The Interpreter: NYCMER's Online Journal of Ideas
The Promise of Cultural Institutions
By David Carr
AltaMira Press, 2003
www.altamirapress.com
Reviewed by Catherine Fukushima
As the literature of our field expands, most works fall into a few identifiable, useful categories. Visitor studies can add valuable scientific rigor to our understanding of audiences and their needs. Museum studies offer analysis and criticism of our institutions from the cool perspective of theory, while case studies share best practices from real-world situations. And, policy papers exhort us to expand our understanding of our institution's role in our communities. Among recent publications, however, David Carr's The Promise of Cultural Institutions is unique—a reflection on our institutions' potential and an argument for what museums could and should mean in our society.
This collection of essays is the work of an author with a singular viewpoint. Carr, who has been consulting with, writing and speaking about museums for almost 30 years, is a professor of Library and Information Science currently on the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. While apparently addressing us from a separate discipline, his voice is one that has long nurtured museum professionals. He writes as an unabashed fan and experienced user who navigates our institutions with ease.
But, beneath the effusive praise we see the trained educator's rigorous thought: Carr is especially interested in cognition, in the ways in which people learn. He also focuses on how individual minds interact with knowledge systems and this concern unites his work with museums and libraries.
One of the most valuable things Carr brings to the discussion is a new vocabulary that can help push our thinking beyond current buzz words that necessarily limit its scope. Carr describes a museum as "an open work," for example, using a phrase borrowed from a piece of music criticism by Umberto Eco that refers to the way a composition is completed (only) through the interaction of the performer. For Carr, "every user completes the museum as an open work in a different way and pursues its ideas and information in a wholly personal configuration." He invokes the term "incendiary" to describe the capacity of museums and libraries to "feed the flames that illuminate the human capacity to imagine the possible." Carr envisions museums as heuristic structures in which students are encouraged to learn independently, posing their own questions. A whole chapter is devoted to "The Poetics of Questions," a topic Carr feels is central to any educative experience.
While the essays are essentially personal reflections on highly abstract aspects of museums, the book is not without some concrete, practical sections. One essay, "Museums, Educative: An Encyclopedia Entry" is an especially worthwhile contribution. Even if you do not agree with Carr's definitions here, you could use the format to generate your own entry. Approached collaboratively as a staff project in your institution, it would provide an invaluable forum for discussion of critical issues. Another essay, "In the Contexts of the Possible," draws parallels and distinctions between museums and libraries. This deep level of thinking demonstrates a way to approach institutional collaborations of many types. The final chapter, "Ten Lessons and One Rule," and the book's three appendices together offer an array of touchstones for staff training. Carr's annotated bibliography points like a welcome guidepost to further journeys of discovery on a range of related topics.
The Promise of Cultural Institutions is not a how-to book. It does not analyze our institutions on the basis of any particular theory. It will not help you with your next grant proposal. Instead, it is a book that may provide museum educators a much-needed moment for reflection and reinvigoration by reminding us about the values that brought us to the field in the first place.
Catherine Fukushima is Associate Museum Educator at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.