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Blockbusters, Museum Consortiums, and Their Pitfalls
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15387 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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12 / 1989 |
1,823 Words |
| Author
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Eric Gibson
Eric Gibson, art critic for the Washington Times, last wrote
on Henry Ossewa Tanner in the September 1991 issue of The
World & I. |
It hardly needs restating that the blockbuster art exhibition--the "Treasures of" and other such shows whose selling point is monetary value or pure exoticism--has over the last twenty years transformed virtually every aspect of the museum world. They have attracted visitors to museums in numbers unimaginable even a decade ago. In the process they have filled the coffers of both the institution and the host city with much-needed cash in the form of gate receipts, bookstore and restaurant sales at the museums themselves, and for the cities, everything from hotel rooms to sales taxes. After the Renoir retrospective concluded in Boston a few years ago, the city fathers reported that it had earned approximately $20 million for the city. It is fair to say, in other words, that no major museum and no city can now afford to be without at least one blockbuster on its exhibition calendar each year. If it didn't exist today, then someone would have to invent it.
But like all addictions, the art world's craving for the blockbuster exhibition has not come, as it were, free of charge. At its best it is a kind of Faustian bargain for the museums, in which their tinkling cash registers and glowing bottom lines are arrived at in exchange for attracting to the museum large numbers of people who may have no serious interest in art except to the extent that it can be regarded as a form of entertainment, something no more demanding than television, even if it doesn't resemble it in every respect. The museums have on many occasions been all too willing to give the public what it wants, never mind that it risks cheapening and debasing not only the art on view but the very purpose of a museum.
Another price that has been exacted for the blockbuster
... (1994 of 10896 Characters)
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