Archive for the 'Policy' Category
Museums Have Visitors: They Don’t Serve The Wishes Of Market Analysts
Thursday, April 10th, 2008
Increasingly, criticism is being voiced about the destructive effect of the market on civilized society. This has even reached the hallowed halls of museums. Two leading museologists Robert Janes, formerly of Glenbow in Calgary and Maxwell Anderson, now Director of the Indianapolis Museum of Art and formerly of the Whitney in New York have criticised this trend.Janes (“Museums, Corporatism and the Civil Society” Curator The Museum Journal 50(2): 219-237, 2007) observes, “the prevailing worldview in North America is grounded in the belief that continuous economic growth is essential to individual and societal well-being”. He argues that this is enfeebling or diverting museums from realizing their unique strengths and opportunities as social institutions in civil society: museums, he asserts, must exploit their uniqueness, resist domination of marketplace thinking and seek ways of achieving meaning and sustainability within their communities.
Anderson (“Prescriptions for Art Museums in the Decade Ahead”, Curator the Museum Journal 50(1), 9-18, 2007) asserts, “rather than following a path towards community service or an educational mandate, the [museum] field has been led astray by a corporate mindset.” Anderson identifies the primary challenges facing art museums in rebalancing their mission, and suggests a series of remedies to the unrealistic economic model that threatens to exclude education as museums’ primary mandate.
Before dismissing what is said below as overly ideological, consider this statement from John Gray (School Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics) reviewing (in The Guardian September 15, 2007) Naomi Klein’s recent book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (Allen Lane).
“Over the past few decades, many of the ideas of the far left have found new homes on the right. Lenin believed that it was in conditions of catastrophic upheaval that humanity advances most rapidly, and the idea that economic progress can be achieved through the devastation of entire societies has been a key part of the neo-liberal cult of the free market. Soviet-style economies left an inheritance of human and ecological devastation, while neo-liberal policies have had results that are not radically dissimilar in many countries. Yet, while the Marxist faith in central planning is now confined to a few dingy sects, a quasi-religious belief in free markets continues to shape the policies of governments.
“Many writers have pointed to the havoc and ruin that have accompanied the imposition of free markets across the world. Whether in Africa, Asia, Latin America or post-communist Europe, policies of wholesale privatisation and structural adjustment have led to declining economic activity and social dislocation on a massive scale. Anyone who has watched a country lurch from one crisis to another as the bureaucrats of the IMF impose cut after cut in pursuit of the holy grail of stabilisation will recognise the process Naomi Klein describes in her latest and most important book to date. Visiting Argentina not long before the economic collapse of 2002, I found the government struggling to implement an IMF diktat to roll back public spending at a time when the economy was already rapidly contracting. The result was predictable, and the country was plunged into a depression, with calamitous consequences in terms of poverty and social breakdown.”
Timothy Garton Ash is Professor of European Studies in the University of Oxford, Isaiah Berlin Professorial Fellow at St Antony’s College, Oxford, and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He is the author of eight books and his essays appear regularly in the New York Review of Books and weekly in the Guardian (widely syndicated in Europe, Asia and the Americas). In an article in the Guardian last year (22 February 2007) Ash said,
“What is the elephant in all our rooms? It is the global triumph of capitalism. Democracy is fiercely disputed. Freedom is under threat even in old-established democracies such as Britain. Western supremacy is on the skids. But everyone does capitalism. Americans and Europeans do it. Indians do it. Russian oligarchs and Saudi princes do it. Even Chinese communists do it. And now the members of Israel’s oldest kibbutz, that last best hope of egalitarian socialism, have voted to introduce variable salaries based on individual performance. Karl Marx would be turning in his grave. Or perhaps not, since some of his writings eerily foreshadowed our era of globalised capitalism. His prescription failed but his description was prescient.”
In the last 40 or so years much of the business world and many governments (as expressed by New Public Management or NPM, particularly in developed western countries, have adopted market (or “rational”) economics and corporatism. Market mechanisms, according to this approach, should be allowed to determine production and pricing and government should stay out of the way of entrepreneurial business ventures. The focus is on the short term because the emphasis is efficiency as assessed by return on investment reflected in stock price as spruiked by stock market analysists. Rather than seeking new products and markets and quality service, the market oriented business seeks increase in the wealth of shareholders. (To varying extents, Nordic and some other European countries have been less prepared to adopt the market economic model.)
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What exactly is New Public Management and has it delivered?
Thursday, April 10th, 2008
New Public Management or NPM, is the transfer of business and market principles and management techniques from the private into the public sector. In the view of Wolfgang Drechsler, Professor in the Technology Governance Program at Tallinn University in Estonia, it is the most important reform movement within the public sphere over the last quarter of a century. The goal of NPM is, in Dreschler’s words, “a slim, reduced, minimal state in which any public activity is decreased and, if at all, exercised according to business principles of efficiency. NPM is based on the belief that all human behavior is motivated by self-interest and, specifically, profit maximization.”
Wikipedia describes NPM as “a broad and very complex term used to describe the wave of public sector reforms throughout the world since the 1980s. [NPM is] based on public choice and managerial schools of thought [which] seek to enhance the efficiency of the public sector and the control that government has over it. The main hypothesis … is that more market orientation in the public sector will lead to greater cost-efficiency for governments, without having negative side effects on other objectives and considerations.”
The application of NPM has had a great effect on governments in many countries and continues to do so in several countries including Australia and Canada. There is every reason why Boards and Directors of museums should be aware of these matters and doing their best to minimize the application of market economics and its outgrowths like NPM and Public Choice Theory.
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New Links
Friday, August 10th, 2007
A number of additional links have been included on the links page. These include AEA Consulting, which features a magazine entitled Platform with articles such as a major review of the arts in California.
The 24-hour Museum promotes itself as an official guide to UK museums, galleries, exhibitions and heritage and a “Gateway to over 3,000 UK museums, galleries and heritage attractions”.
The National Museum Directors’ Conference represents the leaders of the UK’s national museums and galleries.
artintelligence.co.uk is the website of Tom Flynn Art Advisory Services.
Almost 200 blogs concerning every aspect of museums around the world are listed at the Museum Blogs website
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Declaration of the Universal Museum - an Update
Friday, August 10th, 2007
Note: This update includes references to some of the items concerning the Declaration from 2004 through mid 2007. The previous references can be found here.
In early December 2002, nineteen of the world’s top art museums issued a statement firmly opposing the repatriation of cultural material. Attention was drawn to the continuing claims by various countries and peoples for return of collections held in the major museums of the world.
Debate on this issue has continued in conferences, on websites and in journals.
Although at the time, it was claimed that return of Aboriginal human remains from museums in Britain to Australia would be hampered by the Declaration, it would seem from recent events concerning material of human remains from Tasmania in The Natural History Museum in London that no reliance was placed in the Declaration. Rather the issue concerns objects created by people.
Nor has the Declaration been the basis for any aspect of the negotiations between art museums in the USA and the Italian Government over classical archaeological items alleged to have been stolen. There are notes about this later.
We can recall that the British Museum asserts that it “is a universal museum holding an encyclopaedic collection of material from across the world and all periods of human culture and history. For the benefit of its audience now and in the future, the Museum is committed to sustaining and improving its collection”.
The British Museum was significantly involved in the adoption of this Declaration and its director, Neil MacGregor, has vigorously defended it.
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Aboriginal Remains: An update
Wednesday, August 8th, 2007
This post summarises some of the background to the decision in early May 2007 by The Natural History Museum in London to return remains of Tasmanian Aboriginal people. The decision followed months of wrangling and argument and an appeal to the High Court. The decision follows the handing down of the Report from the Working Group on Human Remains. The strong disagreement of some people remains. The claim for return was lodged by the Australian Government in November 2005 on behalf of the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre (TAC).
Matthew Denholm & Peter Wilson (Museum bones legal fight ‘a waste’ of $1m in The Australian February 24, 2007) reported that an Aboriginal group had broken ranks to oppose costly legal action aimed at stopping a British museum conducting tests on indigenous remains. Tasmania’s Lia Pootah community yesterday attacked the case against London’s Natural History Museum as a waste of money, as lawyers predicted legal fees could top $1 million.
Lia Pootah spokeswoman Kaye McPherson said taxpayers’ money would be better directed to indigenous education and cultural programs. She said the DNA and other tests proposed by the museum might have benefits for Aboriginal Australians, a point backed by Mr Mundine. “There is a very emotional balancing act,” Mr Mundine said. “What was done ( taking of Aboriginal remains) is nothing short of horrible. At the same time, there has been some research that has come out of this which could have been good.”
Recently Professor Richard Lane, Director of Science at the Museum said (on ABC Radio National’s “Science Show” 7 July 2007), “These are the first [remains] that we have actually returned. I think both parties started in one place and have ended up somewhere different, quite a learning [sic] for both sides. For the museum community I think it’s about articulating more clearly the scientific benefits to the claimant communities, as opposed to the scientific benefits to all of us.”
Earlier Julia May (in the Sydney Morning Herald, May 12 2007), reported Richard Lane as praising the mediation process and said that this decision would set a precedent. “I think it does change the arena; we’re finding ways that we can balance the needs of the scientific community with the various Australian Aboriginal communities.”
There are, and have been for many decades, widely different views on these kinds of issue. Jocelyn Nettlefold (ABC TV’s 7.30 Report on 21 February) reported the. Michael Mansell (Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre), “They [the remains] were effectively grave-robbed. People dug them up so that they could donate them to institutions overseas.” Professor Robert Foley, Evolutionary Anthropologist (Leverhulme Centre for Human Evolutionary Studies, Department of Biological Anthropology, University of Cambridge), “To see any of it lost and gone forever is, to my mind, a very sad and tragic event.” Mark Stephens, Solicitor: “It may enable one scientist at the Natural History Museum to write an extra paper, but it’s not going to contribute to sum total of human knowledge, it’s not going to prevent disease. It’s not going to do anything which is going to be otherwise irreplaceable to science and, in those circumstances, there is absolutely no excuse whatsoever for this mawkish examination by scientists.”
Natural History Museum director Dr Michael Dixon, said, “They tell a very interesting story about human evolution and the evolution of Tasmanian Aboriginals themselves.”
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