Defining the Modern Museum: A Case Study of the Challenges of Exchange by Lianne McTavish (review)

Defining the Modern Museum is intended to complicate what are often polarizing debates about the role of the “ideal” museum – a civilized and civilizing educational institution – and its entertaining and more overtly commercial contemporary incarnations. Such discussions, Lianne McTavish contends, frequently rely on generalizations and insufficiently nuanced accounts of the historical museum’s ties to commerce; they also tend to privilege large, internationally renowned, national institutions as examples and are thus of limited value when considering “the museum” more generally. McTavish proposes to rectify these shortcomings by offering a careful study of the evolution of a particular provincial museum with natural historical, anthropological, historical, and fine art collections. Her history of the New Brunswick Museum and its predecessor institutions, including the Natural Historical Society of New Brunswick, makes for fascinating reading and brings into focus a host of complex and shifting relations – between professionals and amateurs, female and male association members and curators, education and entertainment, books and objects, museums and the marketplace. Institutional trading partnerships, corporate sponsorship of educational initiatives, diverse forms of consumption, and the effects of the Carnegie Corporation on Canadian museums and libraries are explored. The author advocates reflective examination of “the particular kinds of economic pursuit taking place within museums,” and although her case study does not sufficiently distinguish between the economic goals of individuals, companies, institutions, and governments, she does succeed in enriching our understanding of the historical museum’s place in various economies and the intertwining of educational and economic imperatives.

One of McTavish’s key contentions is that gendered assumptions underpin some critiques of the “corporate museum,” which can be seen as lamenting a loss of “professional, educational (and, by implication, masculine) authority.” She focuses on two paradigmatic exhibitions, each embodying a different model of the museum. The first is a 1924 fundraiser in the form of an “Oriental Bazaar” organized by the Ladies’ Auxiliary of the Natural History Society, where, for an admission fee, people entered a transformed museum in which women costumed in various forms of Asian attire sold tea and cake while presiding over a display of decorative arts including many objects brought to New Brunswick by female missionaries and doctors. The second is the installation of the New Brunswick Museum’s Asian collection in the 1930s, curated by the arthistorically educated Alice Lusk Webster, in which objects were arranged chronologically, stylistically, and nationally in glass cases and accompanied by short descriptive labels. McTavish convincingly argues that the Oriental Bazaar made women’s contributions highly visible and the museum experience simultaneously entertaining, sensual, and commercial, whereas Lusk Webster’s rejection of such display strategies and professional ambitions may have “eclipsed her own role in building the New Brunswick Museum.” More contentious is her implicit claim that the later Asian display was unwelcoming and unstimulating: she uses the same formulation twice to tell us that the “Mandarin coats and priests’ robes that Lusk Webster had acquired hung lifeless in carefully arranged cases; they did not adorn her body as she welcomed visitors in the manner of a hostess at the Oriental Exhibition of 1924” (my emphases), and offers the same assertion in a slightly different variant elsewhere (“she hung lifeless garments within cases …”). As the book contains no discussion of the reception of either display or of the people who would have visited them, this judgment seems to reflect McTavish’s preferred mode of encountering objects rather than contemporary visitors’ experiences. I mention this not because the author’s concern about the gender bias of the “ideal” museum is invalid but because her treatment of this question fails to live up to her promise of careful contextualization and nuanced consideration. Her analysis of different types of display relies on a binary distinction between visual education and multi-sensory pleasure (and popular appeal), falling into generalizations of the sort that she more cogently critiques elsewhere; while she finds evidence of commercialization in the historical museum, she assumes...