The Mindful Museum

Maybe so. But I think we’re all haunted by another possibility: that the museum as metaphor is in fact nothing but another, more sinister twin in disguise — the museum as mall. We fear a museum that’s been drained, not replenished; a museum that’s been emptied of its old purpose either as a remote aesthetic citadel or as an accessible place for new kinds of learning, or even just as a social meeting place. What we have now, we fear, is a museum that is exclusively devoted to pleasure in its cheapest possible form — to the pleasures of the gut, the pleasures of the pocketbook, where art becomes commodity and the gift shop elbows out the aesthete. The museum as mall is the overcrowded, over-merchandised museum that we have all come to glimpse and fear.

Yet realities of finance and audience have made museums grow and change in a new direction, and simply to bemoan their growth is a form of nostalgia and snobbery. It was, I think, the chief function of the museum in the first 200 or so years of its existence to take ritual and social objects and place them in aesthetic contexts. And it’s become the chief role of the museum in the last twenty-five years or so to take aesthetic objects out of their original context and place them in ritual and social contexts.

The great museums of the nineteenth and the first part of the twentieth century were devoted to taking things that were made for one ritual or social purpose and putting them in a place where they could be seen and admired as aesthetic objects. The most obvious case is that of the Italian Renaissance altarpiece: things made as sacred objects, overseeing the rites of the Catholic Church, were taken out of their homes in churches and brought into museums throughout the United States and the rest of the world. This displacement denied certain truths about the work, but it also helped us to see certain others: it enabled us to create the experience of aesthetic pleasure, the notion of looking at something because its beauty arrested us more than its social function. Oscar Wilde’s aesthetics depend on the displacement of Botticelli, and you don’t get Wilde or his mentor Walter Pater without altarpieces in the wrong places.

The museum functions somewhat differently now, by taking aesthetic objects and putting them into ritual and social contexts. This is particularly evident in the displacement of avant-garde art into the museum. We know we live in a culture that’s enormously rich in difficult art — in video art and installation art and conceptual art — and much of it is deliberately intended to defy the museum and conventional aesthetics. One of the central comedies of manners in our society is that that art, which none of us quite understands, is taken out of the aesthetic context in which it’s made and brought to institutions. A host of social rituals have grown up alongside this displacement: rituals of openings and visits and tours, of audio-guides and cautious explication. Slowly, this demanding work, like a grain of sand inside an oyster, is wrapped around with enough sociability, with enough secular ritual, to become acceptable to us as a form of art.

Many of us see the myriad absurdities, the comedy of manners, in what happens as this process unfolds, but I don’t think we should overlook its value either. Just as the old displacements allowed us to create new categories of value, this one does too: it enables us to use new art, to make new art, and to understand new art. In this sense, the café and the gift shop and all of the things we are expected to object to play a positive and constructive role in enabling us to enlarge our range of experience. We apply a certain number of social rituals to new work and then re-appreciate them as things that belong to us rather than as things that we find threatening and difficult.

Although my heart lies with the old museum, my head tells me that the new museum must be taken in and appreciated for what it is. When I think about what the new museum might be, I come up in the end with still one more “M.” What we really search for is not to restore the museum as mausoleum, nor to be nostalgic about the museum as machine, nor to throw up our hands in feigned outrage at the museum as mall. What we really want is a mindful museum. And I use “mindful” in that beautiful Buddhist sense, of a museum that is aware of itself, conscious of its own functions, and living in this moment.

The mindful museum should first of all be mindful in being primarily about the objects it contains. Your first experience when entering the mindful museum should be of a work of art. One of the things that makes visiting the Louvre such a dispiriting experience is that it takes twenty-five minutes from the time when you enter until the moment when you’re actually dealing with a work of art in what is after all the greatest collection of art in the Western world. The mindful museum, as I imagine it, would put art in your face from the moment you enter and force you to confront it not as a reward at the end of your journey through the ticket booth, nor as a dull but improving bit you have to go through on your way to the gift shop, but as something that is intrinsic to it — intrinsic to its every moment.

Kenneth Clark once said that an aesthetic sensation lasts exactly as long as the smell of an orange, and it seems to me that the most oranges that we can hope to sniff during any one visit is twelve. The energies we have to devote to the museum experience tend to be quite limited. You’ll often read a sociologist’s report saying that people spend no more than thirty seconds in front of individual pictures, but we only have about twelve of those thirtysecond bursts in us. Therefore, the things you see first should be the best things you see. The mindful museum puts good stuff out front. My friend and frequent collaborator, the late Kirk Varnedoe, when he was doing exhibitions at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, learned that the crucial thing was not to do the expected in a retrospective exhibition of, say, Jasper Johns or Cy Twombly — to begin with juvenilia and slowly work your way up to the masterpieces. The trick is to put the masterpieces out front — to recognize that the best energies any visitor to the museum would ever have would be those first energies. And the more you could draw on those first energies to show things that mattered, the better off you were.

The mindful museum should not seek to explain what cannot be explained. And that means simply that wall labels and explanatory text of all kinds should be as modest and invisible as conceivable. The mindful museum, as I imagine it, will encourage conversation; it will be a place where at least they’ll let you talk and won’t force you to listen to a pre-packaged monologue. The mindful museum will distinguish between merchandise and art without insisting that there is anything wrong with the desire to bring an object home, while still recognizing that a necktie is a necktie and a Van Gogh is a Van Gogh. Above all, the mindful museum will be concerned with time, will be concerned with articulating the human time in which we live and which the museum alone, among all our institutions, articulates best.


The notion that a museum is a place where we should try to understand time is extremely simple and almost banal, but I think it is terribly important. When I say that the mindful museum should concern itself with time, I mean it in a somewhat deeper sense, too. For the past year, I’ve been studying the writings of Charles Darwin, and I’ve spent a lot of time at the Darwin exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. One of the things that is moving about Darwin is that, as much as with the problem of design, he was obsessed with the problem of time: Was the Earth old enough for evolution to have happened? How old could the Earth be? How could we possibly conceive of this unimaginable expanse of time that had formed our Earth and the million varieties of life? How many millions of years had it taken, and how could we ever really grasp that scale, that cosmic vastness?