Museums: they are all the same
Door kunstvlo op October 28, 2009 12:05. 11 comments
Canada, Montréal. That’ s where I’m staying since Monday night. I’m going to attend the conference Museality and intermediality. New Museum Paradigms organised by (amongst others) the Centre de recherche de l’intermédialité (CRI) of the University of Montréal, the Laboratoire de muséologie et d’ingénierie de la culture (LAMIC) of the University of Laval and the Society for Arts and Technology (SAT).
So I’m here for very pleasant professional reasons. The conference only starts today: yesterday I set off to explore the city and to get rid of my jetlag. As a museums and galleries person I went to the Museum of Contemporary Art (MACMTL) and the Museum of Fine Arts. By the way, the Montréal subway looks and feels just like the subway system in Brussels! Very strange. Earlier, the airport had also given me this same feeling of home.
In the MACMTL I saw exhibitions on work of Francine Savard, Tacita Dean and Tricia Middleton. The Museum of Fine Arts was very proud to present its collections of Mediterraean archaeology, decorative arts and design, European art, Canadian art, non Canadian art, art Inuit and contemporary art.
Both museums are what one would expect from museums. Nicely lit large boxes with artworks peacefully hung next to eachother on walls. Above, typical for the Montréal museums seems to be: very friendly staff ready to take your coat, to present a delicious Waldorf salad in the restaurant and to sell you very interesting books. Nice!
But still. When you have travelled as far as I have this is not enough. I had expected to see different things, I was ready to be overwhelmed by refreshing new museum approaches…
By the way, of course I saw things that were new to me like the wonderful collection of Inuit artworks in the Museum of Fine Arts, but they were displayed in such an old-fashioned way that I could’t get out of the room quickly enough.
Questions that popped up in my mind.
Why does every museum of fine arts in the world need an archaeological collection of Old Europe? In this day and age where we are all connected and travelling possibilities have increased tremendously it seems so over the top.
What does it say about our western cultural legacy when all art made in the twentieth century seems to refer to the European avant-garde?
What does this all mean for the museum as an idea? Hasn’t the time come to profoundly reconsider what museums are doing? It has.