“Museums … are wonderful, frustrating, stimulating, irritating, hideous things, patronising, serendipitous, dull as ditchwater and curiously exciting, tunnel-visioned yet potentially visionary … The real magic is that any one of them can be all those simultaneously.” 

Boniface and Fowler in Nick Prior, Having One’s Tate and Eating It, 2003

The contemporary museum is a complex, multi-faceted organisation in which combinations of roles are immersed within, what we believe to be the institution. This however has not always been the case.  I believe these opinions of the contemporary gallery or museum has stemmed from the changes that occurred during the mid-twentieth century, most prolifically by the Conceptual art movement in the late 1960s.  This change was not only in society but also culture, art and their display, “Art in the twentieth century has been awarded the highest accolade as something that we should admire and respect.  To question it, as Conceptual art has done, is therefore to question the inherent values of our culture and society”, and this is where the change begins.

The art museum for sociologist Bordieu is a place that inhabits ideals of class and society status, an idea that seems very dated in modern thinking but relevant still in the accessibility of these cultural spaces.  Bordieu believes the museum or gallery “comprises a space symbolically opposed to the vulgarities of mass culture, where the values of civilised bourgeois culture are coded and decoded by this class itself.”  However, a symbolically clear classification system is what the museum relies upon, along with specific cultural experts and discourses, the museum has a clear system that it is obviously run by.  This Bourdieusian analysis is clearer when analysing how culture works to stabilise social arrangements.  The legitimisation of a status quo rather than a constantly changing understanding of society means that the museum can finally play the role of an educational institution, concentrating on the public rather than on class distinctions.  Therefore, “Museums are having to contemplate their own efficiency and socio-historical location in order to satisfy both internal monitoring procedures and external calls for legitimisation.”  Hence the museum has the difficult task of, in contemporary society, having to please the people who fund them, their workers and their public.

During the 1960s a huge transformation was occurring in culture, as the views and opinions of the public were having a radical makeover.  The face of the museum was beginning to change as the understanding of its role were evolving along with New Criticism, new art and new politics.  The understanding of art became 'elite' with this “New Criticism’s precious and cliquish aspect … mitigated by its radically anti-institutional bias, which manifested itself in the enthusiastic therapeutic optimism”.  The new concepts and ideas that were evolving within this New Criticism were widely read by the thinkers and theorists of the time. All of who read each other’s work and discussed each other’s ideas at length, thus becoming a specialised and ‘precious’ society.  It was with this written change that a modification within the museum occurred.  The museum began to display art that was approved of or created by these theorists and the general public was forced to appreciate these new ideas as the general naive consensus of the authority that these galleries and museums were displaying. 

The gallery and museum no longer belonged to the presentation of objects alone, they began to take on “many of the aspects of the church or temple: the reverential hush, the fetishism with which it preserves and guards its sacred objects.”  It became the case that the museum was no longer a place to exhibit art and to house great works together for the public to view, but they became places for artists to demonstrate and display the results of their concepts and ‘happenings.’ 

The result was the museum no longer housed the ideas they created but also made them objects of intellectual desire:

“Western culture has, at least since the enlightenment, defined the artist as set apart from the rest of society. The best known version of this artistic autonomy is the constitution of the solitary genius. Today, that imaginary realm of independence is increasingly visible as an ideological construction. Yet, like other myths, including those of nationalism and race, the manifest falsity of artistic autonomy remains operative within specific circles as a mechanism of control.”

Andy Warhol was especially famous for his ‘happenings’ that took place in his New York studio, though later artists were to use the actual gallery space for their happenings.  At these Warhol would create works of art as if he were a machine whilst people stood around drinking and taking drugs, fuelling his ego on as he created works based on those around him and those in the public eye. His happenings and exhibitions became places of worship not only for the artist but also the ‘art’; the media icons used within his work becoming as recognisable as religious icons found within the church.  Which asks the question, is it legitimate that ‘Marilyn Monroe’ or a ‘Brillo’ box became as instantly recognisable and instantly consumed by a gallery/museum visitor as an image of Christ?  The museum furthered the idea of art as religious icon due to the extremely modern experiences that its public was experiencing.  This is a far cry from some kind of manic excursion to the funhouse.  A trip to an art museum is suffused with a sense of gentility and religious awe, a fact guaranteed by the solemn and dignified arrangements, as well as vigilant security guards. The museum is seen as an institution where a variety of tendencies coexist, including religion and media.

When we arrive in the 1970s, it is Conceptual art that altered the state of gallery walls and museum floors. It was an art idea that no longer concentrated so much upon theory and ideas but rather on the process of art itself and the role of the artist in its creation.  Once again the face of the museum changed, along with the art displayed. Conceptual art pushed the boundaries of art and the social acceptance of it.  People began to question why certain pieces found in museums could be labelled art, the arguments a familiar regurgitation from Dadaism.   In particular the arguments that surrounded Marcel Duchamp’s ‘Fountain’ from 1917, an extremely controversial piece of art or ‘readymade,’ a controversial piece that was recently voted the most important art piece of the 20^th century.

The museum has continually been growing in power and authority. Conceptual art, along with Pop art, questioned societies need for iconography and asked the questions of consumerism making religion just as capitalist as, say, Coca-Cola.  The fact that: “Art and museum culture is the secular religion of capitalism. It provides a space for inner meaning in an otherwise spiritually empty world,” this emphasises the close relationship art and religion held within the 1970s, since then the museum has had the ability to contain both.

Before this postmodern era the museum, and art history, were viewed as the forms that encouraged the awareness and institutionalisation of modern art.  Douglas Crimp likened the museum to Michel Foucault’s ideas on the modern institution of confinement, “the asylum, the clinic and the prison – and their respective discursive formations – madness, illness and criminality.”  This view is now seen as dated and somewhat ridiculous.  However Crimp, a post modern intellect, believes that: “Art as we think about it only came into being in the nineteenth century, with the birth of the museum and the discipline of history, for these share the same time span as modernism …art’s natural end [therefore] is in the museum.”  The museum no longer acting as asylum or prison but rather as a mortuary that housed all the old great works and immediately institutionalises new upcoming art as soon as it is seen in a museum space. People are “less likely to see the museum as some kind of library or cultural resource than to see it as a monument to the dead.”

“Our museums, around 1970, one after another abdicated responsibility toward contemporary artistic practice and turned with nostalgia to the art that had previously been relegated to their storerooms.  Revisionist art history soon began to be vindicated by ‘revelations’ of the achievements of academic artists and minor figures of all kids.”  The museum became a ‘Mecca’ for housing art: art from different cultures; art from different times; art from different places; art from different theories.  It is available in the museum in so many different guises: on the gallery walls; on the gallery floors and ceilings and windows; on interactive computers found within the gallery; in interactive rooms.  Visitors can experience art first hand, feel it, create it, understand it; on the internet at home; through school study groups held at the museums; through lectures and open days.  Also through the various ranges of ways the gallery exposes art is endless thanks to new media, new public concepts and new government funding.  This is the contemporary museum, which fits neatly into the contemporary view of contemporary society. 

There is, however, another aspect to the museum that changes its relationship with contemporary society and one that I wish to conclude with. This aspect is the reproduction of works found within books; this is of course also relevant to the Internet.  However, I find the history of the book far more interesting in relation to this subject, “Alongside the museum a new field of art experience, vaster than any so far known … is now, thanks to reproduction, being opened up.  And this new domain … is for the first time the common heritage of all mankind.”  The reproduction has allowed people to experience the work found within a museum or gallery without having to actually visit the site they are found on.  Contemporary society has the privilege of seeing a specific work without having to encounter other pieces that they may simply not be interested in.  This is also a massive disadvantage as they can not experience other works by the same or similar artists in time or style through the continually challenging modern curatorial themes found in contemporary shows:

“Museums cannot be considered as passive providers of didactic materials, delivering the same product to all visitors.  Nor are they all inert reflectors of preconstituted social and economic relations, or one-dimensional conservative agents of social reproduction and bourgeois culture.  Reorganised and reshaped from the late twentieth century, they are more plural, open, and contingent than the mass culture or elite image suggests … The contemporary museum is not irredeemable scoured with the practices of a monolithic postmodernity.  It is not a symptom of an end of modernity, but an extension … where opportunity and constraint are balanced in equal measure.”