Books: A Note to My Successor—Some Thoughts on the Problems and Possibilities of Museum Books

Abstract

My congratulations to you—or should that be my sympathies?—on being chosen as Curator’s next Books Editor. On the positive side, you’re joining a team of thoughtful, creative editors who manage to generate sparks of camaraderie even though we’re scattered around the country. Your postal carrier and UPS driver will soon begin delivering a steady stream of books from academic and commercial publishers—review copies and sometimes bound proofs, all with chipper press releases slipped inside the covers and publishers’ glossy catalogues spilling out of the envelopes. Your bookshelves will gradually come to resemble mine, and visitors who don’t know about your editorial work will be wowed by the breadth and idiosyncratic coolness of your interests, which will appear to run from Pueblo pottery to Islamic calligraphy by way of the anthropology of world’s fairs and the latest scholarship in cultural property law and “glass studies.” Who else, your friends will wonder admiringly, would own that gorgeous coffee-table book celebrating Traditional Archery from Six Continents? Yes, the environmentally unfriendly truth is that a fair percentage of the books you’ll receive for Curator you’ll have no intention of getting reviewed, for the sensible reason that they’re not really about museums—their work or history or guiding ideas—and have little light to shed on those topics except indirectly and in the aggregate. Instead they’re about the objects that museums exhibit or the technical study and preservation of those objects. So they tend to appeal mostly to people who are already interested in and at least somewhat knowledgeable about those kinds of objects or the periods and places associated with them—which in many cases is a small, specialized audience. (If this sounds familiar, perhaps it’s because museums themselves have been accused of focusing on certain classes of objects largely for the benefit of people who already recognize and care about those classes. Not surprisingly, many of the review copies in this category are exhibition catalogues or scholarly texts published in association with new or upcoming exhibitions.) In other words, rather than books about museum practice, these are books of—that is, exemplifying or representing—museum practice. If museums’ traditional activities of collection, preservation, study, and public exhibition can be thought of as a kind of object-based discourse, then what you’re looking for as Curator’s Books Editor is a meta-discourse: stepping back from those activities in order to consider their origins, meanings, functions, and futures. Of course, a variety of those “about” books will arrive in your mail slot as well—books like Museums after Modernism or Museums and Community, books about trends in exhibition design, zoo history, visitor motivations, green museum construction, museum marketing, informal science education, museum philosophy, and the like. A quick taxonomy of these “about” books might be organized around a distinction—or rather, a continuum—between texts written by academics and those written by museum practitioners. At one end of that continuum are books from scholars in various branches of the humanities or social sciences (or, less frequently, the natural sciences) who happen to be interested in museums or museological issues from one angle or another. (Considered as a whole, the museum field is almost absurdly multidisciplinary, as East [2008] and others have reported.) Sometimes that interest is merely one among many and results in a single book about museums; in other cases the interest becomes primary and is sustained over a career. In the increasingly busy middle of the spectrum are texts by museum studies faculty. Here we may want to distinguish between museum studies programs that are . . . well, academic—theory-oriented, historically minded, linked closely to other university departments via interdisciplinary collaborations—and programs that keep one foot in scholarship but lean toward practice, whose faculty members often work in or consult to museums in addition to teaching. These latter programs may be interdisciplinary, but they’re also extradisciplinary: some of their priorities have less to do with the pursuit and creation of knowledge in some recognized domain than with preparing today’s and tomorrow’s museum professionals for the practical challenges they’ll face. Finally, at the other end of the spectrum, are books by the museum professionals themselves, including staff and consultants. Those professional books are the tip of an iceberg of museum discourse that also includes “gray literature” (conference presentations, blog postings, proprietary research reports commissioned by museums, and so on) as well as peer-reviewed journal articles and national research studies. Of course, many books fall somewhere between these categories. It’s a continuum for good reason. There have been collaborations between academics and museum practitioners; volumes of essays by museum professionals who write from essentially academic perspectives; scholarly musings about the minutiae of museum practice (for purposes other than professional training); and so on. It used to be easier to see the difference between the insider view (museum professionals writing largely for each other) and the outsider view (academics writing about museums, often critically and also for each other). But over the last two decades or so, the academic left’s critique of museums, which began emphatically outside the museum—think of the line that runs from Michel Foucault to Tony Bennett, Carol Duncan, Alan Wallach, and others—has been internalized (some would say co-opted) by museum studies programs and even by some influential museum professionals. What was once a disturbing attack that felt to museum practitioners “like being psychoanalyzed in public,” as one of our book reviewers put it a few years ago (Lindauer 2007, 362), has gradually informed the profession’s own rhetoric about its challenges and ideals. I think of Stephen Weil, Elaine Heumann Gurian, Robert Janes, and Nina Simon, although the influence of the postmodern academics on these commentators’ work seems mostly indirect. Our taxonomy would also have to take into account these books’ subject matter and what type or types of museums they deal with. It could draw distinctions between books by a single author, multi-author collaborative works, and collections of essays by various independent contributors. (The latter category includes the museum studies anthologies that have been published with increasing frequency in recent years.) Or between university presses, independent nonprofit presses, and commercial publishing houses. (You’ll occasionally receive an art-forgery saga or a great-man-of-science biography from the latter.) Or between museum studies programs in North America and those in the U.K. or other English-speaking countries. Constructing such a taxonomy in earnest would be a valuable service to the field, and I hope others take up the thread. My hope here is simply to give us a framework for discussing the challenge you’re undertaking. The good news, and the reason for those congratulations I offered, is that some of these museum books are terrific. The best of them may give you, as they’ve given me, a feeling of prickling excitement—a sense that something is at stake, is being risked. How they do this varies, of course. Whether or not you find a book exciting will have as much to do with you as with the book: we get most charged up about what we agree with and what we’re already invested in. (“A real book is not one that we read,” W.H. Auden observed, “but one that reads us.”) Still, as I pass the torch—or rather, the editor’s red pen—to you I’ll mention some of the characteristics I’ve been grateful to find on the page in the seven years I’ve been Curator’s Books Editor. Good museum books reveal the ways in which the familiar ideas and practices of museology (past or present, depending on the author’s project) are contingent rather than given. They put some critical distance between us and museums, making the ordinary seem unfamiliar, even strange. With the benefit of that distance, the authors are able to interrogate the actions, rhetoric, and structures of museums at a fundamental level. This is not easy for insiders to do; we have trouble seeing the assumptions we operate within every day. Philosopher and sometime-museum-historian Stephen Asma has likened this ability to “tasting your own tongue”—an illustration of how difficult it is (Asma 2001, 154). Good museum books also manage to ground themselves in the relevant literature or practice area while also lighting out for new territory. That balance is important. Without knowledge of what museum people have been arguing about, a new perspective reads as merely naïve. Conversely, without something new to say, the contribution feels like hackwork—an apologia for the status quo (a problem I’ll come back to in a moment). When good museum books do borrow theoretical constructs and examples from other domains, they do so in ways that preserve the complexity of those ideas and respect what’s irreducibly foreign about them—aspects that aren’t neatly assimilable to the museum issue at hand. More broadly, good authors of museum literature know how to sustain an argument or narrative over many paragraphs or chapters, and they understand the difference between a string of assertions and the methodical intertwining of observation, inference, reference, and persuasively articulated belief that constitutes a genuine argument. Good museum books sometimes raise questions they don’t and can’t answer, which can feel like a radical act in a field that is has been trying for decades to establish certainties about itself and its cultural status. By problematizing rather than tidying up, these books have the potential to influence the collective agenda and spur debate. (I say “potential” because even the best books can do little good if nobody reads them. Jay Rounds has raised disturbing questions about how much of the museum literature is actually consumed and by whom [2007].) The best museum books display wit, in the sense of both mental quickness and disarmingly clever humor. These authors are confident enough to expect that they’ll be taken seriously even though they don’t take themselves too seriously, and relaxed enough to let a little of themselves into their texts, acknowledging the subjectivity inherent in any human enterprise and thereby helping us account for their presence in the argument as we grapple with it. This list could go on: I’ve had the pleasure of discovering museum books that were heroically well-researched, that spun nuanced historical narratives, that offered powerfully simple frameworks for thinking about complex things—frameworks I’ve found indispensable and passed on to colleagues. A few have permanently changed the way I experience and think about museums. The best museum books can be very good indeed. The problem—and the reason I offer sympathies mixed with the congratulations—is that such books are distressingly few and far between. Too many museum books that come across my desk display an intellectual thinness and logical slipperiness that limits their value to both scholarship and practice. They read as competent enough, but if you probe a little, you find they don’t support real analysis. Too often I’ve found myself wondering if there isn’t, at the heart of the text I’m reading, a kind of dodge, something avoided or elided because grappling with it would have been too troublesome or destabilizing. The Duke University interdisciplinary scholar Cathy N. Davidson calls this “fudging,” which she defines as intentionally or unconsciously “glossing over the nuances of a complicated, inconvenient, or even controversial topic” in order to fit in, as it were, within the cozy confines of one’s discipline. She notes that the “evasions and coverups” of fudging “arise most often when a scholar is confronted with the most fundamental and potentially contentious concepts of her discipline.” So fudging is “emotionally fraught, making you susceptible to exposure,” and instances of it in a text tend to be heralded by a momentary grandiosity that both marks and masks anxiety (Davidson 2009). Although Davidson has in mind science, literature, and other fields, her analysis captures something all too common in museum books. Too many museum books operate within a narrow and convenient sphere of reference, drawing mostly from sources, ideas, and examples already present within museum discourse. (Such books are about museums in a much narrower sense than, say, history books are about history, because the latter is inherently outward-referring: its subject—the human narrative—lies outside itself. Does an analogous dualism exist in museum studies?) This is especially true of books by and for museum practitioners, which sometimes feel hermetically sealed within the bubble of museums’ most gratifying assumptions about themselves. Even on the academic side of the spectrum, many are rife with what has been called (in another context) “unexamined postulates that answer the question before it is asked” (Ragland-Sullivan 1987, xvii). New or foreign ideas from various disciplines do make their way into these books, of course, but they tend to be ones that confirm rather than unsettle the ways museum people see themselves and their institutions and are often applied in reductive ways that reveal the author’s about the in which the The is a kind of in which the text can museum or practice, even when its seems to want to or Too many museum books make they don’t for argument and an of or for Those in can be of the because out that an has been before by is not the as that to it can the of Too much museum literature on this of which an of the is much I being about these If so, I’m not I a at a museum studies to review a new written by a museum scholar at another whose work she A after the she to she think it was her to review or the museum to were in no with much The book even her wonder about the of the press in which she had already as the of some to the museum they questions have come up in book we on my although they’ve been raised In one a at the University of a museum studies that the to the had the to their own or difficult questions with . . . and and that the had to the articles with each other or the they reviewers have for intellectual and we’re at and than they found in the sometimes texts they It’s that all of these books, including the one as were to an independent review in addition to editorial review before being for So at least two museum studies scholars or museum professionals not with the read each the author’s sometimes with This us that people will on such is to some in the of the But it also questions about the value of the review which may display some of the as the literature whose it is to it’s the of people most of the writing for and the of for and one might expect the and to both at the level. It might be easier for one museum to another to when a than to her own writing to those but it’s that she would have in mind very in the two the that those the profession’s or of can work There are also what we might on the of the review as you’ll see in the of your work with this journal articles also The review is to be but the museum is a sometimes it’s not for reviewers to the of the of the book or they’ve been or for the who those via to their The of people in those two is small, and they each in order to the they and so can work Of course, the of review are of the out the to our taxonomy of museum books and to it the distinctions been making between good museum books and their less but our continuum that runs from academic to or to practice, with museum studies programs in the It will come as no at the academic end and in some books by museum studies the critical which museums are is and the sphere of in which they’re is than at the professional The academics are also at museums among other human and to from other disciplines to understand both of which can be of the most are and while many work in museum natural history museums, few have museum the of their of and are also on the academic side, with What the professional and research reports written by museum practitioners or least in is too many of these books are on and so they fall into the category after be the practitioners who write these books aren’t trying to knowledge for its own they’re trying to support or museums in what they often by and that can be applied So it could be that I’m the of one type of museum literature another and with the But aren’t knowledge and practice of the we to do the in order to the and a little of our and us to do some in my outsider and academic museum books as as a than those by and for practitioners, most museum professionals the academic literature because they think it’s not too theoretical and to them their practical and as and have observed, the of scholarly writing may run than museum staff are of ideas and concepts that appear to But if I’m that books on the academic end of the spectrum are to outside concepts and to on museum then what we have is a between and breadth of in the will This is and are some of the ways new ideas a of practice, and new ideas can that with the it practitioners who academic books about museums are an to their own and I would the even in What museum professionals and museum scholars really to and books that aren’t about museums but which might shed light on the museum enterprise if we can read them with our I’m not to and although these may be relevant in certain this a of I’m that for you work at a science museum or are how science museums their purposes and you for the recent on in or the and you might a of The of a of the and from the and and give some thought to the between an and a (If you’re like me, you’ll at a science exhibit the way Or you could out another this from your into literature, at the of which the of narrative and in the of science concepts than any museum book could read and the for with its of how science from and in human somewhat to of a an on museological truth and by the of of these books raise questions about science museum and and these questions are in kind from those raised by the museum own literature on the they’re and rather than Even by to we something about what’s in the a science or natural history an At the I those coffee-table exhibition catalogues and technical as for a review in Curator on the that they really “about” museums, but were examples or museum here I’m for us to to books that are not “about” museums. The difference is that outsider books like because of their can be read as of museum practice and for new most exhibition catalogues are assertions of the of one over another. It’s not that we should be the outsider books of those that are about museums. should be them museum books, and we should be much to the museological questions they and the they If we can make that in our we may be able to take new in our scholarship and practice. you be able to review many of those outsider books in no matter how their for our be too busy trying to keep up with the stream of books about museums, of which seem to be published each as museum studies programs their to the new their to and museums themselves to in and around the I to seeing which you from this stream to review in Curator and which ones you to your between The of and More I to seeing how the reviewers you to write those to the and the they find in those A literature is as good as its by and can we that our books will be written and are all Your as Curator’s Books Editor will be to museum scholars and practitioners of what’s at each we put to or the of a