Karp & Lavine (1993) Communities and Museums: Partners in Crisis

This article is a partial synopsis of the book, Museums and Communities by the same authors. It looks at the evolving perspective of museum curators and staff toward their audiences and vice versa. It discusses paens made in the post-recession 1990s to the need for demonstrable value and accountability in public institutions (think "Contract with America"), and what that meant for the future of museums. What value do museums have to society? Why should they continue to be funded by communities or governments?

Karp and Lavine hold that museums—those that continue to take a one-way, top-down approach to the communication of vetted culture, at any rate—are likely to have a hard time answering this question adequately.

As the authors point out, in a struggle to survive in the face of scant patronage, many museums had already begun to "consider their audience" by installing entertainment-heavy blockbuster exhibits intended to appeal to the lowest common denominator (think "Bodyworlds").

Critics suggest that something has been lost in this transition to massive, lavishly produced exhibits—that museums have made this leap at the expense of reputations as repositories of high culture and spaces for quiet reflection. The authors spend some time picking apart one such critique by New Yorker essayist Adam Gopnik.

Gopnik may have a point, they say, but his criticism is not sensitive to the economic pressure felt by museums to draw bigger crowds, and even to compete with amusement parks, which increasingly include education in their mission statements.

None of this is to say that Karp and Lavine believe the blockbuster exhibit is the solution to museums' need to be relevant. On the contrary, they suggest that attendance figures are a poor surrogate for the cultural value of museums. Mere crowd size does not speak to the value of the quality of the experience of attending a given exhibit, which is their preferred metric.

To increase their cultural value, museums should not focus myopically on entertainment—value, which they've tended to do in a very top-down fashion, but should instead begin to view the mounting of exhibits as a two-way communication process. Museums shouldn't just market to more visitors or more diverse visitors. They should engage in dialogue with these audiences, and let them inform the forms that the museum's exhibits and outreach programs take.

The authors close by giving examples of museums that have engaged with their audiences in more or less successful fashions, and by pointing out the strengths and weaknesses of these experiments. Suffice to say that successful engagement must avoid several pitfalls, which the examples elucidate—either through their limitations or their success.

One is the building of exhibits that explore multicultural points of view, but in a way that appeal primarily to the same educated, white crowd to whom the museum has always catered. The second is for a museum to be so responsive to the demands of its audience that it loses sight of the aim of objectivity.

The authors close the article by reiterating their main points, calling for museums to be spaces for experimentation, and pointing out that if museums are to truly take on new forms, they may have to buck their traditional forms of institutional organization.