Encyclopedic Museums and Museums as Encyclopedias
Posted by: Rebecca Vnuk
Like print encyclopedias and their online counterparts, museums run the gamut from extremely specialized to (at least as an ideal) comprehensive or encyclopedic in scope. (I will limit my examples to art museums, although many museums straddle the boundaries of art, history, nature, and science.) Examples of the specialized museum include New York’s Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art (limited to a particular culture or geographic area) and Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum or Philadelphia’s (or rather Merion’s) Barnes Collection (limited to the acquisitions and display stipulations of a single collector). There are museums devoted to the works of a single artist, genre, or time period. There are museums of great depth in their chosen area, such as the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Some of these museums, such as MoMA, are encyclopedic in their chosen specialty.
The truly encyclopedic museum is a rarer breed. In the United States, I would estimate that there are two to three dozen art museums that merit the encyclopedic label. In my home state of Texas I count only three: one each in Houston, Dallas, and San Antonio. Boston, Manhattan, Brooklyn, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Detroit, Saint Louis, Chicago, Seattle, and Los Angeles are among the other American cities that have great encyclopedic museums. Each of these has its strengths and weaknesses in terms of depth and scope. Even the Louvre, for all its depth, is not encyclopedic in the way these museums are. They all have French and Italian art; but where is the Louvre’s American, Asian, or African art? (I know the answer to that question, by the way.) Only the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in my opinion, has the scope of a Wikipedia (the Met has some two million objects, and Wikipedia has a similar number of articles in English). The Met’s authoritativeness might be measured in terms of the authenticity of its works (spectacular fakes have been discovered and less spectacular ones surely abound among the two million); provenances; the accuracy of its wall labels, online records, catalogs, and other publications; and generations of expert curators. In terms of depth and authority of coverage (not to mention its limitation to art), a more apt comparison would be The Dictionary of Art. In terms of arrangement, encyclopedias are usually alphabetically arranged, while museums are almost never so arranged (although their indexes probably are).
Print and online encyclopedias have the advantages of easy access through one’s library or computer. They are on the whole far less expensive to access than any museum not located within easy driving distance. What even the best-illustrated encyclopedias lack, however, is a real-time encounter with the painting, drawing, print, sculpture, or installation itself. No online or print encyclopedia can elicit the same feeling as, say, any three-dimensional work or a massive or highly textured painting seen live. I will go out on a limb, though, and say that some prints, drawings, and photographs look awfully good in high-quality reproduction. Finally, one thing that no museum has (except in the case of certain types of art produced in multiples) is any of the art that any other museum, gallery, private collector, or starving artist has; in that sense, each collection is unique. It is nice to see these items on loan, though I really cherish seeing my old friends in a museum’s permanent collection. The truly encyclopedic art museum is the growing, slowly changing set of all art museums.
January 24th, 2012 at 10:35 am
[...] like the Dodge, Firestone, and Ford families. After more than a century of adding works to the encyclopedic museum, the DIA is now the country’s fifth-largest fine arts museum with more than 65,000 pieces, [...]