Are Museums Like Parks? The “Public” in Public Museums.
by Melanie Bühler
While museums have been closed due to COVID-19 lockdown measures, it is remarkable how much of the discussion around the suspension of their activities has mobilized the notion of “publicness.” Museums have been described as “serving the public” (András Szántó), hailed as part of the public infrastructure in that they “are like parks” (Bart De Baere), and referred to in a general sense as public institutions: “It is our collective role as public institutions to support artists and culture at this time” (Hans Ulrich Obrist).1 But what does it mean for a museum to serve “the public,” or to be a “public” institution, today?
"One thing we already know: these art-world professionals cannot mean that museums are public in the sense of being exclusively publicly funded. This is no longer—if it ever was—the case for the majority of art museums in the United States or the EU. Austerity measures, as we saw in the 1990s and late 2000s in particular, have consistently involved cuts to public funding for museums. Rather, the notion of “public” in these statements functions as a social imaginary—a normative term that, as Michael Warner describes, invokes an ideal.2 And at a time when people cannot actually come together as physical bodies, this ideal has become especially powerful. Moreover, with an economic crisis looming, the question of what is deemed essential to society—more specifically, which institutions and businesses deserve to survive and thus should receive financial aid—will be asked again and again, with ever greater consequences."
"By shining a light on what it takes to make art possible, they transformed the space of the museum into a “critical” site, connecting to an ideal of public space as theorized by Jürgen Habermas: their works expressed an ideal of the public museum as a place that facilitates critical debate around the experience of art.6 This, according to Habermas, is the foundation of the public sphere: a space where subjects engage in rational-critical debates among equals.7 Their respective critiques can be seen as an attempt to reinstitute the Habermasian notion of the museum, which they saw endangered, or “camouflaged,” as Buren would have it,8 by private and corporate interests and an architecture of neutrality."
"Artists such as Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Andrea Fraser, and Renée Green introduced the idea that publics are created by museums—constituted via institutional makeup, modes of address, and language employed. Consequently, it should not be assumed that every person is similarly able to participate in the general “critical” public; moreover, it is perhaps the case that a general public does not actually exist."