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New York Times contributing arts writer Jori Finkel opened the conversation—in front of a standing-room-only crowd—by asking the panelists whether they believed art had made them better people.

Segerstrom president Terrence W. Dwyer said that experiencing great art and working with inspiring artists have changed his life—by offering him moments of reflection and windows into new cultures.

Although she joked that she’s “still waiting to find out,” New Yorker staff writer Susan Orlean said that from a young age, reading fiction gave her the capacity to feel a connection to and empathy for people who were entirely unlike her. “I think I would be a very selfish, narcissistic person if I didn’t somehow learn what it felt like to be in another person’s life,” she said.

Getty Trust president and CEO James Cuno said that his family deserved most of the credit for making him the person he is. But the arts gave him purpose and anchored him in the world.

Finkel asked the panelists if particular kinds of artwork instill more empathy than others.

While Orlean said that reading William Faulkner might be a higher calling than watching Real Housewives, she considers any work that challenges people to imagine lives beyond their familiar experiences to be of value.

Cuno, however, cautioned against putting too much of a burden on the arts. Could it be, he asked, not that art makes people more empathetic but that the people who work in and appreciate the arts are more empathetic to begin with?

Dwyer agreed with Cuno that art’s effect on people is mediated by their prior experiences. “The arts take people through terrible experiences,” said Dwyer. “They also help people get through the terrible experiences in their lives.”

Cuno said that his own father never visited an art museum until his son began working in them—but still led a meaningful, well-lived life. “Some people find meaning elsewhere,” he said. “Wherever you find that purpose and meaning is important.”

“You’re not going to tell us where?” asked Finkel.

Cuno said that 1200 Getty Center Drive would be a good place to start.

Orlean recalled profiling the hugely popular but critically derided painter Thomas Kinkade. Kinkade told her that his art made people joyful—and didn’t that alone make his work art and thus valuable? It’s easy to say that a Shakespeare play makes you a better person, Orlean said. But it gets more complicated when you go beyond “the very comfortable world of fine art and fine literature.”

Cuno disagreed. “The question to me is not what falls under the umbrella of art but what offers more acute, lasting, compelling, complicating, enriching, deepening experiences of art,” he said. “I don’t want to assume that any one of them makes people better than the other.” But some art, he said, is of deeper quality than other art. Kinkade is not Michelangelo. “I want to encourage people to think that art is more than providing them simple access to immediate gratification,” he said.

Finkel asked the panelists if a digital image has the same power as an original work of art on a museum wall, and if a YouTube clip does the same work as a live performance: “How important is it in your view that we experience an original work of art, whatever that means, versus these versions that we’re so used to today?”

In the future, said Dwyer, we are going to have large audiences who never attend a show in our halls but experience our art online in some way. And that’s necessary: Arts institutions and artists have to evolve as communities evolve.

Orlean said that she was surprised, recently, to accompany her son and his third grade classmates on a trip to the Getty Center to see a Van Gogh. Although children of that age are deeply comfortable with the digital, the kids went wild over the paint on the canvas and the experience of seeing the real thing.

When it comes to the visual arts, said Cuno, the real thing can’t be modified or enlarged: “You’ve got to come to terms with it as it is in front of you,” he said. “I don’t think that will ever go away.”

In the question-and-answer session, an audience member asked the panel about whether art that features a lack of empathy—like the Bret Easton Ellis novel American Psycho—can in fact make people more empathetic.

Orlean said that one of the most profound reading experiences she’s ever had was Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood—about the killers of a Kansas farmer and his family. The impact of the book was not about its content, she said, so much as it was about the experience of surrendering yourself to a piece of remarkable, transforming literature.

If art is so important, asked another audience member, why does our society undervalue it?

Cuno said that people falsely assume that anyone can do art—or that it’s a skill a person is born with—and as a result, there’s no reason to invest in training. But we put a value on art based on the time we’re living in. When times are tough, people make the decisions they think will provide themselves and their children with a better future. The value of art comes and goes in part based on people’s confidence in larger economic and political forces.

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I grew up in an Air Force family that moved around a lot: from Missouri to Louisiana, Ohio, Florida, Washington, California, and Bermuda. After graduating from high school at Travis Air Force Base in the Bay Area, I headed to the U.S. Air Force Academy Preparatory School in Colorado Springs. But military school wasn’t for me. I wanted to travel. So, after one semester, I dropped out and went to London, where I worked as a short-order cook and hitchhiked up and down the U.K.

In 1969, I enrolled at Willamette University in Salem, Oregon. Wanderlust soon struck again, and I moved to Luxembourg for a study-abroad program. Ideally suited for train travel—I am a compact person—I moved around Europe as often as I could, buying inexpensive tickets to bigger cities such as Frankfurt, Munich, and Paris.

On a trip to Paris, I happened to visit the Louvre. It was my first experience at a museum. This was more than 40 years ago, long before the Louvre Pyramid was built to accommodate crowds of visitors. In those days, artifacts overflowed along byzantine passages and byways, and rows of Old Masters hung from the ceiling in grand salons, beckoning you through hall after tantalizing hall.

I stumbled along those halls looking at the art—these were things I had never seen before, made by people from cultures I had never heard of before, from times and places of which I knew nothing. And it all came alive to me. Each object was a provocation. I’ve never forgotten it.

That chance visit to the Louvre was a lightning bolt. At age 19, I’d found what made my heart sing—but I hadn’t figured out how to turn it into a career. Two years later, still a college student, I got involved in avant-garde theater. When I acted in Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, I got a taste of what it means to make art, and the pleasure of that experience. I moved to San Francisco for a time, worked in a warehouse, and tried to connect with theater; I even did an evening of Beckett plays in a dance studio in Berkeley.

When I returned to college in Oregon, I worked as a janitor in a theater and did a bit more acting. I loved acting, but I was terrible at it. I was a better janitor than I was an actor.

I decided to study art—rather than create it or clean up after it. I was accepted to the master’s degree program in art history at the University of Oregon. Still unwilling to let my theatrical ambitions die, I helped form a neo-Dada theater and music group called the Unfortunate Duck, which performed in art galleries and universities from Vancouver, British Columbia to Mills College in Oakland, California. There was no second tour.

I wrote a thesis on the work of the early 20th-century Russian constructivist Vladimir Tatlin. I continued my graduate studies at Harvard University, moving my focus a few decades back in time, and a few countries west, to fin-de-siècle France. Years after that first magical experience at the Louvre, I was back in Paris.

I was doubly lucky to study at Harvard, where the art history program was housed in the most magical possible place: a museum. I worked for the Fogg Museum at Harvard, and then moved with my young family to New York for a job teaching art history at Vassar College. Over the next years I taught at UCLA, Dartmouth College, Harvard, and the Courtauld Institute of Art in London.

I had found my niche. I directed a series of ever-larger university museums and, two decades into my career, became director of the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2011, I ended up in Los Angeles at the Getty, an institution that combines the fascination of a museum with the depth and breadth of a research institute, a conservation institute, an art publisher, and a grant-making foundation. When I arrived at the Getty, I felt that I had truly landed.

I know how lucky I am to have stumbled into the Louvre at age 19, knowing nothing of art or museums. I’ve never been called on to apologize for devoting my career to the arts. I went into the arts because they made me feel curious and challenged and alive, which are the best reasons for choosing your life’s work.

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Cuno pointed to the first encyclopedic museum, the British Museum, which was founded in 1753, as an example not of patriotism or nationalism but of an interest in cultures and art from around the globe. Neil MacGregor, the museum’s current director, likes to say that what surprises people most about the British Museum is that there are so few British things in it.

Much of the discourse in the world today focuses on national differences and “the inevitability of cultural conflict based on these differences.” But, said Cuno, by bringing together “all the world’s cultures under one roof” in a “secular cosmopolitan space,” the encyclopedic museum instead enlarges one’s view of the world.

The encyclopedic museum’s origins are in the 18th-century Enlightenment. Like coffee shops, dictionaries, and newspapers, the museum was meant to bring the Enlightenment to the broader public. Taking inspiration from the breadth of a museum’s collection and scope, visitors from all walks of life could begin to ask new questions about the world, form new answers, and continually subject those new answers to further scrutiny and critique.

The corollary to the encyclopedic museum was the encyclopedia (also a product of the Enlightenment), which was considered a “dangerous instrument” at the time because it encouraged readers to think their own thoughts and draw their own conclusions about various forms of dogma that shaped their world. In 1759, Pope Clement XII was so concerned about the encyclopedia that he called for all Catholics to have encyclopedias burned by a priest or face excommunication.

According to many of their contemporary critics, museums reinforce the power of the state and the societal elite by telling a single, predetermined story. Museums do tell stories, but, said Cuno, people in museums ultimately write their own. After all, if critics can see beyond the supposed manipulations of the museum, why can’t the rest of us do the same? Cuno pointed out that even with something as simple as a gallery, there are two entrances, and the presenter cannot know which one a particular visitor will use or in what order she’ll view the works. “We open the doors to people, and people wander as they might,” he said.

Empires have always led to extensive intermingling between cultures, and the works on display in museums testify to this historical fact. But, said Cuno, while museums may be witnesses to empire, they are not instruments of empire

In a final note on the importance of the encyclopedic museum, Cuno pointed out that India, despite boasting a glorious artistic legacy, lacks an encyclopedic museum. This was not an innovation that Great Britain ever introduced to its colony, nor has India subsequently followed Britain’s lead. Instead, Indian museums tend to present their art in narrow, politically motivated terms, reinforcing the fractiousness of a country plagued by outbursts of communal violence.

In a friendly but spirited question-and-answer session, audience members challenged a number of aspects of Cuno’s argument.

Noting that encyclopedias are largely extinct, and that “you can’t give away a Britannica” today,” one person questioned whether museums do indeed still matter. Cuno responded by asserting that the Internet is not a replacement for museums but an ally. The Web, he said, will inspire people to seek out the authentic thing. He also emphasized that the Internet offers another outlet for visitors to use museums to challenge their assumptions about the world.

Another audience member asked about the “chasm [that] divides First World museums in Britain and the U.S. and museums in Latin America, Asia, and other parts of Europe.” How do privileged institutions bridge this divide? We have to do as the British Museum did not do in India, responded Cuno. Museums must share and collaborate. That’s why the British Museum works with museums in Africa to give curators and museumgoers greater access, while the Getty Trust is involved with projects around the world, in places like Western China, India’s Rajasthan, and Egypt. Museums have a responsibility to share their resources and knowledge and to “encourage curiosity about the world” rather than staking claims to some narrow patch of land.

Watch full video here.
See more photos here.
Buy the book: Skylight, Amazon,Powell’s.
Read expert opinions on the purpose of museums in the information age here.

*Photos by Aaron Salcido.

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In recent years, museums have come under criticism for many alleged sins–overly aggressive collection practices, questionable finances, elitism, or failure to adapt to the digital world. This has led to a reappraisal by museum leaders and efforts to make museums more accountable and relevant. In advance of a Zócalo lecture by Getty Trust president and CEO James Cuno, we asked several people who think a lot about museums to answer the following question: What should be the purpose of a museum in the information age?

Giving the Public a Voice

If museums had just one purpose, our jobs would be much easier. But museums address multiple needs, regardless of the era in which we find ourselves. For art museums, those needs include collecting and caring for examples of cultural heritage and providing the public with avenues to understanding the intentions of artists in their time and the relevance of works to the present. But the Web has altered this last-mentioned obligation, from dispensing information alone to soliciting new forms of participation. And while museum professionals will always offer the “official” interpretation of objects in our care, we also should welcome the opportunity to attract the notice and to encourage the engagement of people anywhere.

This creates a dilemma: how should museums react to the opinions of the public? Online visitors may advocate changes or new offerings that don’t bear on the museum professionals’ understanding of their job responsibilities. The calibration of the balance between traditional professional duties and new types of engagement will play out one museum at a time, and one director at a time. In my view, there is much value in giving the public a visible voice in adjudicating the success of exhibitions, programs, and other activities, even if the step du jour is as simple as operating a Facebook page or Twitter account for a museum. While providing a forum for such a voice may be disorienting at first, such a strategy can refine the strategies and tactics of art museums for the better.

Maxwell L. Anderson is the Eugene McDermott Director at the Dallas Museum of Art.

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Public Access, Which Must Come With Public Accountability

In our information age, museums serve the same purpose they always have: providing access to direct encounters with authentic art and artifacts by moving such opportunities out of the salons and palaces and into public venues. New sources of information (and older ones: wall labels, public lectures and dialogues, gallery educators, docents) can encourage, enhance, and expand this encounter, but they cannot replace what the German critic Walter Benjamin famously described as the aura of the authentic. Museums have enriched, even fundamentally shaped, innumerable lives. It seems unlikely that an encounter with a digital T. rex could awe and inspire 5-year-old Stephen Jay Gould like the aura of the real T. rex skeleton at the American Museum of Natural History did. I have collected many personal stories of lives changed by museum experiences, but, Microsoft commercials notwithstanding, I have yet to hear “seeing Monet online made we want to be an artist.”

This capacity of museums makes them extraordinarily powerful and important institutions. Museums are, says philosopher Alain de Botton, “where we might take a group of visiting aliens to show them what we most delight in and revere.” Despite their many virtues–eloquently elaborated most recently by James Cuno–they should not be left unfettered from public scrutiny. Too often, museums have betrayed their purpose, so we must pay close attention to museum matters: who runs them, who chooses their collections, and who determines how the art is displayed. Studying German museums, I witness how often ideologues turn museums to their advantage. While we certainly cannot blame Enlightenment museums for failing to prevent the atrocities of World War II, we should not ignore how Nazi leaders embraced museums and the arts, recognizing their potential to promote ideology. They produced in Degenerate Art what might still be the most successful exhibition of all time. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, billions of Euros have been spent restoring art museums to precisely their pre-War appearance and content, mostly keeping art from outside Europe separate (in a replica of a Prussian palace in Berlin, no less) from the European collections. No plans are in place to build a museum to the failure of the Enlightenment, though perhaps Daniel Libeskind’s museum architecture in Berlin and Dresden suggests this view.

Here in the U.S. museums have a very different history. Interest in museums has been driven less by extreme ideology than by the need for the one percent to find useful purposes for their increasing share of the national wealth, culminating in the opening of the Waltons’ Crystal Bridges Museum a few months ago. No matter how generous their donors, or how benefactors treat employees while accumulating their fortunes, museums inevitably draw on public funds (through economic development grants, special tax breaks, and so on). The oligarchy of museum governance (how many museum boards are you on?) seems to have frequent conflicts of interest and to routinely exclude certain groups from the galleries. The Guerrilla Girls’ critique–to name one of many–dates from the 1980s and includes a recent open letter to Eli Broad noting that the artists in his publicly supported collections are more than 95 percent white and 83 percent male.

None of this necessarily detracts from the power of the aesthetic encounter. When we enter a museum, a great work of art takes our breath and excites our imaginations. New media can help sate our curiosity, share our inspirations, and even provide greater access to information about museum governance and practice. Available information always should include who chooses the works on display and why the museum considers them worthy of our attention. As museum audiences and supporters, we must conscientiously engage in critical seeing to prevent abuses of the museum’s potential.

Peter Tokofsky organizes public education programs at the J. Paul Getty Museum and is an associate adjunct professor in the Department of Germanic Languages at UCLA.

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A Place for Serious, Quiet Contemplation

Museums have never mattered more. This is because they hold some of the most important objects from the great civilizations of past. Today, we are enthralled with ourselves, self-centered, expressing what we feel, what we have done, what we want. We have become dislocated from the past and find it hard to imagine how things were any different. The dominance of the Internet, the virtual and the connected in our lives, is clearly wonderful, but we also tend to neglect that which doesn’t change at a click of a mouse.

Museums can be one place where serious, quiet contemplation happens through engagement with the artwork or artifacts, objects that don’t revolve around us. It’s possible to have a transformational experience, engaging with a precious artifact that sheds light on how remote peoples lived, loved, and died. This engagement can transport a spotty teenager from, say, a poor family in London to, say, China in the period of antiquity. That teen will see how she’s connected to other human beings and how her own life could be different. Museums showcase a range of objects–the unique or the representative–and, by doing so, open a door to other times and other worlds.

Dr. Tiffany Jenkins is arts and society director of the Institute of Ideas.

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Aggregators, Curators, Mentors, and More

In a world shaped by immediate access to a vast sea of digital data, museums will serve as: sources, sharing information emerging from their collecting and research; aggregators, finding and integrating information from the many sources touched by their work; curators, selecting and annotating content to help people find reliable information; and educators, providing context and commentary. Technology will enable museums to scale up these core functions, which are already embedded in their work.

In the future, museums also will become mentors, recruiting and training people to contribute and interpret content; and moderators, encouraging people to engage with content, sharing views, opinions, and their own expertise. And museums will continue to be welcome havens of respite and retreat, where people can unplug, disconnect, and immerse themselves in silence, beauty, and wonder.

Elizabeth Merritt is founding director of the American Association of Museums’ Center for the Future of Museums. CFM is a think-tank and research & development lab that helps museums explore the cultural, political, environmental, economic, and technological trends shaping the future.

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Conductors of Two-Way Conversations That Surprise

Museums have always been known for the fascinating artifacts in their collections. At the Smithsonian, those include the Star-Spangled Banner, Thomas Jefferson’s writing desk, and the Spirit of St. Louis. There is nothing like seeing the real thing and sharing the experience with others, but today museums have become even more relevant to our society by using the digital tools of the information age.

If you can’t visit us on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., the Smithsonian will come to you. We have 170 affiliate museums all over the country that borrow from our collections and host our traveling exhibits–and 13 of these affiliates are in Southern California. We’re also digitizing our collections and making them available online, so that history, art, science, and culture will be more accessible to everyone, everywhere.

Last year, almost 30 million people visited our museums, but the Smithsonian’s websites counted 79 million unique visitors. Nearly two million people follow us on Twitter and Facebook. But these new technologies are not meant to be one-way streets. In the information age, we’re looking to hear from you. People can interact with our researchers and experts through our blogs and mobile apps, comment on our exhibits, and provide us with information. We want the Smithsonian to be a conversation, not a lecture.

A few years ago, I spoke with a young woman in San Francisco about what she wanted from the Smithsonian. She said, “Surprise me.” Every time we reach out to our visitors, we try to live up to that challenge and not only surprise, but delight, educate, and engage. Now, with the tools of social media and mobile technology, all museums can be more dynamic engines of learning.

Wayne Clough is the 12th Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution.

*Photo courtesy of alex4981.

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But museums are also under attack. Among academics, one particular kind of museum, the encyclopedic museum that is a repository of things representative of the world’s many cultures, is increasingly criticized for being an instrument of the state and of empire, for being an instrument of elite hegemony over the will of the individual.

Really? I argue the opposite. By presenting the artifacts of one time and culture next to those of other times and cultures, without privilege or prejudice, encyclopedic museums encourage curiosity about the world, increase understanding, and dissipate ignorance and superstition. They demonstrate a truth about art: that it has never known political boundaries. It has always been dynamic, formed through exchange with diverse peoples.

The first public, encyclopedic art museum, the British Museum, was founded in 1753. It represented the Enlightenment belief that building a large collection of the world’s many natural and artificial things and subjecting them to a rigorous scientific examination (i.e., reasoned inquiry) could teach us truths about the world for the benefit of humankind.

Such inquiry was not meant to be exclusive to specialists, however. As the philosopher David Hume put it, the “separation of the learned from the conversable world” had been “the great defect of the last age,” in which learning had “been as great a loser by being shut up in colleges and cells.” Enlightenment was available to anyone whose intelligence could be cultivated by access to clearly argued philosophical positions. Clear thinking, plain words, and modesty are to be the intellectual’s goals, setting reality above verbality and creating “a commonwealth of polite letters.”

From the beginning, the British Museum saw its public responsibility as one not only of collecting things about the world but also of organizing and presenting them in reasonable ways that might attract the public’s attention to the objects in themselves.

This is as true today as it was 250 years ago. Museums still hold as their core mission to collect, preserve, and present things in the public’s interest. In presenting them, museums are fully aware of the choices they make. They arrange things in a particular way and often work hard to justify organizing the installation of their collections in one way or another. But they know that their visitors are likely to experience the museum as they wish. The more museums seek to control their visitors’ experience the more frustrated their efforts will be. As the critic Adam Gopnik once said, “Maybe I’m just too dense to get it, but it seemed to me that, in fact, your experience of walking through the Museum was that you made up your own story and you did it simply by not paying attention to things that didn’t interest you.” That’s true, even if, as the art historian Michael Baxandall reminds us, “it is not possible to exhibit objects without putting a construction upon them.”

Recent academic writing on museums has focused on this issue. Take the writings of art historians Carol Duncan and Alan Wallach. For them, “the museum, like other ceremonial monuments, is a complex architectural phenomenon that selects and arranges works of art within a sequence of spaces … [and] organizes the visitor’s experience as a script organizes a performance.” By performing the ritual of walking through the museum, “the visitor is prompted to enact and thereby to internalize the values and beliefs written into the architectural script.” And that script, we are told, is state power. Museums “embody and make visible the idea of the state,” and for a viewer this “intensifies his attachment to the state” as well as “the power and social authority of a patron class.”

Another scholar, Donald Preziosi, sees the chronological installation of objects by national school or civilization (Assyrian, Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Medieval, Renaissance, Modern–all from a European perspective) as creating a perception that today’s visitors are among the elect and most advanced people. “Chronology becomes genealogy, which in turn becomes evolution and progress, and everything becomes oriented and arrowed with respect to its pertinence, its contribution, to the fabrication of the present,” Preziosi writes. As the museum is a seeing experience (one looks at things), Preziosi figures the museum frame as an “optical instrumentality for the positioning, the siting (and the sighting, the rendering visible, the framing) of modern(ized) populations in and for history that was itself deployed, both museographically and historiographically, as the unfolding of the transcendent truth.” Again, in doing so, the museum makes the visitor a subject of the state and makes works of art serve as “the most telling products of the human mind, and a universal standard against which all that was not Europe might be measured, graded, and ranked down along the slopes of European modernization.” And that’s before Preziosi even gets started on psychology:

The object [work of art] can only confront the subject [museum visitor] from a place where the subject is not. It is in this fascination with modernity’s paradigmatic object–with ‘art’ as such in museological and discursive space–that the subject or spectator is ‘bound over’ to it, laying down his or her gaze in favor of this quite remarkable object. And it is in this fascination that we find ourselves, as subjects, remembered (repairing our dismemberment). Museums disarm us so as to make us remember ourselves in new ways. Or, to put it another way, museums help us to forget who we are.

And gender:

The modern museum of art may also be understood as an instrument of compulsory heterosexuality, one of the chief productions of the institution, after all, is the engendered subject. The typologies of gender positions are among the museum’s effects: the position of the museum user (‘viewer’) is an unmarked analogue to that of the (unmarked) male heterosexual pose/position. So much has been clear; what may be less apparent is that all art is drag, and that hegemonic heterosexuality is itself a continual and repeated imitation and reiteration of its own idealization. Just as the viewer’s position in exhibitionary space is always already prefabricated and bespoken, so also is all gender (a) drag.

To these critics, museum installations–and thus museums themselves–are never not ideologically motivated and strategically determined. By shaping the discourse, they are always exercising their power.

Well. Is this your experience of museums? Do you feel manipulated by a higher power–a “meta-narrator” or the ruling elites of your city or perhaps the state itself? Do you feel yourself “gendered?” Is it ritualistic? Do you even experience the museum the same way twice? Even if the museum has a message, perhaps you can make up your own mind. After all, if these critics are able to escape the hold of the state, why can’t you? Are their powers of reasoning so rare and refined? This is just the kind of specialist knowledge hoarding that Hume railed against.

Whatever the French state’s political ambitions might be for the Louvre, I’ve never felt the French state in the museum or its collections. It is the objects that hold my attention. Even the museum’s Pyramid entrance, which offers four cardinal points of entry, confounds any attempt to script the visitor’s experience. Visitors wander as they wish. That’s one of the great pleasures of museums.

I suggest that curiosity is possible, even inevitable, in any kind of installation that foregrounds the object–gives it room–so that it can be seen easily. That’s enough to trigger curiosity.

Whenever I argue the promise of encyclopedic museums in public forums, I am confronted with the charge that such museums are the result of empire, of stronger nations enriching themselves at the expense of weaker ones. I always reply that while they might be witnesses to empire–and not only in the years since their founding, but, with their deep historical collections, ever since imperialism has existed in the world–encyclopedic museums are not instruments of empire.

The legacy of empire–whether political, economic, or cultural, and always entwined with colonialism and nationalism–is complex and needs to be considered carefully. But the diverse collections of the encyclopedic museum only underscore the fact that, as Edward Said has written, “partly because of empire, all cultures are involved in one another; none is single and pure, all are hybrid, heterogeneous, extraordinarily differentiated, and un-monolithic.”

A blue and white Chinese ewer is evidence of empire, surely: the Ming Empire during which it was made, the Safavid Dynasty of the Iranian Empire through which it likely passed, and the imperial reaches of the East India Company that brought it to Jacobean England. So is a Benin plaque bearing the imprint of the historical Benin Empire and the impact of the Portuguese and British empires. So is the Gandharan Bodhisattva, witness to empire from Cyrus’s Persia to that of Alexander the Great and the subsequent Mauryan, Kushan, and Sasanid empires. Empire is everywhere in the encyclopedic museum, for empire is a fact of history. So what does one do with this?

Said’s answer was to look at the intertwined histories of cultures at a granular level. This seems right to me. Encyclopedic museums hold the promise of promoting curiosity about the world’s many cultures. And “the map of the world,” Said once wrote, “has no divinely or dogmatically sanctioned spaces, essences, or privileges.” The encyclopedic museum was founded on the Enlightenment principles of suspicion of unverifiable truths, opposition to prejudice and superstition, confidence in individual agency, the public exercise of reason, and the promise that critical inquiry leads to truths about the world for the benefit of humankind.

This, I hold, is why those millions of people are coming to our museums: they want to experience the larger world and to feel a part of its rich and fecund diversity and be ennobled by it.  In in our era–one of resurgent nationalism, sectarian violence, and military-backed, hardened ideological conflict–museums matter. Now more than ever.

James Cuno is president and CEO of the Getty Trust and the author, most recently, of Museums Matter: In Praise of the Encyclopedic Museum.

Buy the Book: Skylight Books, Powell’s, Amazon.

*Photo courtesy of moria.

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