“Soup Kitchens For The Soul”
I’ve just finished reading an article from the Sydney Morning Herald on Elaine Heumann Gurian’s visit to Australia. Elaine is the author of the book Civilizing The Museum and is a consultant to a large number of Museums, (including the Smithsonian, the Jewish Museum in Berlin and the Australian National Museum).
I was really interested in a number of things the article had to say, I really wish I could get my hands on her lecture that she was here to give:
A speech she gave at the Powerhouse yesterday, titled “The museum as soup kitchen”, examined how cultural institutions should be engaging much more creatively with the public. And not just museums, she includes art galleries, botanic gardens, historic houses and other educational attractions.
On one level Gurian means the term literally. During the Great Depression, she says, museums did act as soup kitchens. More recently, when the North Dakota city of Grand Forks was hit by a flood, the local museum became a civic refuge.
“They were a church on Sunday, a dance class on Wednesday afternoon, while still being a museum,” Gurian says.
She says the global financial crisis should be seen as an opportunity for museums to forge new links with local communities. Under her soup kitchen philosophy, museums should be satisfying spiritual, cultural and emotional needs.
Part of the problem, she argues, is that museums are still seen as elitist and inaccessible, partly “because some of them are … and those tend to look like the one in Night At The Museum“.
Too often cultural institutions are content to see themselves as repositories of “stuff”. They take care of their collections but see no real need to excite people who don’t know what’s there.
“Museums make culture visible, transforming it from an idea into something we can all see and participate in,” Gurian says. “That’s why governments fight over museums.”
Take the controversy over our National Museum when it opened in 2001, with right-wing critics – including the board members Christopher Pearson and David Barnett, and the historian Keith Windschuttle – denouncing it as presenting what some called its “black armband” view of Australian history.
“National museums of any country are always political.
Yet in its first decade the National Museum has won many awards and had record crowds. Like other Australian museums and galleries with free general admission, it also seems to be weathering the financial crisis.”
