Museums are being battered — and from all sides. Diversity. Legacy. Restitution demands. The climate crisis. Inclusion. Issues around historical narrative. Relevance. Accusations around racism. Concerns about dodgy donors. Let alone the pandemic, and now the problem of possible links to Putin cronies. And always, of course, money. Who’d want to lead one of our museums or galleries today?
Well, it seems that Maria Balshaw would — and with relish. Director of Tate since 2017, and therefore responsible for the overall strategy as well as day-to-day running of the four galleries in its stable, she has also stuck her elegant head above the parapet as this year’s Slade professor at Cambridge, delivering a series of seven lectures that investigate the whole concept of museums, their place, their state, their future.
It adds up to a long, considered and bold statement, divided into themes such as “Reputation, Ethics and Activism” or “Uncomfortable Histories & Embarrassing Objects” and ending with an upbeat take on “The 100-year Future”.
Talking in her cosy office beside Tate Britain on London’s Millbank, Balshaw appears full of optimism. “The debates are moving all the time,” she says. “We’re feeling our way out of two years in which we’ve had to learn to operate completely differently. What I’d planned to talk about, when I was first invited [to give the Slade lectures] four years ago, completely changed.”
A striking aspect of these talks is Balshaw’s assumption that controversy and highly emotional dialogue are more or less the permanent condition of museums and galleries, and are actually to be embraced — partly because it’s inevitable and partly because it’s creative. Has she always felt like that?
“I’ve always felt that about museums and about culture more broadly. I started life as an academic and the habit of critique, of sharing ideas and then being challenged by colleagues — in a respectful way — is the foundation of academic discipline. It’s to do with: how do ideas get better? They genuinely, I think, get better through serious challenge. And there’s a fundamental idea [in academic discourse] that you don’t have to agree or resolve a situation, you can stay in a state of disagreement. It’s healthy.”
She summarises the contradictions and tensions of the modern museum into a series of points. “They are fundamentally from an elitist lineage but wish to be ‘for everyone’,” reads the first point. Another: “They purport (mainly) to be about the past, but they are actually about the present (services for people now) and the future (the archive).” And another: “The past they hold is never self-evident and always reshaped in the present — though this is not the way many of the visiting public perceives it.”
Each of these opens up a fascinating discussion in itself. But, Balshaw says, “we’re at a time where debate feels unproductively polarised: if you take one position, you are disagreeing with another, and there can be no common ground. That closes down debate.”
Is this idea of perpetual debate, I ask, a hard message to get across to the public? She thinks for a moment before saying, quite emphatically, “No. We find at Tate that the public are very free with their views, and across a wide spectrum of thinking — and they don’t stop coming if they don’t like something.
“We see different generations of thinking within a museum — they come as children and they come as old people, and there’s a different cadence of debate. Some of the heat expressed very rapidly on social media is just the tone that generation uses. We have to make space for all the tones of response.
“I come back to this idea of a museum as a space that can hold dissent and disagreement, because there are already multiple points of view at play in any exhibition.”
Yet we, the public, also want to see museums as safe spaces, balanced and neutral. With hotly contested issues such as the destruction of memorials, the cry often goes up, “Put it in a museum,” as if that solves everything.
“I don’t see it as a weight of expectation, or our job, to sort out tricky issues of the past or now — but we are part of those issues, and if there’s a greater public wish that the museum help us think through difficult and divisive issues, then we’ve succeeded in our job to engage a wider public — which can only be a good thing.”
But, Balshaw points out, it’s a mistake to think that these crises and tensions about the ways we engage with the past are a new thing. “It’s wrong to say that museums were founded and just allowed to get on with their business, because they never were. They were founded, typically, to narrate certain things about the nation that we are. There’s an ideological project, and a very strong one, behind the establishment of the V&A, or of Tate — we’re just a bit more aware of that now.”
There were always arguments about what should be shown, she says, about what world was being reflected. “There’s now a wider and more diverse public coming in. Which means there’s going to be more dissent. And if we [museums] weren’t part of the wider debates that we see playing out over the news and social media, we’d be asleep.”
Which leads us easily on to the question of diversity, a challenge for all institutions. A statistic that jumped out at me from Balshaw’s lectures was that diversity in programming, disappointingly, doesn’t necessarily lead to more diverse audiences in the longer term.
She points to Tate’s current exhibition of British-Caribbean art, Life Between Islands. “We’ve seen a massive uptick in attendance by black British people, and a wider age demographic too. Diverse audiences have gone up to 35 or even 40 per cent. But in our experience it falls back afterwards.”
There are many other elements, though: “The programme matters, but who works for you also matters, and how you direct your wider message also matters.”
Another urgent subject, the climate crisis, brings out a down-to-earth streak in Balshaw, grappling with the nuts and bolts of the problem as well as the big picture — and she feels that museums and galleries, with their duty of care towards the nation’s treasures, have a leadership role to play here.
“We can’t be institutions for the long term if we continue to be so consumptive of the world’s resources. We bring works into the collections assuming that they’ll be there in perpetuity, but if we hold those objects in conditions that require air-conditioning and intensive climatisation, then we won’t be there in 100 years, unless we all take intensive action.
“Every single artwork”, she points out, “has its own carbon footprint. So it’s about finding a different practical path.” A series of measures range from the small scale to the wider picture: what she calls the museum sector’s “growth spurt” — the recent proliferation of new buildings — needs to come to an end in favour of a more sustainable approach. That includes finding a range of different ways to bring the work to the public, not necessarily within the traditional spaces. “Collections are getting bigger and bigger, we can think about how to share them better.”
Throughout, Balshaw’s approach emphasises the exchange of knowledge, and she genuinely seems as eager to learn from the visiting public as to teach us. At Tate she isn’t in the centre of the storm when it comes to the question of restitution of objects, but, she admits, the “uncomfortable histories” she refers to in that lecture title apply to everyone.
The debate, she feels, often takes a wrong turn into “a catastrophising scenario”. “I’ve never been very keen on absolutist solutions or positions. Important museums are being created on the African continent and elsewhere; we should be part of that dialogue. I hope we’ll see some objects make their way back to their places of origin, and some have.”
Meanwhile, in the ongoing work between countries, “there is a sensitive and principled way of recognising how some objects are very significant for the cultures that they came from, and that we want a stronger relationship with those places.”
These are cautious and balanced responses, of course, but Balshaw doesn’t hide from the heat of these arguments, not just about ownership of objects but about their contested interpretation. In her opening lecture she says: “[Museums] present themselves as rational and cool, but actually they are riven with emotions, internally and externally.”
Passion and argument, then, are business as usual. Will she be collecting the hot topics of these Slade lectures into a book? “I think so, I hope so. There’s a lot of talk about museums being under challenge, under threat — but also, we’re in a very dynamic situation that is about shaping and creating wider understanding and larger networks and different kinds of art coming into the collections.
“As a culture, we’ve been through such a difficult couple of years, but taking museums away from people only affirmed how much they valued the experience. Museums have a job to be themselves, at the moment — places where people gather. That is our deep social worth, and I want to hold on to every bit of optimism.”
Jan Dalley is the FT’s arts editor
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Tate director Maria Balshaw: ‘A museum can hold dissent and disagreement’
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