Cultural Consumption, Art & Entertainment
Our Relationship with the Art Museum
The concept that the arts exist in a realm removed from other systems is at the core of the issues considered here: systems that are governed by rules whose logic prescribes that the arts cannot exist within their defined space and simultaneously exist in another realm such as the market or as a lever to achieve policy ambitions, which are in turn governed by another distinct set of rules. This scenario is disqualified on the basis of incompatibility. A hierarchy is constructed in which the presumed hermetic space the arts inhabit - and the art museum acts as a protector in – dominates other systems with varying levels of perceived worthiness. This is neither reflective of reality nor sustainable. This paradigm informs all interactions of the museum with its external environment and thus affects management practice, by acting as what can be described as a moral barrier to best practices. This is also a pivotal element to the challenges faced by institutions as they attempt to meet the demands and evolving expectations of their contemporary environments. It ignites conflict surrounding identity, value, funding, responsibility and subsequently impacts attitudes towards entrepreneurialism, shapes organisational culture and the capacity for organisational learning and also affects mission and understanding of museum ethics. This short essay was taken from a publication examining our contemporary relationship with the art museum through articulations of cultural consumption in a German context.
Arts, Education, High Culture
Both Sheehan and Gohr address how concepts of identity shaping current conflicts between perceptions of art and entrepreneurial action, articulations and theories surrounding cultural consumption, as well as ideas about how the public must relate to works of art, are found at the root of present day attitudes towards a distinct differentiation between art and other disciplines in Germany.(1) Graf and Möbius characterise this antagonistic relationship with the saying that the 'museum is always its opposite, subsisting on attendance and withdrawal, giving culture-pessimists an opportunity to speak of the downfall of the museum, either case warranting its closure'(2) – as though to introduce the idea that competing systems are causing inefficiencies.
Further illuminating this paradox, Wurst outlines how in eighteenth and nineteenth century Germany, unlike other European countries, modern consumer culture was more closely associated with education and that a critical disinterest in the connection between culture and consumption are particular to the German development.(3) She explains that a 'devaluation of sensory experience in knowledge formation in favour of abstract cognition contributed to the disinterest in the affective disposition we call pleasure as it manifests itself in entertainment'.(4) The 'self-definition of the German middle class as the architects of the Kulturnation' is cited as another key element to understanding this distinctive system of cultural consumption(5) and marks the origin of contributing pretensions that separate the realm of the arts with anything other than education and high culture.
Expanding on this, it becomes apparent that such articulations(6) shaped the institutional art world in German-speaking Europe within which museums were built. Sheehan outlines a number of these articulations, referring to how Kant dismissed art whose only aim was mere enjoyment, not infused with any variation of a moral idea, rendering it distasteful(7), to how Wilhelm Wackenroder states his conviction that art and religion are similar enterprises and that art galleries therefore 'ought to be temples where, in peaceful and silent humility'(8) art would reside and to how August Wilhelm Schlegel demanded a new kind of art world in which the artist is not restrained by either patronage or markets(9). He also points to how Humboldt in 1792 went as far as to say that neither art nor scholarship was to be directed by the state in order to 'advance knowledge, encourage morality and deepen culture'(10). Consequently, when in the twentieth century statistics on visitor numbers, the effects of museums on tourism and ancillary services emerged, it culminated in what Adorno disparagingly referred to as 'cultural industry'(11) demanding that art remain at a distance from the material conditions of everyday life(12). Wurst also cites Marcuse‘s theory on affirmative culture, according to which for the modernist, entertainment cannot be part of high culture because the pleasure it provides is associated with bourgeois manners, morals, and habits - thus the modernist was repelled by 'consumer-oriented and comfortable' art.
She also cites the Frankfurt school‘s concept of high art in which the pleasure associated with entertainment had no raison d'être, explaining that in the early 18th century the emphasis on self-discipline created a system in which leisure, entertainment, and pleasure were 'at best marginal concepts and at worst vilified as part of nobility‘s lifestyle'(13). These articulations all describe the historically value-laden status the art museum inhabits within German society and culture. The different narratives are all unified by the rule that art and the art museum is to be maintained within an almost sacred space, uninterrupted by any interference from another system.
Wurst describes how, despite a practical engagement with the visual arts within the context of sociability being present for much of history, the sentiment that museums ought to be a space protecting art from the 'indignities of entertainment and commerce' was equally prevalent(14). No other system is to interfere with the arts within a museum, while at the same time the museum is driven to welcome other governing forces in and operate alongside them. This establishes how the first element making up the ideological contentions that create obstacles to sustained development is rooted in residual elements of extant belief systems.
To read more, follow the link below the references.
1 James J. Sheehan, Museums in the German Art World: From the End of the Old Regime to the Rise of Modernism (New York, Oxford University Press, 2000). Siegfried Gohr, Das Museum zwischen Traum und Bedrängnis in der deutschen Kulturgeschichte (Köln: König, 1995). Krzysztof Pomian, Der Ursprung des Museums: Vom Sammeln (Berlin: Wagenbach, 1988).
2 Bernhard Graf, Hanno Möbius, Zur Geschichte der Museen im 19. Jahrhundert: 1789-1918, Institut für Museumsforschung, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin - Preußischer Kulturbesitz (Berlin: G+H Verlag, 2006), p.31.
3 Karin A. Wurst, Fabricating pleasure: fashion, entertainment, and cultural consumption in Germany, 1780 -1830 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005), p.13.
4 Ibid. p.xiii.
5 Ibid. p.29.
6 James J. Sheehan, Museums in the German Art World, p.5.
7 Ibid.p.9.
8 Ibid. p. 48.
9 Ibid. p. 49.
10 Ibid. p.57.
11 Siegfried Gohr, Das Museum zwischen Traum und Bedrängnis in der deutschen Kulturgeschichte, p.44.
12 Karin A. Wurst, Fabricating pleasure, p.6. Siegfried Gohr, Das Museum zwischen Traum und Bedrängnis in der deutschen Kulturgeschichte, p.44.
13 Karin A. Wurst, Fabricating pleasure, p.7.
14 Ibid. p.215.