Kathy Halbreich on creativity in museums
Friday, July 9, 2010 at 09:02AM
Visitors at MoMA. Photo by Amy Whitaker.Just getting into Artforum's single-themed summer issue devoted to "The Museum Revisited". The first inclusion is by MoMA associate director, and former Walker Center director, Kathy Halbreich. For me, some of the most interesting tidbits revolve around a sense of everyday creativity, and how that creativity might be better harnessed and celebrated by museums, which tend otherwise to be essentially conservative institutions. The piece (written as told to Artforum editor Tim Griffin) is well worth a read, but I wanted to pull out a few choice thoughts here:
On her tenure at the Walker Center:
I wanted to see whether some of the class divisions within an institution could be erased, so that, for instance, the extraordinary people who worked in the basement--the so-called crew, many of whom were artists--would know that their voices were important in the galleries. Similarly, I wanted to bridge the gap between administrators and programmers. We were all creative partners, and emphasizing this would, I hoped, make everyone feel deeply engaged in the institution.
Thinking from MoMA:
I'm also interested in people who make expressive things--films or dances or music compositions--on YouTube but who don't call themselves artists. I wonder whether they aren't part of our audience. We're beginning to look at how to engage those folks ... This leads us to new distribution and display systems we need to understand and embrace.
I think as a culture, we really are scared of artists. I think, as a culture, we're not really interested in ambivalence or ambiguity. I think, as a culture, we give no reward to intelligent failure.
And one that sounds good, but that I don't quite get:
... now, in the twenty-first century, I would rather the institution set standards in terms of permission rather than canon. In other words, if the canon is about a kind of certainty, perhaps today permission could usefully be about a kind of fluidity--a different way of constructing reality.
creativity,
museums 















