Museums are my sanctuaries. They are orderly, calm, and focused on issues beyond the mundane.
I have gone to art museums since I was a boy. Unfortunately, the adults were harsh: “Why are you here alone?” “Do you even know what you’re looking at?” And most brutally, “I don’t know why they let your kind in here.”
Perhaps those adults believed culture was exclusive to certain classes and races. That’s ironic because art museums as we know them today evolved out of private collections of monarchs, aristocrats, the church, and wealthy individuals.
Some people complain when museums include artists from marginalized groups. But that’s exactly where the trend is going. Museums in Australia and New Zealand, for example, regularly show the work of indigenous peoples. Exhibits will promote artists of marginalized groups. Museums are part of a trend away from royalty, empire, and elitism toward democracy and respect for all people.
The Louvre, a former palace, opened during the French Revolution in 1793; it was one of the first public museums to display royal and church collections. The British Museum, London, opened its doors to the public in 1753; it began from the collections of the Anglo-Irish physician and scientist Sir Hans Sloane and expanded dramatically with objects taken during British colonization. The Uffizi Gallery, Florence, originally designed as a government building, became a public art gallery in 1765; it displayed the collection of the ruling Medici family.
National Gallery, London (1824; focused on collecting European art, particularly Old Master paintings) and The Prado Museum, Madrid (1819; based on the Spanish Royal Collection and eventually including works by Velázquez, Goya, and El Greco) were two national museum founded during the 19th century.
The Brooklyn Museum (1823/1897) was conceived as an institution focused on the public. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, (1870) branding itself as TheMet since 2016, has become one of the world’s largest and most comprehensive art museums.
The Hermitage, St. Petersburg, founded in 1764 by Catherine the Great (1729–1796) as a court museum, opened to all citizens after the October Revolution of 1917; the museum further expanded in the 1920s with art requisitioned from private collections.
Today, there are approximately 104,000 museums worldwide, according to UNESCO. The United States has the most museums, with almost one-third of the world’s total.
Art museums continue to grapple with the provenance of objects in their collections by confronting the legacy of colonialism and by coping with demands to return artworks and artifacts to their countries of origin. Museums are also working to diversify their collections and exhibitions, focusing more on artists from underrepresented groups, including women and non-Western cultures.
As a term, “museum” originated as “a temple or shrine of the Muses,” from Mousa, or “Muse.” A museum is for study and to find one’s muse. Each work of art offers the chance to enter another person’s mind. We can understand how great artists processed their own experiences, the fullness of the tradition that they inhabited, and the genius that led to many branchings in the river of art.
Who is the patron of the art work? Who is the audience (intended or otherwise)? And why do we – the human civilization – need to keep track of all art? How will we be remembered as a civilization – by our inventions, our wars, or our works of art?
We do remember civilizations by all three—inventions, wars, and art. In present times, we are the patrons (we fund art through taxes and fees) and the audience (even if one doesn’t go to museums and galleries one is surrounded by public art, architecture, design, and craft). Before we worry about how we’ll be remembered, we should know that art shows us as we are and it shapes where we’ll be going. May that not be to glorify war and may our inventions be peaceful.
“Art shows us what we are…” – Really? Is there bias from the artists? (E.g., Skill related? Subject matter related? Materials related? Culture related?)
I used to attend museum exhibitions until I found that the art pieces shown did not reflect the world or human civilizations. The pieces were either commissioned by wealthy patrons, establishments, or something else. How much art is truly from the artists as free human beings?
Are we as a civilization becoming more and more in love with our own image? Just like Narcissus felling in love with his own reflection in the water? Don’t we create what we want to see?
“Art shows us what we are…” – Really? Is there bias from the artists? (E.g., Skill related? Subject matter related? Materials related? Culture related?)”
== I didn’t mean that art shows us who we are in terms of aspiration or individual personality. Selected pieces often become deeply meaningful to us because of that, but that’s completely a matter of each person.
However, art does reflect history, and it does accurately reflect the societies from which they came. Much of that may be unflattering or even abhorrent. Bias, skills, subject matter, materials, culture—all of this is indeed reflected in art. Those details may well reflect matters that we even reject today—monarchy, oppression, feudalism, slavery, trade imbalances, imperialism, war, even genocide—but these are all aspects of our human history and psyches that we can benefit from contemplating. We can preserve and revere art but reject the subject matter and circumstances of its making.
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“I used to attend museum exhibitions until I found that the art pieces shown did not reflect the world or human civilizations. The pieces were either commissioned by wealthy patrons, establishments, or something else. How much art is truly from the artists as free human beings?”
== The fact that the art was “commissioned by wealthy patrons, establishments, or something else” is not necessarily a reason to reject them out of hand. Let me give you an example. I once went to Versailles. With prejudice, I made myself go to Marie Antoinette’s palace. I found it surprisingly modest. Then I went to a ceramic exhibition there. I learned that the entire ceramic industry was about to go extinct in France—until Marie Antoinette rescued it by commissioning the very pieces at which I was gazing. Now, she may have had her corrupt or perhaps even evil side, but this humanized her for me. It also showed me that a patron could have had a conscience too. They weren’t just necessarily merely commissioning playthings. They did have a social role, albeit in a horrible feudal society.
The idea of art being “ruly from the artists as free human beings” is a relatively contemporary idea, isn’t it? Much of art outside the Western world was anonymous and a part of the civilization and spiritual beliefs. Aside from the literati artists of China, we had court artists, ceramic, textile, wood, lacquer, and jade artists to name a few. Most of them go unnamed. Most of them had no outlet for their art except patronage or merchandise. None of them were “free” in today’s sense. Instead of rejecting their art, we should contemplate that situation.
Even so, look at how the individualism of great artists transcended the predicaments of their time. Leonardo; Michelangelo; the creator of the Jadeite Cabbage in the National Palace Museum, Taipei; the porcelains in the Sir Percival David Collection at the British Museum; the architects and builders of Kinkaku-ji in Kyoto; Gongchun, servant to the scholar Wu Yishan, credited with making the first Yixing teapot in the style of a ginkgo tree burl and known as the “father of Yixing teapots”—these are just a few examples of artists who so astonishingly rose above their situation and the limitations of ordinary people that they left the details of their patrons and social straits behind.
Sometimes I look at art from Africa, First Nations People, and old Aboriginal art and I even lament how art changed in the nineteenth century and became preoccupied with psychology, individual freedom, and independence from patrons and academies. At least in those earlier “primitive” times, art was an integral part of society and the artist fit in. Now the artist is always on the outside—few parents want their children to be artists, for example. Or compare any university art department to the STEM and business schools and tell me which one is poorer and receives little support or prestige, and you can see that the “free artist” of today is adrift in the vagaries a materialistic society that leaves little place for them. Besides, our current corrupt art world merely makes myths around selected artists they can manipulate and treats their works with less dignity than people give to NFTs.
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Are we as a civilization becoming more and more in love with our own image? Just like Narcissus felling in love with his own reflection in the water? Don’t we create what we want to see?
== All that you indicate is valid. I simply appeal to you to put those questions in a far wider context. By all means, identify the art you think shows the problems you deplore. See those problems as ALSO being revealing of the human condition. And look at other art that is distant from those errors.
Ultimately, all art reflects society, culture, and human psychology. We may well reject much of that, as if our prerogative. But let us sort through it all thoughtfully. Then we are truly benefitting by appreciating art.
Thank you for your advice. There is much to contemplate here…
Just wish the artists could find their own place in the world – driven less by the wealthy and the powerful or by the greedy capitalists.
(Ahh…to transcend…)
The YingXi tea sets are beautiful pieces, just like porcelain tea sets from the Ming Dynasty (Thank goodness to the Ming Emperor’s interest and hobby? LOL)
p.s – I will go back to the museum and look for artists from non-Western influenced cultures!