Book review: The Art Museum from Boullée to Bilbao

I spend a lot of time at meetings that end up discussing the purpose of museums. Never far from the surface are disagreements about the relative importance of audiences and collections, education and scholarship, relevance and timelessness, or instrumentalism and intrinsic quality.

If only we could agree with Nancy Hanks and move on. Hanks was the chairwoman of the US National Endowment for the Arts in 1970 when protesters gatecrashed the annual meeting of the American Association of Museums to demand greater democratisation of museums (along with the end of the Vietnam war).

She responded: "I do not think that we can any longer spend time discussing the role of the museum as a repository of treasures versus its public role. It simply has to be both."

Andrew McClellan's book is full of such entertaining incidents, showing that the role of art museums, at least, has been regularly contested over the past 200 years. He takes a panoramic view of art-museum history with separate chapters looking at subjects such as architecture, collections and display, audiences and commercialism.

He also discusses looting, repatriation and universal museums. The book's strength is its focus on the history of "debate about art museums and their place in society", citing many differing views of the art museum's role and critiquing the museum critics.

McClellan shows that museums can be over-ambitious in asserting their impact and he wonders whether every museum can appeal to everyone, or whether it might be more realistic for different museums to aim at different audiences. He generally supports the overall thrust to open museums up and claims that art museums are "the most vibrant and popular of all cultural organisations in the west".

He is less happy about art museums' tendency to present a "depoliticised global humanism", a trend he thinks has grown since 9/11, and cautions against recent conservative calls by James Cuno and others to see collections as more important than audiences.

The book is easy to read, almost, while being fully referenced (there are 50 pages of footnotes). It would perhaps have benefited from tighter editing to improve the clarity of the argument, which can get obscured as it moves through two centuries and crisscrosses the Atlantic. Much of the discussion concerns US art museums, but there is also material from France, Germany and the UK.

I was intrigued by McClellan's sketchy accounts of the couple of dull decades after the second world war, when museums drifted into an untroubled curatorial slumber, calmly collecting and avoiding interpretation. (McClellan reckons this was because labelling was seen as anti-western: communists and fascists used art to make didactic political points, so freedom lovers left it to speak for itself.)

In the late 1960s, directors "awoke to find themselves out of touch… the world beyond the museum had changed dramatically". Sixties radicalism gave us community museums such as the Smithsonian's Anacostia in Washington DC (opened 1967) and eco-museums in France . The 1968 Paris riots led to the opening of the Pompidou Centre (just as Liverpool got its Tate after riots in 1988).

Now, much of the spirit of 1968 has been replaced with business-like efficiency. On a recent visit to the Pompidou I was sorry to find that visitors now need to pay before they can ascend the building's external escalators. Worse, the remarkable original open galleries have been replaced by a series of neat white boxes with a guard in every corner.

I agree with McClellan that art museums are now well-run successes. However, with a few notable exceptions such as Tate and Pallant House in Chichester, they can be predictable and dull.

It remains to be seen whether UK art curators have the ability to embrace the emerging agendas of excellence and sustainability and rediscover the freshness and sense of purpose that many of their predecessors had in the 1960s.