The Promise of Cultural Institutions (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Promise of Cultural Institutions Patricia Galloway The Promise of Cultural Institutions. By David Carr. Walnut Creek, Calif.: AltaMira Press, 2003. xxi, 213 pp. $24.95. ISBN 0-7591-0292-9 (paper). This, according to the foreword, is a "why to" book, a meditation on the underlying ethical commitments that should drive those whose professional homes are cultural institutions. Its author, David Carr, who teaches at the University of North Carolina, is now perhaps best known as a "museum educator." The volume is a collection of essays and presentations, only four of them previously published, taken from Carr's recent lectures and publications. The primary focus is on museums, but Carr's general principles are directed at all formal institutions that call themselves "cultural." The overriding argument is that cultural institutions can and should as their highest purpose serve as venues for projects of self-motivated informal learning—that the focus of cultural institutions should be on people first and only second on things. Read straight through, the essays are somewhat repetitive, because the same supporting themes are treated from several points of view, but each essay adds to the themes and also remains self-contained, so that the volume provides a rich source of episodic sustenance, and as a teacher of museum studies I expect to use it with profit to address these themes: 1. People should be seen as "users" of cultural institutions on their own always unfinished quests to answer the questions of a lifetime, living ideally reflective lives tending toward wholeness and away from information overload. These users of cultural institutions must be treated with the utmost consideration and respect in the vulnerability of their openness to learning and in their efforts toward critical thinking, must be "rescued" from the routinization and meaningless measurement of formal learning institutions and the banality of commercial entertainment. [End Page 347] 2. Institutions of culture should make use of "masterful" objects and texts to construct revelatory and provocative (or "incendiary") experiences for their audiences, never closing down discussion but underdetermining their interpretations, thereby helping to extend the culture that sustains them while serving as democratic forums for its discussion. 3. Language should be the heart and soul of the externalization and development of thought, and its use should be encouraged and enhanced by cultural institutions. 4. Culture professionals should see themselves as the supporters of users, providing personal assistance and tools for learning in the context of modeling and cognitive structuring activities, led by the professional as a "more capable peer" of the user. Carr, whose background is in literature, education, and museum and library services, takes his fundamental theoretical inspirations from psychologists Lev Vygotsky and Jerome Bruner and anthropologist Clifford Geertz as he draws a picture of the kind of independent cognitive activity by the motivated learner that he feels cultural institutions should support. The essays "Museums, Educative: An Encyclopedia Entry" and "The Situation that Educates" both explore in detail what informal learning inside a cultural institution should be like, providing a conspectus of the kinds of socially situated learning that museums and other cultural institutions can support. Carr also supplies an excellent annotated bibliography, modeling in his own practice the same kind of assistance for the reader as he suggests should always be offered to users of cultural institutions. In addition, there is a particularly helpful appendix that provides a guide to observation of the features of a cultural institution as experienced by a user. Oddly, although Habermasian communicative action appears to be a central figure in the book, Habermas and the whole frame of Enlightenment rationality and Western liberal democracy remains the taken-for-granted context. And although Carr's ideal cultural institutions would be emphatically user-centered while secondarily carrying out their additional function as machines for cultural reproduction through preservation of cultural materials, the user of cultural institutions (even though most of the essays focus on the adult user) is always to be the less capable peer to the culture professional, is rarely to be more than consulted about what the cultural institution should offer, and then only at the pleasure of the professional (although in perhaps the strongest essay, "Museums and Public...