Universities, Museums and the Sale of Collections: A Personal View

October 14th, 2009

The past year’s news for university museums has been bleak. The University of Arizona art museum decided to fire its curatorial and educational staff, several major universities have sought to sell parts of their museum-based art collections–in violation of all applicable codes of museum ethics–and Brandeis University announced its plans to close its art museum and liquidate its collections to shore up endowment losses and university-wide operational deficits. While it is widely understood that many of these actions violate the ethical codes of museums, some argue that universities need not abide by these codes. Their mission is to be universities, not museums, and they are justified in violating museum ethics if it allows them to better fund other operations.

Hogwash.

Universities that include museums–especially accredited museums–have accepted an obligation to treat museum collections in accordance with ethical standards in the museum world.

Does this mean that all universities are bound by the ethical codes of the American Association of Museums or the Association of Art Museum Directors? Certainly not. Different professions have differing codes of ethics or of professional conduct, and it would be arrant nonsense to suggest that universities are somehow bound by the crosscutting and sometimes contradictory codes of every profession represented by their faculty or by their diverse fields of study.

But when universities choose to create an entity on campus–a hospital, for example–they do become obligated to manage that entity in accordance with all of the applicable professional ethics of that field. Of course universities are not obligated to obey hospital ethics in all of their activities or in managing all of their departments. But university hospitals must obey them, and university hospitals must be managed by the university in accord with those rules.

The same logic applies to university museums. Universities need not order all their affairs in accordance with museum ethics, but they must follow these ethics in managing their museums and museum collections. Violating those ethics when it seems financially advantageous to do so is an all-too-clear statement of what the university really values, of how deeply it lives its commitment to integrity and honesty, of how much it demands those qualities of itself and how effectively it communicates those qualities to its students.

John Ruskin famously wrote that we record our legacy in three books–the book of our words, the book of our deeds, and the book of our art. Selling off the book of art, in violation of recognized and acknowledged ethical prohibitions, is a passage in a university’s book of deeds that give the lie to any lofty ideals in its book of words about integrity and character.

And our students read all three.

Art Imitating Nature

September 30th, 2009

Art in Bloom 2009 posterAs this year’s Art in Bloom poster indicates, art has long celebrated the beauties (and sometimes the terrors) of the natural world. Each year in early March, the annual Art in Bloom festival fills the Museum of Art & Archaeology with fragrant flowers, plants, and artwork celebrating the abundance of nature, appealing to all the senses. But the art of nature is not confined to the interior of the Museum. We are also part of the wonderful landscape known as the Mizzou Botanic Garden, and last month I had the opportunity to acknowledge our relationship to this wonderful living museum.

To celebrate the 10-year anniversary of former Chancellor Richard Wallace’s proclamation of the MU campus as a botanic garden, Dr. Peter Raven, director of the Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis and a former University of Missouri curator, visited Mizzou on Thursday, Aug. 27, for a public lecture entitled “The Role of Botanic Gardens in Sustaining Plant Diversity for the Next Century” at 2 p.m. in Monsanto Auditorium at the Bond Life Sciences Center. Dr. Raven is a world-renowned botanist and environmentalist whose many accolades include more than a dozen honorary degrees, the Arthur Hoyt Scott Medal, the Priestley Medal, the U.S. National Medal of Science, and the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement. He served as an adviser on science and technology for President Bill Clinton, and Time magazine named him a “Hero for the Planet.” His remarks provided a sobering counterpoint to the annual exuberance of Art in Bloom.

For Dr. Peter Raven, conserving plants involves saving ourselves on many levels. He pointed out that botanical gardens historically originated with universities, often for medical research and clinical purposes. We obviously depend upon plants, which capture and store solar energy in many useful forms, for food, clothing, shelter and medicine, but plants and the entire natural world also depend upon us for conservation and stewardship (a key theme of Hildegard von Bingen nearly a millennium ago). Dr. Raven cited the accelerating loss of agricultural lands and open space as a growing threat to biological diversity, and observed that global climate change is redefining the very notion of native plant species. For example, Missouri has risen at least one climate zone in the last fifteen years, with no signs of slowing down. Finally, Dr. Raven reminded listeners that the threat to biological diversity involves ethical issues of the highest order and deepest significance. He pointed out that many religious and philosophical systems took root in the natural world (eg, the Garden of Eden), and that we still need to find our place there. “The economy,” he reminded us, “is a wholly owned subsidiary of the natural environment”, and social justice a key component of sustainable development. The Museum of Art & Archaeology is part of a larger museum; the Mizzou Botanic Garden offers willing students on this campus our own museum of the incredible natural world.

But what does this all have to do with art? I posed that question after the lecture to Dr. Patricia Raven, a noted botanist and nature photographer in her own right as well as Dr. Peter Raven’s wife. She mentioned several photographers whose work reflects the Missouri Botanical Garden’s emphasis upon preserving biodiversity. Susan Middleton and David Littschwager, both of whom studied and worked with renowned fashion photographer Richard Avedon, have published important books such as Witness and Remains of a Rainbow on the subject of endangered plants and animals. Their work itself was the subject of an Emmy award-winning 1998 National Geographic television documentary, America’s Endangered Species: Don’t Say Goodbye. Much closer to home, Dr. Henry Domke of well-named New Bloomfield, Missouri trains his lenses and medical expertise upon the overlooked central Missouri landscape to create artistic images that facilitate patient healing. Art ultimately does not imitate nature; art is really an essential part of our nature….

previous blog about biodiversity