Art museums are taking a huge risk in pursuing a consumer public, because doing so puts the museum in direct competition with existing popular culture. The traditional functions of the art museum have been the collection, preservation, and presentation of art. Traditionally, these services have been provided to everyone, but in truth aimed at a cultural elite. The problem is NOT that museums cost too much or that they are hard to get into. It is far easier, and cheaper, to see great art than to attend the Superbowl. The problem is that most people PREFER to invest their time and money in professional sports than in fine art: most Americans would rather attend the Superbowl than view a collection of Picasso paintings. Because of the nature of art, most people quite naturally prefer pro sports to fine art. This is a fact, not a put-down of the masses. In commercializing the art museum, we hope to draw more of that audience into the artworld. In "opening up" the museum to a larger public, museums face a peculiar paradox: The museum can cater to the taste of the general public, or the museum can try to develop the taste of that public so that it comes to share the tastes of the existing art world. In short, if the goal to be broader access, with more people drawn to art, we seem forced to choose between two strategies for reaching that goal: do we "dumb it down" or do we work to "elevate" the audience? Although the second choice has its risks, I think we pay a greater price if museums simply capitulate to popular tastes and entertainment value.

The point to keep in mind is that we already have an enormous cultural machine that produces art for a broad audience. It used to be known as ‘Hollywood,’ but now the Hollywood model has been adopted by visual arts and by the music industry we can talk more generally about popular art and popular culture. As Andrew Clark observes, popular culture is no friend to art, literature and music that demands close attention over sustained periods. To be profitable, popular culture must either reach huge numbers of people or there must be a constant supply of NEW product to entice consumers to consume. Popular culture also depends on cognitive accessibility; new product must be relatively familiar and it must be easy to understand on first contact. It must reward short attention spans by employing simple and obvious techniques. In short, popular culture is the very opposite of traditional bourgeois fine art.

The opera house offers us an obvious analogy. At its zenith it flourished as a commercial enterprise aimed at wealthy aristocrats and the emerging European and American middle class. In recent years it has been maintained as a civic enterprise, as are most art museums. But now many opera houses are once again expected, like Amtrack and the U.S. Postal Service, to be self-supporting commercial enterprises. To quote from critic Andrew Clark:

"Today, if art does not appeal instantly or command attention through deliberate provocation, it does not sell. Value is defined by demand, which is dictated by mass taste. Politicians feel they cannot afford to stick their neck out to support a minority interest such as opera. This populist bias helps to explain the recent drift towards privatisation in European opera houses. The burden of fixed costs, in a labour-intensive industry, whose returns cannot be measured, has become too great for the modern taxpayer. And it explains the safety-first programme policies of the big theatres, and the proliferation of festivals and "pocket" opera companies which perform a reduced or more flexible repertoire for shorter periods."[1]

The result is the stagnation of the opera repertoire. A handful of operas are produced again and again, giving opera fans less access to the full range of the art than at any previous time. This mirrors the strategy of the ‘blockbuster’ art exhibits of recent years, exhibits that provide atrocious viewing conditions for highly popular artists such as van Gogh. London’s National Gallery of Art sells a special museum map for tourists, showing the most direct route to the museum’s 16 most famous paintings (Vermeer, Rembrandt, Leonardo Da Vinci, etc.), reducing a huge collection to it "greatest hits." Here is a museum that has come to grips with popular taste. The result, I fear, is that the museum pretends that the art is something that it is not: a set of accessible, "safe" masterpieces to be viewed for 30 seconds before the tourist yields to the call of the souvenirs in the gift shop. But Vermeer and Da Vinci do not yield their full reward to such visitors.

Yet I suppose that I prefer this approach to the other choice, which is to fill museums with nothing but works that will have mass appeal. Although I have no use for the music of Mariah Carey and Whitney Houston, I am thankful that their mass appeal creates the profits that encourage record companies to take a chance on less obvious, more interesting musicians. In the same way, let’s be thankful that the National Gallery offers more art than its greatest hits, and be thankful that those greatest hits support the preservation and presentation of all the stuff that does not reward popular taste.

1. Andrew Clark, "Phantom of the Opera," Financial Times, FT.Com, http://timeoff.ft.com/ft/gx.cgi/ftc, Access date 6 September 2001. 

©2001 Theodore Gracyk