The Curatorial Turn, 1980 - 2018

CHAPTER 2: The Curatorial Turn, 1980 - 2018

“Museums must change or die. They must compete in the modern world for their audiences and their resources against other leisure activities and - in a time when there are too many museums and other heritage attractions with new ones still opening and the audience at best static - against each other.”

Graham Black (2005)142

In 2005 museums and heritage specialist, Graham Black, delivered a call to action. In The Engaging Museum, he argued that museums must transform themselves if they are to remain relevant to twenty-first century audiences. For most of the nineteenth and twentieth century, the primary role of museums had been to collect objects, classify, document, conserve and put them on display. Black was recognising that, since the 1908s, society had changed, bringing with it new demands on the cultural sector. Modern museums needed to justify their existence, generate far more of their own income, broaden their audience bases, reflect their communities and enhance their role as learning institutions.

Black was also implying that audiences had changed and, with more demands on their leisure time and many more competing alternatives for that time, were far less willing to accept a passive role as cultural consumers. This would increasingly mean that museums would need to expand their offer to meet the varying needs of different audience segments and individuals, and to reflect the fact that most visitors will demand a multiple range of experiences during their visit. Black proposed a clear vision for a museum of the future that “engages, stimulates and inspires the publics it serves.”143

Black’s position was connecting to a debate that had dominated the museum sector since the late 1990s. In 1998 academics and marketing

142

Graham Black, The Engaging Museum: Developing Museums for Visitor Involvement, London: Routledge, 2005: 267.

143 Ibid.: 268.

consultants, Neil Kotler and Philip Kotler had acknowledged a similar shift as museums faced the twenty-first century:-

“The most successful museums offer a range of experiences that appeal to different audience segments and reflect the varying needs of individual visitors…successful museums provide multiple experiences: aesthetic and emotional delight, celebration and learning, recreation and sociability.”144

In the same year Caroline Reinhardt, writing in The Spectator, was one of a number of cultural commentators who had detected a similar shift:-

“There is something happening behind the scenes at the museum. A revolution has taken place in its philosophy, which would like to see the glass cases smashed. Today’s museum aims to be genuinely populist. It welcomes - indeed seeks out - all sectors of the community, and eschews anything that smacks of elitism. Explanatory material (preferably using state-of-the-art technology) is pitched at the simplest possible level. And, above all, the new museum seeks to pull its head out of the historical sand to address issues in the contemporary world.”145

These debates were in direct response to a rapidly changing landscape for culture in the UK. They were driven by a series of political and social changes that were to have a major impact on museums in the years leading up to the millennium. The shift was also due to new challenges facing the sector, most notably cuts to government funding for the arts, increasing competition from other sectors, such as retail and leisure, and declining visitor numbers. Museums were forced to look sideways in order to understand what was happening around them and to question the very nature of the visitor experience they offered in an attempt to expand audiences, but also to more effectively engage them.

This chapter charts and analyses these key shifts, as a way of defining the debates that were circulating in the museum and cultural sector during the

144

Neil G. Kotler and P. Kotler, Museum Strategy and Marketing: Designing Missions, Building Audiences, Generating Revenue and Resources, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2008: xx.

145

Caroline Reinhardt, ‘History with attitude: Elitism is out, populism is in’, The Spectator, 4 April 1998: 43-44.