OpenCulture

Yesterday’s announcement about the High Court ruling that the Wedgwood Museum’s collections can be sold as an asset to contribute to the £134m pension shortfall of the Wedgwood company has prompted me to return again to the theme of how fragile a museum’s legal relationship with its Collections can sometimes be. (more…)

What are the essential ingredients of a museum? If you’d asked this question perhaps 10 years ago, the list would have been pretty straightforward - walls, objects, respectful visitors, curators. The mental archetype of the museum in the popular consciousness would have been a place with things in it, cared for by people who knew about the things. Probably wearing tweed, and almost certainly male.

Fast forward a decade, and the picture is nothing like as simple. Walls? Pah. A museum is so much more than walls - it is an attitude, a belief, a set of principles, a pop-up in a shopping centre, a tent on the foreshore of the Thames.

Things? So 90’s. Yes, of course we need some stuff, but only to the extent that they help us tell the human story of the world. Collections are the heart of the museum, but they are (or should be) subordinate to design, interpretation, narrative and experience.

Respectful visitors? Sod that, culture-nazi. Museums are places of joy, celebration, learning, entertainment and egalitarianism. They’ve even got kids in, for god’s sake. Where once the museum had every right to expect its visitors to be quiet, well-behaved and have at least a nodding acquaintance with clerical latin and taxonomy, nowadays it is very much the duty of the mountain to make itself available for Mohammed.

And Curators? Well, thereby hangs a tale.

Every good story needs its heroes and its villains. It needs simple 2-dimensional characters we can boo and cheer at. And in the story of the progress of museums in the past decade, it is very often the curator that has found themselves the villain of the piece.

If the thrust of museum discourse is essentially progressive, the curator has come to represent everything that is retrograde about the ‘old’ museology. Where much of the rhetoric about museums is about openness and equality of participation, the lazy characterisation of curators is as hoarders of knowledge, using their control over ideas to exter control over their colleagues - indeed over the museum itself.

The archetypal curator is essentially an academic - highly specialist, extremely focussed and driven not by the impulse to share knowledge with a non-specialist audience but by the urge to enhance the general fund of scientific understanding. This is a gross characterisation, of course, there are many curators whose greatest gift is communication but there are just as many for whom the public role of museums is an unfortunate inconvenience to be tolerated not celebrated.

The heyday of the ‘old-school’ curator in England really ran between 1890, the great period of expansion and collecting (not just in museums) and the 1950’s. During this period, the supremacy of the curator as the arbiter of knowledge and objective truths was largely axiomatic - nobody really questioned it. Then, of course, society changed, and museums changed - the great expansion of social policy, the invention of social history, the re-coding of the museum’s role in society all happened between 1960 and 1980, and things have never been quite the same since.

Today, in all but the largest National and Regional museums, the idea that every collection (not just every museum) should have a curator is almost an anachronism. The assault on curatorship came from numerous angles all at once:

• There was the argument of simple economics - as museums have had to increase delivery on diminishing budgets, the idea of a specialist curator attached to every collection became simply untenable. Indeed the idea of having a specialist curator in every museum (along with the concept of having in-house access to a professional conservator) is now regarded simply as a financial impossibility by many.
• Then came the Collections Manager - if you look back over the last 10 years of Museums Journal recruitment ads, there is a marked trend. People stopped advertising for specialist roles like ‘curator’ and ‘documentation officer’ and instead started advertising for more broad-spectrum curatorial roles like the slightly suspect ‘keeper’ and, particularly ‘Collections Manager’. The Collections Manager was expected to bridge two worlds - the world of business process/management and the world of curatorship. In the process curatorship came to be seen as a set of repeatable processes, and started to become detached from the idea of scholarship and subject authority.
• Then came a profound shift in the design idiom of museums. We abandoned almost completely that onslaught of skeletons and picture frames and handwritten labels and camphour fumes that characterised the Victorian museum and embraced instead light, space, sparseness - the idiom of the art gallery and the experience. Where once people came to a museum to see as many unusual things as possible, now they come to experience the whole museum.
• Then came the Internet, and with it the appropriation of the word ‘curate’. People today curate their shoe cupboard, they curate online exhibitions by choosing some pictures, they curate social media strands of conferences (apologies for that one). A ‘curator’ meant someone who had deep specific technical and/or scientific knowledge of the subject of their collection, and who used that knowledge to develop the collection, to research it and to enhance the general fund of knowledge. Like an academic forced to perform on a reality TV show, the need for the curator to reduce this knowledge to a form suitable for public exhibition was not always a comfortable fit.

There are all sorts of reasons, practical and political for the devaluation of the currency of curatorship. And yes, there is a case to be made that the control exerted over the museum by its curators had become a limiting factor on its ability to change, and that some degree of positive action was necessary to redress this balance. But we have to guard against the risk of going too far in the opposite direction.

The Collections Trust’s vision of a sustainable museum is inherently about balance. Like the Ancient Greeks believed that health was a question of keeping the humours of air, earth, fire and water in balance, we believe that a healthy museum is one in which four priorities - humans, collections, knowledge and money - are kept in equal and mutually respectful balance.

A balanced museum cannot function without curatorial knowledge. Curatorial knowledge cannot function without the support of learning, access, outreach, gallery and web. Neither can function without money. None has a purpose if they are not used.

The risk of not having access to ‘old school’ curators is that museums will gradually stop moving forward, and will instead begin to feed on the knowledge and collections accumulated in the 40 years either side of the turn of the century. A revolving video in the Natural History Museum tells visitors that ‘90% of the worlds species haven’t been discovered yet’ (how do they know??) and yet many museums have quietly stopped acquiring, stopped carrying out new research.

Two candidates have emerged in recent years to backfill the loss of specific knowledge that comes from having a curator. One is crowdsourcing, the other is joining together what remains of the UK’s ‘network of expertise’ into Subject Specialist Networks. The crowdsourcing vision holds that knowledge of the collection is not the preserve of the museum, and that if we can but unlock the vast untapped reserves of knowledge in the community, we can extend the idea of participatory culture to embrace participatory curatorship. I have always been troubled by this - the flipside of the ‘Wisdom of the Crowd’ is the ‘immense self-reinforcing stupidity of the crowd’ - the fact that when crowds are right, they can often be more right than experts, but when they are wrong, groupthink can make them forget to question.

Subject Specialist Networks are a vital, indeed thriving way of opening out specialist knowledge, of filling gaps and of helping people support one another - but they are an adjunct to, not a replacement for, the idea of having curators in museums working with their collections.

And so what to do? We cannot go back - a return to the hegemony of the curator would help neither curators not the rest of the essential functions of a museum. But perhaps we could made some different decisions about how we go forward. Instead of regarding curators and ‘other staff’ as being at odds, perhaps we could focus instead on their common aim to preserve heritage and to make it available for education, enjoyment and research. I think too much has changed to re-assert the old role of the curator. Perhaps instead we could think about how we assert a new role that is fundamentally predicated on balance.

On the 5th December, I attended the first of 5 meetings of a new initiative called the ‘Museum Ethics Network’. Funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council and led by the School of Museum Studies at Leicester the purpose of the network is to examine the current ethical framework governing museums, to test it and to identify potential ways forward.

Now, I freely admit that I approach ethics with a healthy dollop of skepticism. Having studied it first at UCL (as part of an MA in the History & Philosophy of Science) and latterly at Cranfield Business School (as part of a course on ‘Case Based learning’) I know that discussions of ethics can very quickly dissolve into a miasma of semantics and end up sounding more like a 6th-form cider-fuelled theology debate than a reasoned discussion.

However, at the risk of prefacing the next meeting’s discussion - it has never been more important that we revisit, engage with and really test the foundation of our ethical principles. The entire sector is being tested on the forge of relevance, and it is at times like these, when there is no real political or professional pole star to orientate by, that ethics is pretty much all we have. The only way, in other words, is ethics (sorry, but I managed to hold that in throughout the entire meeting).

The network brings together a really interesting group of people - David Fleming from National Museums Liverpool, tireless campaigner for social justice and human rights, Manchester’s Nick Merriman, Leicester’s Jocelyn Dodd and new(ish) recruit Janet Marstine, Eithne Nightingale, the V&A Head of Diversity Strategy, Mark O’Neill from Culture and Sport Glasgow, NHM’s John Jackson and a whole range of others.

The semantic issue was neatly side-stepped by James Dempsey o fthe University of Leeds, who works with many different types of business and organisation to explore the meaning and function of ehtics in their institution. He provided a neat triumverate of ‘ways of expressing ethics’ which I will try to reproduce here:

1. Case studies - which have the advantage of a loose, organic approach to ethics which helps people to think rather than presrcibing answers (but with the corollary that they are relatively unstructured)

2. Codes of Conduct - which are clearly-expressed and have the quality of sets of rules, but which militate against creative and informed decision-making based on sound judgement.

3. Values - tacit or explicit expressions of corporate principles or values which provide a broad frame of reference within which decisions can be made.

James pointed out that none of these is mutually exclusive, and that they all centre on the idea of a rational individual who will bring to them their own personal frame of reference. I think this is a neat exposition - although I think that in reality decisions are more often made on the basis of custom, practice or process and that whether an action is good or bad, right or wrong, is really an emergent property of the process of being a museum. I am not sure, outside a smallish number of highly specific contexts (such as restitution, repatriation or potentially controversial subject matter) whether people think very much about ethics in their daily work.

Next up was Nick Merriman, who had been asked to give a potted history of the development of Codes of Ethics for Museums. Speaking with characteristic erudition, Nick explored the way in which the idea of professional standards for museums emerged from the idea of museums as a ‘profession’. Mark O’Neill observed that this was, itself, partly a response to Thatcher’s concerted attack on the professions in the mid-1980’s, which prompted many sectors to codify themselves as professions. Nick explored the emergence of the MA Code of Ethics as a curatorially-led development, supported by a broad framework of discourse and training. He looked at the broader definition adopted by ICOM  and the way in which both were ultimately assertions of professionalism on behalf of the broad spectrum of people working in museums.

From there, the discussion opened out into a broad exploration of the different dimensions of ethics. I have a visualisation of this discussion, which I will post here when I can next get to a scanner, but to characterise some of the dimensions:

1. The concept and expression of ‘professional ethics’ as a codified set of principles and associated governing rules of behaviour. Both the MA and the ICOM Code of Ethics fall into this category, and there was an interesting discussion of the intellectual model of museums manifest in both documents. There was a feeling around the room that both are too anodyne and lacking in ambition and direction to form a useful direction for the ‘virtuous museum’ (a beautiful content of John Jackson’s and one to which I am sure we will return). In particular, there is nothing in either document which speaks to the moral imperative of engagement, inclusion, representation or diversity.
2. The connection between ethics and social policy - I got nervous here, as I do whenever people speak of a polarity between ‘collections’ and ‘people’. There was a slight tinge of ‘museums have focussed on procedural and structural standards for collections (cover your ears, SPECTRUM) because this is easier, or less challenging than addressing social issues. There was a really interesting discussion about the idea of ethics in relation to the principle of democracy and the right to representation.

   At this point, there was a fascinating discussion which I can’t do full justice to here about the implications of the current change in political and strategic direction for the sector. Some felt that with the Coalition Government, we will see an end to projects and developments focussed on diversity and democracy, that the advances of the previous decade will be set aside as inclusion comes to be seen as an unaffordable luxury and that a new trend towards appointing Trustee’s with strong right-wing views will undermine the hard-won egalitarianism of modern museum practice. Personally, I think this is too apocalyptic, but it is hard to argue with the fact that there is a lot less emphasis on inclusion in the current and forthcoming generation of funding programmes.

3. The connection between ethics and human rights - the fact that Collections Trust takes as our starting point in all collections-related work the principle enshrined in Articla 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (’that everyone shall have the right freely to participate in the cultural life of their community’) and that actually both the MA and ICOM Codes of Ethics are quite sufficient if you incorporate this fundamental assertion of ‘rights’ in front of them.
4. The extent to which the public role of museums, based as it is in the concept of trust, is rooted in our professional ethics. Several people questioned whether the more flexible approach currently taken to ethical decisions (particularly around financially-motivated disposal) would either undermine the public trust in museums or help them to understand the ethical dimension of our work.
5. The extent to which ethics is informed by the financial circumstances of the UK museums sector - including an interesting discussion of how museums can make ethical decisions about the companies with whom they enter into partnership.
6. The ‘philosophical’ idea of ethics as a domain of discourse and where, if at all, museums have open discussions based on the realities of current working practice.
7. The idea of ’systemic’ ethics - that ethical implications arise as a by-product of the simple act of managing a collection and can be an emergent property of the systems we use to do the job. In this context, it is interesting to look at the issue of whether documentation, selection, digitisation - which are often presented as ‘neutral’ processes, can either serve to reinforce prejudice or highlight and guard against it.
8. The idea of environmental ethics - the responsibility to the object, to the public and to the impact on the broader environment. In this context, we discussed the Eden project as well as the new radical wing of conservators who are taking a more aggressively ‘risk-based’ approach to thinking about environmental management.
9. The idea of ethical codes as a defence mechanism - that while the majority of people never read or refer to the MA or ICOM Codes, they frequently invoke them either to defend their practice or to help inform non-museum colleagues about the value and impact of their work.
10. The idea of ethics as a necessary element in addressing the statutory requirement to demonstrate public benefit required of museums as charitable organisations.

There are, I’m sure, many other dimensions - but I found it fascinating to explore the ways in which ethics impact directly both on practice but also, critically, on public value, trust and identity.

And so to the afternoon session, which focussed on ‘Social Engagement and Ethics’. Again, I confess this had me worried initially - there had been an interesting undercurrent to the morning session that the focus of professional practice on collections had somehow been to the detriment of their ’social’ function, or at least that museums had been much more successful in being explicit about the former, but less so the latter. In the event, though, my concerns were more or less unfounded - it turned out to be less about collections-bashing and more about something much more interesting - social justice.

I want to explore Mark O’Neill’s presentation in detail and at greater length elsewhere. It was, frankly, scintillating - a brilliant, clear exposition of why museums are where they are and how they got here. I’ll restrict myself to covering a couple of his core ideas:

There are 3 ‘types’ of museum (actually, there are 3 stages of progression, but it’s simpler to say ‘types’):

• Elite museums - of which there are very few left, but which exist in splendid isolation from ideas of audience or social utility and are able to focus instead on art for arts-sake and the pursuit of truth and beauty in and of themselves.
• ‘Welfare’ museums - which are essentially elite museums onto which the functions of education and inclusion have been grafted. These form the majority of museums, and while they pay homage to and use the language of inclusion and diversity, are still essentially focussed on the idea of transmitting privileged knowledge. As an aside - we talked about what happened to Renaissance, and there was an interesting sense that the Renaissance Hubs had been aborted in the transition from elite to welfare museums, and before they had an opportunity to achieve the kind of root-and-branch long-term change required to change them permanently into category 3, which is….
• ‘Social Justice’ museums - which understand and pursue truth and beauty, but which are fundamentally constructed around the needs of real people and which also recognise the role of inclusion and diversity - that there are many truths and many subjective forms of beauty, that are egalitarian rather than privileged and which work in partnership with their audiences.

I am paraphrasing inadequately, of course, and Mark said much more besides. I suspect that there are very few museums now that do not at least aspire to be museums of social justice, but I was fascinated by the ‘path’ to museum enlightenment (my words not his) which Mark offered. He described a progression through a number of stages:

• Avoidance
• Tokenism
• Projects
• Bolt-on services
• Integrated services
• Full integration

I think this is valuable because I think it helps to think about where on this progression your museum is, and whether Mark and David are right that we risk slipping back a few rungs in the current political climate.

Next up, David Fleming. Instead of giving a presentation, he started with a simple statement ‘Museums serve elites’, then stood up and read the National Museums Liverpool’s Strategic Plan. I’m not sure if this is publicly available anywhere, but if it is, I suggest you track it down. Better still, I suggest you track David down and get him to read it to you. It begins with the words ‘We change lives…’ and continues on to address public stress, the welfare and prosperity of Liverpool, connectedness and - to me the most fundamental word of all - confidence. It could not be a clearer expression of the museum as agents of social change, as needing to deliver real value for a city where deprivation and joblessness are endemic. He finished by sharing some interesting statistics about the socio-economic profiling of the audiences of National Museums, published by the DCMS in their annual review of KPI for the Nationals.

And so where did all this get us? A long way and nowhere at all, really. We rehearsed some familiar ground about the sociological function of museums, we heard some interesting ideas about how to structure thinking about professional ethics, we highlighted the value and limitations of the existing Codes of Ethics. We know about the ‘triple bottom-line’ of museums, about the many ethical dimensions of daily life. We acknowledged the chasm between ethics and practice.

The real question, of course, is not the subject itself, but in the idea of change. There was a suspicion that, if the political tides have turned against instrumentalism and social policy, then ethics could become a more ‘palatable’ vehicle through which to pursue the same principles. It was pointed out that social engagement is a campaign which polarises, whereas appealing on the basis of ethics is a much harder line to deflect. Some people suggested a toolkit, others felt it would be sufficient to explore the issues, others, too, felt that it was time to revisit the MA and ICOM Codes of Ethics and to use them to express a statement of intent on behalf of all museums.

And me? Well, I spent the day in the company of some brilliant brains, and there are three phrases which stood out for me:

• ‘Museums should be unafraid’
• ‘Relevance is the key to survival’
• ‘Ethics is the basis of confidence’

I’ll blog the next few sessions, and I really look forward to seeing how the discussion evolves from here. In the meantime, I would love to hear your thoughts and comments on the question of the role of ethics in museums!