Big, bold (brash?) and beautiful
Well, my America tour is over. It's been a wonderful experience in so many ways, and a real treat to have the opportunity to visit so many spectacular museums in quick succession, as well as rich archives and libraries. I've blogged already about the enchanting house museums that I visited - notably the Frick Collection and Isabella Gardner - but not about the bigger encyclopaedic institutions. Here I will take stock of those, and about what I think UK museums could learn from them, for better or worse.
American museums are on the whole undoubtedly bigger and richer than their British counterparts. Even the British Museum pails into insignificance next to the Metropolitan in New York, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, or the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. But what I've realised is that these museums are also more confident. They inhabit monumental, expensively-finished spaces filled, almost exclusively, with art acquired from elsewhere in the world. You also pay a fairly hefty ticket price to get in. There is no apology for either. 'Look at what we can afford' they seem to say, and therefore, by implication, what you should not balk at paying to visit. Is this confident display of capitalist expansion not the latest version of the colonial acquisitions for which British museums seem to be constantly apologising these days?
This is not to say that all three museums do not also display a wealth of American art. I made a point of spending 'quality time' in the American galleries of each, seeing what I can't see in Europe. But, sadly, comparatively few people were doing the same, much as the galleries of British porcelain are under-visited at the BM. Visitors want to see 'the other' as much as to see the star pieces. Nor is it to say that American museums are not sensitive to their complicated history. I was impressed by the display at the President's House in Philadelphia, for example, which sets the stories of the slaves who worked there alongside the familiar tale of American liberty hatched in that very place. Nor, equally, is this to belittle the cultural heritage embodied in objects in British museums which other cultures wish to regain.
It is merely to point out that much of our own cultural heritage is now in the US, in some cases whole rooms moved as a piece across the Atlantic. We do not, as yet, see this movement as a problem. Celebration of wealth allows American museums to be proud both of their contents and of their entry charges. Is this something on the change as we reassess our economy? Or is it something from which UK museums can learn?