How Art Museums Can Remain Relevant in the 21st Century

Last spring, Dana Schutz’s painting of Emmett Till, Open Casket (2016), spawned calls for the painting’s destruction, an on-air discussion on the daytime chat show The View, and a protest within the Whitney Museum of American Art, where it was exhibited. Over a year later, much of the furor has subsided. The painting is intact and away from public view, but the conflict has reverberated throughout a variety of other controversies. Reformers have made it clear that the issue at stake goes beyond an isolated work of art. They’re demanding that museums address how they display art, source funds, collect objects, and engage their own staff.

“What institutions hang on their walls or put on their pedestals is a clear articulation of who they imagine their audience to be,” writes Aruna d’Souza in a new book, Whitewalling: Art, Race & Protest in 3 Acts, which asserts that American art institutions have long centered on whiteness, or catered to white audiences. Recent efforts to rectify this, or to “decolonize” museums, include calls to reconsider the hiring of a white woman for a position as an African art curator at the Brooklyn Museum, burn or bury an offending artwork by Sam Durant, and even to rethink what we mean when we say “decolonize” (as it often denies Indigenous issues).

One major question, still far from resolved, lies at the heart of these demands: How can 21st-century museums both operate with the greatest sense of equity and ensure that they remain a relevant part of American cultural life? While some professionals are all but ready to give up, others are just getting started.

A very old problem

Western art institutions have always been exclusive. Britain’s first public museum, the Ashmolean at the University of Oxford, opened in 1683 to house the collection of antiquarian Elias Ashmole. Architect Charles Robert Cockerell designed an imposing Neoclassical structure to hold the founder’s “curiosities,” many culled from overseas travels. Over the past few centuries, the curators and directors have added to the original bounty, amassing hundreds of thousands of ceramics, paintings, sculptures, textiles, coins, and more from Egypt, Japan, colonial America, and beyond.

The Ashmolean’s founding principle—that “knowledge of humanity across cultures and across times is important to society”—had a major limiting element: Who, exactly, was included in its definition of “society”? Indeed, Oxford itself didn’t allow women to become full-time students until 1920, and its first black student didn’t matriculate until 1873. At its inception, and for about 200 years after, the Ashmolean museum apparently served a fairly narrow society: the predominantly white men who were wealthy enough to attend Oxford.