The San Francisco MoMA Questions the Museum, Falls Short on Answers

"The Art of Participation: 1950 to Now," San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. November 08, 2008 - February 08, 2009.

Traditionally, the mission of the art museum was to build its collection. Education and entertainment for the general public were secondary to acquisitions, if really considered at all. More recently art museums have evolved, taking the public as its primary audience and ticket sales as its goal. The particular ways in which the economic crisis has hobbled the art world have given these questions a new urgency; the recent blockbuster exhibition at the San Francisco MoMA is an example of this trend in exhibition-making.

Photo by Tiff Chow http://tiffchow.typepad.com

Although the museum describes the show as a historical survey of "participation art" since the 1950s, it more truly embodies a Debordian spectacle cum art exhibition. While including groundbreaking artists such as Vitto Acconci, Maria Abramovic, John Cage, and Nam June Paik, many of the exhibition’s works have little in common aside from their use of audience participation as a means to communicate disparate concepts. The pairing of nearly 100 works because they involve participation is akin to featuring a series of paintings for their incorporation of trees. The ideas engaged by the works are clouded by the unhelpful categorization undertaken for the sake of easy entertainment and high ticket sales.

An image from the exhibit; Photo by Tiff Chow http://tiffchow.typepad.com

"The Art of Participation" represents a much-needed shift away from the traditional collection-based, museum in the ivory-tower model, towards something more educational and community-oriented. But museums like SFMoMA need not sacrifice curatorial intelligence to get more people in the door. The general public has the capacity to enjoy and learn from a complex and stimulating art exhibition without the dumbing down of the subject matter by a sales-driven institution.

One room from the Art of Participation; Photo by Steve Rhodes

Some would argue that the current financial climate demands the creation of blockbuster shows with mass appeal. In December 2008, things got so bad that the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art was dangerously close to bankruptcy and had to solicit a $30 million bailout from wealthy art enthusiast Eli Broad. In a recent New York Times article, Holland Cotter pointed to the American art museum’s current plight, caught in a downward spiral of disappearing funding and decreasing capacity. The problem, he said, is not limited to the Los Angeles MoCA, but is hitting institutions across the country, leaving many a hallowed cultural institution in a state of desperation, forced into "doing by undoing: loosening up the rigid values and temple-of-art models that shaped them, and replacing these with a new 'people's museum' model, unsacred in atmosphere, fluid in values, with complicated answers to the question of what museums are."

Another room in the exhibit; Photo by Anne Garrity.

Cotter describes the results as ranging from "great to work-in-progress gauche to soul-selling bad.”¹ I wouldn’t categorize SFMoMA's "Art of Participation" as "soul-selling bad," or even "work-in-progress gauche." But the exhibition joins museums throughout the art world in failing to find an elegant solution to a very complicated problem. The challenges of building a more socially engaged—and economically viable—museum still lay before us.

¹ Holland Cotter, "Museums Look Inward for their Bailouts" The New York Times, January 7, 2009

Christy Wiles is currently pursuing a Masters Degree in History and Theory of Contemporary Art at the San Francisco Art Institute.