Director Of Museum Research Articles

Museums’ Economic Performance and Directors’ Recruitment Process: An Assessment of the Recent Policy Reform of the Italian Museum Sector

We study the economic effects of a reform of the national museum sector, the so-called Franceschini Reform, implemented in 2015. The reform introduced a new organization of the national museum system. One of the most innovative instruments of the policy was the establishment of a different method - an international call for applications - in the selection of directors of major museums (museums of “national interest”). The article studies the effects of this new recruitment policy on museum economic performance, focusing on revenues. Using a difference-in-difference technique for the years 2014 to 2017, we show that the new recruitment policy improved the revenues of treated museums throughout Italy by a range between 17% and 26%. We also find that the characteristics of the directors (age, field of degree, and study abroad experience) play a role in explaining the increase in revenue of these Institutions. We thus find evidence of significant benefits of the policy. The new knowledge may be useful for improving museum and cultural sector management policies.

A Conversation with Manuel Borja-Villel

Abstract One could argue that Manuel Borja-Villel fuses the position of the melancholic museum director, mourning the loss of the emancipatory projects of the recent past, with that of the activist utopian museum director, elaborating, if not enacting, the urgently needed changes necessary for a different future of institutional and cultural practices to be achieved. Since his initial appointment at the Tàpies Foundation in Barcelona in 1990 and continuing on to this January, when he left his directorship of the Reina Sofía, Borja-Villel has advanced, or rather re-embodied, the great tradition of the progressive museum director of the 1920s and ‘30s, from Alexander Dorner in Hannover to Alfred Barr in New York. Theirs was a tradition that defined the functions of the curator as being those of a scholar, cultivating historical memory as a form of collective enlightenment and visionary innovation as the dissemination of current critical thought and oppositional practice. As directors, they had imagined the museum to be an extension of the public sphere, one whose functions were comparable to those of libraries and the various faculties of the university: to collect and organize knowledge and critical and historical reflection in order to satisfy the largest possible public's desire for cultural literacy, beyond the inherited or enforced distinctions of class privileges. Unlike that of his contemporary American colleagues, Borja-Villel's institutional success was not the result of incessant compromises with the ever-intensifying demand to turn the museum's exhibitions into an expanded field of spectacle culture. Nor did he expand the museum's collections to serve as the affirmative substrate of speculative investment. Borja-Villel—until now protected by the legal principles of a recently restituted liberal-democratic state—could develop and sustain his exemplary practice of organizing truly historical exhibitions and building a formidable collection within the boundaries set by his comparatively limited access to public resources. Not to have yielded to those pressures, to private capital and its property control, is undoubtedly one of the reasons the newly emerging reactionary forces in Spain (as everywhere else) determined that it was time to conclude its support for the aspirations that had emerged from the oppositional practices of Conceptual art and institutional critique that had been formative for Borja-Villel (much more so than for any other museum director known to us in either Europe or the United States). Typically, to mention just a few examples, the first great comprehensive retrospective exhibition of Hans Haacke's work was organized by Borja-Villel, as were the first major European retrospectives of Marcel Broodthaers and James Coleman, of Lygia Clark and Nancy Spero. And another, equally ground-breaking exhibition (among dozens of others), Alice Creischer, Andreas Siekmann, and Max Jorge Hinderer's The Potosí Principle—one of the first comprehensive projects to construct a site-specific mirror for Spain's colonial history—could not have happened anywhere but at the Reina Sofía.

Analysis of the Outdoor Microclimate and the Effects on Greek Cultural Heritage Using the Heritage Microclimate Risk (HMR) and Predicted Risk of Damage (PRD) Indices: Present and Future Simulations

This study aims to assess the impacts of climate change on the cultural heritage of two Greek areas for both the present time and the future. As the climate is constantly evolving, cultural heritage is continuously exposed to the risk of damage and deterioration. Therefore, museum directors and boards as well as the national ministries must be informed so that measures and practices are adapted to the new climatic conditions. Greece is a country with immense cultural wealth, both tangible and intangible, which stretches back four and a half thousand years. As a homeland of important historical and cultural resources, Greece is vulnerable to climate change. Two up-to-date indices were applied to two Greek areas with high cultural value: Thessaloniki and Delphi. In order to evaluate the suitability of the microclimate and to assess the damage risk, the Heritage Microclimate Risk (HMR) index and the Predicted Risk of Damage (PRD) index were used for two variables: temperature and relative humidity. The study was carried out for three different time periods, the period 1980–2000 (hereafter, the reference period) and the future periods 2039–2059 and 2079–2099. For the reference period, data from three different sources were incorporated in the study (observed, reanalysis, and model data). The simulated data were derived from the Regional Climate Model RegCM4 with a fine spatial resolution of 10 × 10 km. In addition, the emission scenario RCP4.5 was used for the model’s future simulations. The present and future ideal outdoor climate conditions for the monuments were also estimated and are presented in this work. Overall, the future estimations revealed that the ideal outdoor temperature conditions will be higher compared to the reference period, meaning that the monuments will have to adapt to new warmer climate conditions. In addition to the new temperature conditions to which the monuments will have to adapt, the study showed that the monuments will be exposed to “moderate-maximum” risk more often in the future.

The Paris Peace Conference and Cultural Reparations after the First World War

Abstract The First World War was marked by cultural destruction that violated international law and outraged international audiences. This article examines the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 and the five post-war treaties (Versailles, Saint-Germain, Neuilly, Trianon and Sèvres) to explore how these issues were resolved in the post-war settlements. Rather than focusing solely on the substance of the treaties, the article examines the process through which they were negotiated, paying particular attention to the crucial role played by lobbyists such as museum directors, writers and politicians. It sets these negotiations in the wider context of the contemporary discourse about cultural destruction. The article asserts that the cultural provisions of the post-war treaties sit at the intersection of two key issues in post-war peacemaking: self-determination and reparations. Many states presented claims for the return of cultural objects or compensation for cultural destruction as essential to their national restoration after the war. Cultural claims generally appeared in the treaties’ reparation clauses and their enactment was inherited by the post-war Inter-Allied Reparation Commission. The article argues that the post-war treaties demonstrate the dominance of the cultural claims of Western allies over those of eastern Europe and colonial settings. They also demonstrate a tension between a belief in universal civilisation and the claims of nation states to ownership of cultural property, which was most apparent in cases involving the dissolution of the Habsburg and Ottoman empires. Fundamentally, the decisions reached were often arbitrary rather than being guided by consistent principles or norms.

The Long View: Leadership at a Critical Juncture for “African Art” in America

The Long View: Leadership at a Critical Juncture for “African Art” in America

The Unfinished Business of Unsettled Things: Art from an African American South

The Unfinished Business of Unsettled Things: Art from an African American South

Historians in the Museum

In the last two decades Poland has experienced a museum boom. The numbers of new, or significantly remade museums, has grown rapidly, along with the growing numbers of museum visitors. Before the pandemic, Polish museums recorded more than thirty-eight million visits a year, a number equal to the size of Poland’s population. Among the most popular, with more than five-hundred thousand visits annually, were newly opened history museums, offering a new, narrative type of exhibition and museum experience. Museums like Warsaw’s Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews and the European Solidarity Center in Gdańsk have also attracted international attention of museologists and media, earning enthusiastic reviews and major European museum awards. In recent years, however, they became objects of harsh criticism and pressure by politicians of the ruling Prawo i Sprawiedliwość Party (PiS). In this conversation, four Polish historians with substantial museological experience—three museum directors (present or former) and a museologist—talk about museums as institutions to practice history; they discuss what academic historians can learn working at museums, and they dwell on the challenges resulting from the success of museums as vehicles of public history. Piotr Cywiński is by instruction a medieval historian, who for several years has been the director of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial Museum. Paweł Machcewicz and Dariusz Stola are historians of the twentieth century, currently professors at the Polish Academy of Sciences: Machcewicz was the founding director of the Museum of the Second World War in Gdańsk, and Stola was the director of the Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews. Anna Ziębińska-Witek is a historian and museologist, and she has written extensively on Polish and Eastern European museum exhibitions of twentieth-century history. They met online to react to questions posed by Timothy Snyder, who has written extensively on the history of Poland and Eastern Europe; Snyder has also served on the academic council of the Museum of the Second World War. Stola has edited and translated, from Polish to English, the record of their conversation.

Making History: The IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts ed. by Nancy Marie Mithlo (review)

Reviewed by: Making History: The IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts ed. by Nancy Marie Mithlo David Titterington Making History: The IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts. Edited by Nancy Marie Mithlo. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2020. ix + 185 pp. Illustrations, contributors, index. $39.95 paper. We use Making History at Haskell Indian Nations University (mentioned more than once in its pages), because the book is a perfect demonstration of new pedagogies and fresh theoretical approaches to the rich, creative lives of Indigenous people. Countless little surprises and new insights fill the text, and while traditional approaches to art history often deprioritize the artist in favor of theory and analysis, Making History presents a much-needed "view from the inside." Making History is more than just a book of essays. It is a catalogue of almost 200 artworks from the Institute of American Indian Art's (IAIA) historic collection (some works, such as Bill Soza War Soldier's Ghost Dance triptych, cannot be found elsewhere or online). It is also a student workbook with vocabulary lists, writing prompts, sample interview questions, and large margins perfect for taking notes, as well as a teacher's manual with sample handouts by educators at the top of their fields, all connected to IAIA. This book is the first of its kind. The authors demonstrate the research practices they describe so that, as one critic put it, teaching and modeling simultaneously take place on the page. The constant use of "we" and "us" makes the reader feel included and spoken to. As editor and contributor Nancy Marie Mithlo (Chiricahua Apache) explains, "our focus is on providing a scaffold of resources for emerging Native arts scholars, Native and non-Native readers, students, and academics who wish to understand the tenor and tone of what this field is about and how to approach teaching and learning about Native American Indian arts" (xvi). Although the text's focus is on Southwest artists, there is some Great Plains representation. In the chapter "Mapping Indigenous Space," John Paul Rangel (Apache, Navajo, Spanish) writes about the work of Edgar Heap of Birds (Cheyenne/Arapaho), Anita Fields (Osage/Muskogee Creek), and Norman Akers (Osage), each focusing on the physical and psychological geographies associated with the Great Plains. There are also multiple perspectives on the Ghost Dance phenomenon, and an essay by IAIA museum director Patsy Phillips (Cherokee) on the work of C. Maxx Stevens (Seminole/Muscogee Nation of Oklahoma), who uses objects to bring to life her memories of Kansas and Oklahoma. Similar to the visual arts, poetry activates deep memories and alter-logic, and Mithlo bookends the six chapters with two poems by Indigenous authors that further help unsettle [End Page 107] our ordinary thinking. There are also four "gallery" sections of 102 colored plates. It is not clear how the galleries relate to the chapters, for each chapter also contains its own images, and so we are left wondering if they are perhaps a cache of images for the student reader to draw from in order to curate their own imaginary exhibition. As Cree scholar Shawn Wilson would put it, engaging with this book is ceremony. Although one impressive work cannot redress the lack of resources available to teach Indigenous art from Indigenous perspectives, Making History is a start, and mandatory reading for any serious student of art history. David Titterington College of Humanities Haskell Indian Nations University Copyright © 2023 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln

Этнография Кавказа в отражении коллекций Кавказского музея (вторая половина XIX – начало ХХ в.)

Introduction. The paper focuses on the issue of constructing ethnographic knowledge about the Caucasus in the late imperial period. All issues of collecting, systematizing and popularizing information about the traditional cultures of local peoples are considered from an institutional aspect using materials from the Caucasus Museum. Materials and Methods. The authors characterize the role of the museum in shaping ideas about local ethnography based on a wide range of sources. The analysis of the content of ethnographic collections and their exhibition design in the context of interaction between government, science and society was carried out. It showed by what means and in what spirit this work took place. Analysis. The paper focuses on the research practices of museum director G. I. Radde and his contemporaries in creation and development of the Ethnographic Department of the museum. The author shows that quite a few famous statesmen acted as contributors of the exhibits. The main source of replenishment of the museum collections were objects of material and spiritual culture acquired by Radde during his travels in the Caucasus or as a result of interaction with other institutions and scientists. Particular attention is paid to the development of an original approach to the exhibition of ethnographic objects. The author gives various points of view of contemporaries on this issue. Results. The authors conclude that with the support of the local administration, together with G. I. Radde’s energy and hard work, the Caucasus Museum turned into a leading scientific and educational center of local ethnography. In conditions when scientific knowledge about the peoples of the region was just elaborating, he represented a collective image of the traditional culture of the East, formed in the mass consciousness of his contemporaries. His ethnographic collections showed the diversity of local peoples who had recently become Russian subjects and thereby emphasized the power and greatness of the entire Empire. The scientific significance of the Caucasus Museum, which contributes to the rise of ethnographic knowledge about the region, is also substantiated.

Новые материалы к биографии Б. Н. Засыпкина

This article continues the author’s series of publications on the history of organization and participants of the studies in Eastern culture in the Crimea in the mid-1920s. A page of the expeditionary activities of the team of the Central State Restoration Workshops in the Crimea is revealed. This work was a part of large-scale archaeological and ethnographic expedition for the study of the Crimean Tatar monuments. It was commissioned and funded by the Crimean ASSR and carried out by researchers from the academic centres of the USSR. The article has analysed the participation of Boris Nikolaevich Zasypkin (1891–1955), a well-known restorer and the organizer of the archaeological monument protection in different regions of the USSR, in the study of the Crimean cultural heritage. It has introduced into the scholarship previously not known documents from the collections of the Central State Restoration Workshops now residing in the Moscow Central State Archives. These materials shed light on new aspects of the architect-restorer B. N. Zasypkin’s works in the Crimea in 1926 and 1927. The texts of Zasypkin’s reports on his works on the peninsula in 1926 are supplied. Informative but little-known letters of P. I. Chepurina, the head of Yevpatoria Archaeological and Ethnographic Museum, and K. E. Grinevich, the director of the State Museum of Tauric Chersonese, to B. N. Zasypkin uncover tough personal communications of the researchers of the Crimea and Zasypkin’s role in the said process. Zasypkin’s activities for the preservation of the museum in Yevpatoria has been demonstrated. He arranged the intercession of the museum existence and preservation of its storage from the Head of the Museum section of the Glavnauka (Supreme Administration of Scientific, Scientific-Artistic, and Museum Establishments) at the People’s Commissariat for Education of the RSFSR N. I. Sedova, the Head of the Glavnauka F. N. Petrov, and the Chair of the State Academy for the History of Material Culture N. Ia. Marr. The Central State Restoration Workshops’ expedition under the supervision of I. E. Grabar to the peninsula has been reconstructed. It included the head of the Commission for the Preservation and Discovery of Ancient Paintings in Russia and the art historian A. I. Anisimov, the restorer G. O. Chirikov, and the photographer A. V. Liadov. The 1927 expedition was aimed at the inspection of architectural monuments where paintings survived and the development of necessary measures to protect and maintain these architectural sites. Zasypkin’s work for the recording of Chersonese monuments has been shown.

The features of the Сalchaqui ceramic vessels: technology of producing and ornamentation

The problem of the interplay between manufacturing technology, vessel construction elements and surface treatment often attracts the attention of archaeologists studying ancient ceramics. The MAE RAS collection includes a number of ceramics vessels obtained during excavations of the La Paya site (province of Salta, northwest Argentina). The settlement was founded by the Diaguita-Calchaqui Indians at the end of the first millennium and existed in 9–16 centuries AD. An important part of this archaeological complex was excavated at the beginning of the 20th century by the Argentine archaeologist, founder and first director of the Ethnographic Museum in Buenos Aires, J. B. Ambrosetti. The most part of the La Paya complex was presented by hand-molded ceramic vessels, which were a characteristic part of Calchaqui’s funeral rituals. Burials in cists were found within the stone wall surrounding the site, as well as in the territory of the necropolis adjoining it from the west. The ceramic complex of La Paya consists of a significant number of bowls, characterized by a high level of morphological diversity. Bowls of different shapes were made either as independent vessels or as components of complex forms. At the same time, the funerary urns and the bowls associated with them have a stable pattern of ornamentation. In the article the data on technology of manufacturing and ornamentation of the La Paya vessels is presented and some historiographical and mythological subjects, which can be useful for understanding new features of construction and ornamentation of the Calchaqui ceramic bowls and burial urns, are analyzed.

United in Patriarchy? A View from across the (Aegean) Pond

United in Patriarchy? A View from across the (Aegean) Pond

Characteristics of the Stone Age of Crimea in the Creative Heritage of A.S. Moiseev.

The purpose of the article is to characterize the contribution of the Russian scientist Alexander Silovich Moiseev to the archaeological study of the Stone Age of the Mountainous Crimea. To achieve the goal, the following tasks were envisaged: the selection of articles on the primitive archeology of the Crimea from the entire array of scientific publications of the scientist, their subsequent historiographical analysis and generalization. The research methodology was based on the complex application of scientific principles: historicism, objectivity, comparative historical approach, retrospection. The problem field of the research included the following components: establishing continuity in the history of the study of the Stone Age of the Crimean peninsula, formulating priority problems of the primitive archeology of the region in the works of the scientist. The source base for the study was the published articles by A.S. Moiseev on the history of the Stone Age of the Mountainous Crimea. In the course of the conducted research, it was found that during the short-lived but important expeditions of A.S. Moiseev as director of the Natural History Museum in Yalta, the source base was gradually formed in the articles of the scientist and the program of future studies of the ancient history of the peninsula was concretized. A.S. Moiseev put the study of the Stone Age of the Crimea to a qualitatively new level. In particular, he actualized the need to search and excavate primitive monuments with careful fixation of all finds in plan and section, justified the expediency of joint stationary excavations of several well-known archaeological sites with systematic searches in new, not yet explored areas. In addition, the author's innovations are the transition from the simple collection of flints and tools to their systematization and typology, the formation of ordered collections; the creation of a complete archaeological map of primitive sites and locations of the peninsula with their detailed stratigraphy, as well as the strengthening of scientific ties between representatives of regional and academic science in the study of Paleolithic, Mesolithic and Neolithic monuments of the Crimea.

In memory of Judith Masters and Fabien Génin.

In memory of Judith Masters and Fabien Génin.

Wilhelm von Bode's Way of Art Appraisal

Wilhelm von Bode, 1845-1929, whose full name is Arnold Wilhelm von Bode, added the word "Feng" to his family name after being granted the title of nobility in 1914. He was a famous German art historian, museum director and founder of museology in the 19th century, and served as the general curator of the Berlin Museum from 1905 to 1920. In Bode's more than half a century long art museum work and art appraisal activities, he has identified countless works of art, and it is impossible to accurately count how many works of art he has evaluated and collected for the Berlin Art Museum and other art museums in Germany. His achievements in art appraisal have almost become a legend. These events recorded in the art history present Bode's specific details and ideas in the work of art appraisal, and more clearly delineate the intricate relationship between art appraisal and other social factors in the country's cultural construction.

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF PERSONALITY IN DEFINING AND REALISATION OF THE ROLE OF A MUSEUM: A CASE STUDY OF TUKUMS MUSEUM (1953–1960)

The paper reflects the understanding of Auguste Kapmane, Director of the State Tukums Museum (the present Tukums Museum), on the role of the museum, or rather its contribution to society in accordance with ideological tasks of Soviet museums. It also deals with her activities in realisation of the role of museum within the context of the social-political events of the 1950s. Evaluation of her activities in Tukums is not unambiguous. Although she had been a member of the Communist Party since 1917 and she was head of a museum whose collection was dominated by artwork of the pre-Soviet period, she held professional criteria higher than ideological tasks. She did not comply with the demand of several evaluation commissions of the museum collections to destroy the works of the so-called formalists and she also dared to exhibit pictures by some émigré painters. Likewise, she enlarged the museum collection with prominent artwork by Latvian painters from collections of other museums during the so-called cleansing actions.

Introduction to Special issue

Introduction to Special issue

Jean Otth and video art networks: Exhibitions, festivals, open encounters – About the agency of a medium

In the early 1970s, Jean Otth played an active role in the constitution and development of a video art scene in French-speaking Switzerland. The art critic and museum director René Berger described these pioneers in the use of a new medium as ‘musketeers of the invisible’. Based on the notion of agency theorised by Alfred Gell, we show in this article how Otth’s work, as well as his curatorial and pedagogical activities, allowed the development of a videosphere (to take up and displace the meaning of a term proposed by Gene Youngblood in 1970). We also propose an analysis of Otth’s early videos and installations, which are traversed by a phenomenological interrogation on the mechanisms of perception and a deconstruction of representation and its conventions. Finally, we integrate Otth’s reflections on television and video from his personal archives to reveal his creative intentions.

The Illusionist

The Illusionist

(In)visibility and African Fashion in UK Museums

(In)visibility and African Fashion in UK Museums