the long-now and the ability of collective goodwill to move mountains, and which perhaps binged less than any of us on the ready availability of taxpayers cash in the past.
5. And my final proposal concerns standards. There is a risk that the current generation of professional standards, born as they were in a foment of creativity and reinvention for museums in the 70’s and 80’s, don’t come to be used as a tool to obstruct the changes that need to happen in the sector. Standards such as the new Museum Accreditation Scheme, which is soon to be released for sector consultation, must be useful, relevant and agile enough to ensure that they promote the interests of the sector and its audiences.

So, to conclude, I offer the my closing remarks from the talk to the West Midlands Museum Federation (which wasn’t nearly as good, by the way as Maurice Davies absolutely outstanding talk on his Sustainability work - of which more in a future post). As I say, I’d welcome any and all comments!

There are, it seems to me, two ways we can go from here, two paths we can take. One is to retreat, to enter hibernation and to wait for the sunshine to fall once again on the old way of doing things. A sunshine that may take a very long time to come, if it ever arrives.

The other is to take ownership of our destiny, positively and proactively, and to create a new narrative about how Collections can help stabilise a troubled society, how they can contribute to the process of rebuilding, how we can make ourselves more efficient and more open, and how we can deliver public value in the process.

So I’d invite you not to think about sustaining what is, but to embrace the process of change, to reimagine the future and help to create a new, clear and compelling narrative about the value of what we do and the wayw do it.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 26th, 2010 at 3:52 pm and is filed under Business Models, General, Linked Data, Nick Poole. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.