“Soft power” has become a concise way of denoting the political potential of ostensibly non-political agencies such as arts and culture. There has never been a shortage of efforts to leverage culture for diplomatic ends on the international stage – that’s why the Foreign and Commonwealth Office sponsors the British Council, after all – but there is growing recognition that the arts are a social force whose power may be harnessed for the public good in a variety of other contexts too. To such a background, this book focuses particularly on the relationship between museums and the cities they inhabit worldwide.
Some years ago, a US survey found that 87% of citizens viewed museum exhibitions as among “the most trustworthy sources of objective information”. No government, brand or other institution comes close. It follows that if curators are better trusted than politicians, doctors, lawyers and priests, museums must be the most effective vehicles through which a range of views and values may be promoted. This is some responsibility to bear, for it makes them very desirable commodities, not least for anyone with an agenda.
Thus, in cities across the world, planners and investors often want to enlist museums – especially new museums – to enhance brands, or even a city itself. After all, “Powerful cities have powerful museums”, as one chapter title proclaims. However, when curators and developers come together, museums sometimes remain in control of their own destiny (as in the Guggenheim’s venture with Bilbao) and sometimes (as may transpire with the projects in Abu Dhabi) become the medium for someone else’s message.
This absorbing book, whose 14 contributors provide global case studies, is written from the standpoint of museums rather than cities, more concerned with how museums can improve society than an investigation of their urban role.
Cumulatively (and sometimes rather evangelically), the book enjoins them to do more to increase their moral impact on the world, though this is described in general institutional terms rather than in specific relation to the collections around which most museums have evolved.
Indeed Hayfa Matar, writing about new museums in the Gulf, feels it’s time that “the mission statements of museums to ‘collect, preserve and interpret’ should be shelved” in favour of a new mantra “to gather, steward and converse”. It nonetheless seems odd that Gail Dexter Lord and Ngaire Blankenberg’s closing chapter, Thirty-two Ways for Museums to Activate Their Soft Power, declines to analyse in any depth the political impact and potential of exhibiting. There is, instead, a preferential focus on the motherhood and apple pie of Developing Cultures of Creativity, Bridging and Bonding and the like.
Elsewhere there are flashes of critical thinking: in relation to the King’s Cross “Knowledge Quarter”, Baillie Card acknowledges that it is possible that property developers’ arts programmes are less about soft power and more of a “facade that gives the creative class the impression of living in an attractive cosmopolitan city”, and Guido Guerzoni seems heretically to wonder if there are too many museums in the world. But such flurries of scrutiny are few and far between.
Though this serious study of an important subject deserves the attention of museum professionals, it should carry two health warnings. First, it does not say much about how museums’ soft power changes things for the better in cities (merely how it might or should) and does not explore how and to what effect this power is at work across a wide range of media (television, film, literature and so on) beyond museums. Thus the book focuses on its theme in unnatural isolation, curiously theoretical despite its several case studies.
Second, the parts by Lord and Blankenberg carry the slightly patronising air of a self-help manual, where maxims and lists of how to fix things abound. Neither of these shortcomings fatally undermines the worth of much of its content, but they are a reminder that the topic deserves critical attention from beyond the world of museum studies too.
Some years ago, a US survey found that 87% of citizens viewed museum exhibitions as among “the most trustworthy sources of objective information”. No government, brand or other institution comes close. It follows that if curators are better trusted than politicians, doctors, lawyers and priests, museums must be the most effective vehicles through which a range of views and values may be promoted. This is some responsibility to bear, for it makes them very desirable commodities, not least for anyone with an agenda.
Thus, in cities across the world, planners and investors often want to enlist museums – especially new museums – to enhance brands, or even a city itself. After all, “Powerful cities have powerful museums”, as one chapter title proclaims. However, when curators and developers come together, museums sometimes remain in control of their own destiny (as in the Guggenheim’s venture with Bilbao) and sometimes (as may transpire with the projects in Abu Dhabi) become the medium for someone else’s message.
This absorbing book, whose 14 contributors provide global case studies, is written from the standpoint of museums rather than cities, more concerned with how museums can improve society than an investigation of their urban role.
Cumulatively (and sometimes rather evangelically), the book enjoins them to do more to increase their moral impact on the world, though this is described in general institutional terms rather than in specific relation to the collections around which most museums have evolved.
Indeed Hayfa Matar, writing about new museums in the Gulf, feels it’s time that “the mission statements of museums to ‘collect, preserve and interpret’ should be shelved” in favour of a new mantra “to gather, steward and converse”. It nonetheless seems odd that Gail Dexter Lord and Ngaire Blankenberg’s closing chapter, Thirty-two Ways for Museums to Activate Their Soft Power, declines to analyse in any depth the political impact and potential of exhibiting. There is, instead, a preferential focus on the motherhood and apple pie of Developing Cultures of Creativity, Bridging and Bonding and the like.
Elsewhere there are flashes of critical thinking: in relation to the King’s Cross “Knowledge Quarter”, Baillie Card acknowledges that it is possible that property developers’ arts programmes are less about soft power and more of a “facade that gives the creative class the impression of living in an attractive cosmopolitan city”, and Guido Guerzoni seems heretically to wonder if there are too many museums in the world. But such flurries of scrutiny are few and far between.
Though this serious study of an important subject deserves the attention of museum professionals, it should carry two health warnings. First, it does not say much about how museums’ soft power changes things for the better in cities (merely how it might or should) and does not explore how and to what effect this power is at work across a wide range of media (television, film, literature and so on) beyond museums. Thus the book focuses on its theme in unnatural isolation, curiously theoretical despite its several case studies.
Second, the parts by Lord and Blankenberg carry the slightly patronising air of a self-help manual, where maxims and lists of how to fix things abound. Neither of these shortcomings fatally undermines the worth of much of its content, but they are a reminder that the topic deserves critical attention from beyond the world of museum studies too.
