Rethinking The Art Museum
Art museums become part of the interpretive framing of all the art it contains. It part of the art’s meta-data. A fork is just a fork when featured at the dinner table. But a 3,000 year old Mesopotamian fork transforms when featured in an art museum.
Art museums help us follow a sliver of world history.
For a few hours, we can leave the hustle and bustle of the city and enter into a curated imaginative galaxy of story.
Art museums, however, are a relatively new-ish invention.
For all their triumphs, they carry with them status, eliteism, class, and hierarchy.
Not anyone can be featured in an art museum. There is not a textbook on how to even be featured in one.
One thing I feel the art museum has done negatively for the American imagination is bifurcate
“Art” versus “non-art” in an unhelpful way. The museum has preached to our society, “there are only a few worthy of the title of Artist.”
Negatively, this worldview has robbed the arts of all their play, joy, fun, nuance, and community building capabilities. It says said, “No! This all belongs in this building called a museum! The rest of you peasants enjoy your blue-collared job. Art can’t be a hobby. Hobbies are not art! When you color with your children, that feeling of childhood joy isn’t supposed to be there. Get back to work!”
No one, of course, has said this out loud. But the imaginary is there.
God never intended our expressions to be imprisoned in such a way. I propose we get out of the museum-as-art mindset and get back to a more generative world.
Make these your life’s museum: your homes, your workplace, your places of study, your home offices, and your meet ups with friends.
Take back these as the spaces and moments of rest, joy, play, and hospitality. When we do this, we embody what Abraham Kuyper said, “There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry, Mine!”
This frames our world as the museum.
A generative one. Not a self-seeking one.
