collections represent both economic and cultural control. Others countered that, within the context of shared guardianship, there is the potential to think about collecting as an ethical good.
Moving beyond canonicity
The fourth workshop took a narrow lens to focus on ethics in one particular type of museum – the art museum. Marstine asserted that many of the ethical challenges endemic in art museums and galleries stem from the principles and assumptions of canonicity. She explained how judgments of quality, based on subjective and culturally relative factors including aesthetics, originality, and influence, determine a canon; a canon is thus an exclusionary sifting device that delineates boundaries between insiders and outsiders, the core and the margins. This discrimination leaks from the artistic to the social sphere: in perpetuating canonicity, art museums and galleries implicitly also perpetuate social inequalities that create barriers to participation. Marstine argued that canonicity encourages art museums to extend themselves financially to develop costly blockbuster exhibitions and to acquire high-priced works by canonical artists, and, as a result, many art museums make ethical compromises, from accepting funding from ethically tainted corporations to overlooking conflicts of interest. Despite the focus on art museums, the workshop raised issues relevant to other types of museums, particularly the ways in which canonicity translates to history, science, anthropology, and natural history museum settings. Participants acknowledged that canonicity in these other settings often operates through hierarchies attached to factors such as provenance, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, race, and class. Poole asserted that the canon reinforces the founding identity of the museum as a means of organizing and structuring the world: “it’s difficult to take institutions founded as such and transform them into reflective and responsive spaces.”
Issues of canonicity illuminate a crisis of values that dissuades museums from tackling inequalities. John Jackson, from the Natural History Museum in London, was critical of the ways in which museums naturalize canonicity without explaining how, and by whom, it is constructed. Matt Smith, a Brighton-based artist and curator, discussed the burdens of canonicity from a queer perspective. He explained how narratives of canonicity exclude LGBT experiences and discussed examples from his own work that refute and unsettle this exclusivity. David Anderson argued that museums invest very little in meaningful social participation and staff assume that the institution itself has intrinsic, rather than instrumental, value. Rather, he said, “[i]t is the objects within them, rather than the organizations themselves, that have intrinsic value.” Basu added that the nineteenth-century notion of the art museum as a “civilizing institution” is alive and well. Merriman championed working with artists to develop imaginative and creative approaches to collections and exhibitions, but Sandahl and Nightingale voiced frustration that one-off artist-driven initiatives too often enable museums to ignore the potential of such projects to produce organizational change.
Professor Richard Sandell of the School of Museum Studies at the University of Leicester explored BP’s sponsorship of Tate and the powerful protest art of activist group Liberate Tate in critiquing this partnership (see Chong, this volume). When questions arose about the assumption that corporate funding is tainted while public money is always free from compromise, Megone cautioned that it is always challenging to analyze the ethical practices of any organization and its supply chains. Jackson asked whether the ethical practices of individual donors should be scrutinized before their contribution is accepted. Merriman admitted that the UK MA ethics committee does not consider cases concerned with museum sponsorship; almost all of its work involves collections issues. Jackson remarked that most museums make funding decisions based on risk assessment, not on ethics.
Overall, there was no consensus that art museums are particularly weak in addressing ethical issues. Some discussants were concerned that the critique of canonicity was not more widespread and that most practitioners believed that art museums are valuable spaces of creativity, inquiry, and reflection. Sandell declared that quality and social justice are not mutually exclusive. Jocelyn Dodd shared the findings from a long-term RCMG project that evaluated the impact of art works on the perceptions, feelings, and attitudes of young people. Though unfamiliar with art museums, the sample respondents had the opportunity for sustained engagement with a particular painting: Raphael’s Madonna of the Pinks (National Gallery, London). The research showed that age, ability, and previous knowledge of art are not prerequisites for engaging with such canonical works; the experiences of the young people involved were enjoyable, thought-provoking, and in many cases enabled self-reflection and considerable skills to be developed (RCMG 2007). Do projects like this challenge canonicity or legitimize it through public funding? Merriman pointed out that some art museums have taken significant steps to deconstruct canonicity; he cited Kelvingrove in Glasgow, which challenges canonicity by treating artworks like all other museum objects. He also expressed some concern with the “missionary zeal” with which social responsibility was thrust upon museums and galleries, believing it was also important for people to have the choice to resist museums. Others countered that, for many people, resisting is not a choice because the power structures in place do not equally empower diverse publics to exercise their cultural rights.
What would it mean to exercise ethical leadership in the art museum? IDEA CETL took the lead in asking how the museum sector might find common ground. Megone suggested that museums could look to universities, which grapple with many of the same ethical dilemmas of participation and access, but also acknowledge their moral agency as they challenge traditional hierarchies of disciplines and “ways of knowing.” Partnerships between art museums and museum studies departments could offer new ways to think beyond canonicity. IDEA CETL lecturer Jamie Dow advocated a role for museum professionals, in conjunction with museum studies researchers, to define more rigorously the “social good” that museums promote. David Anderson suggested we re-examine the values of public service, which are rarely discussed, as a way of thinking. The workshop as a whole revealed that alternative ways of valuing artistic practice beyond the hierarchies of canonicity can help art museums and galleries to generate shared authority more successfully and become, as Jackson put it, “social actors beyond matters of taste and cultural capital.”
Sustainability
The fifth and final meeting of the network examined the theme of sustainability and, like many of the other workshops, raised ethical debates that were not easily resolved. Nick Poole, who opened the discussions, identified the need to decide the parameters of sustainability in museums; specifically, what should be sustained, why, and who decides. Poole characterized sustainability as “managing a dynamic equilibrium between consumption and production by establishing priorities.” He acknowledged the many conflicting definitions of perpetuity: from 100 years, which is how many museum professionals frame long-term impact, to thousands and millions of years, which is how environmentalists commonly measure actions. Poole asked if it is ethical to sustain some elements of museum activity, such as collections, at the expense of others, such as the experience of culture. He suggested that, in museums, sustainability concerns “educating individuals about their mutual obligation to others.” Megone noted that the ancient Greeks did not have a concept that could be identified as sustainability; instead, our relatively greater control over our world today has generated the idea of sustainability as an ethical value. Others added, however, that it remains difficult to determine exactly what we do, and do not, control.
Tony Kendle, Creative Director of the Eden Project, Cornwall, and Robert Janes, Editor-in-Chief of Museum Management and Curatorship, agreed on the need for collective action among museums to help define and develop the parameters of sustainability. Kendle discussed the interconnectedness of the “three pillars” of sustainability: environmental, economic, and social. He argued for the benefits of understanding how these work together, rather than focusing on each at the expense of the others. Kendle warned that views on sustainability too often “protect particular versions of the future” that create difficult ethical dilemmas. Poole proposed that museums could
