Book of Animals by Helen Iranyi, and: Animals: A Picture Sourcebook ed. by Don Rice (review)

76 Books Cod Museums and Hot Museums: Towards a Museological Criticism. Jorge Glusberg. CAYC, Buenos Aires, 1980. 78 pp.. illus. Paper. Reviewed by F.David Martin* According to Glusberg, a ‘coolmuseum’ispoor indidactic presentation of information, stimulating the public to become actively involved by adding its interpretations. A ‘hot museum’ is rich in information, inviting passive receptivity from its public. A cool museum encourages its public in self-education and creativity. Ideally the public is even drawn into institutional decision-making-for example, the what, how and when of exhibitions. The slogan of the cool museum is: artfor the people. Conversely, a hot or traditional museum keeps its public at a distance. Run by elitists for elitists, the primary function of the hot museum is to preserve its collections for posterity. Even for exhibitions the slogan (unwritten) is: keep artfrom the people. Glusberg derives thesesuggestivedistinctions of ‘cool’and ‘hot’from Marshall McLuhan. In advocating the cool museum as the ideal of the future, he is, in this reviewer’s opinion, on the side of the angels. Communication theory is the foundation for his museologicalinquiry. Museums ‘should be understood as operators of a form of communication which links exhibitors to the public within an institutional web that is incorporated into society’(p. 13). The ultimate purpose of his inquiry is to help integrate the museum with its society. One expects, then, to find out something about how this program is to be realized. One gets, however, disjointed and repetitious discussions about methodology, jargon, a few insights, and very few coherent arguments. Only rarely does Glusberg descend to specifics, as in the excellent but all too brief comparison of MOMA (hot) with the Beaubourg (cool). The writing is atrocious, furthermore, the editing worse (typos and misspellingsabound, and even paragraph divisions are unclear), index and bibliography are missing, and the thirty or so drawings (the numbering systemselfdestructs)by Luis Benedict are monotonous and of little artistic value. Museums are in a crisis, both economically and culturally. Will they die or will they be revitalized? How? But the only major contribution of this ‘cool essay’ may be stimulating someone to do a better job of analysing the crisis. Analyzing an Art Museum. William S. Hendon. Praeger, Eastbourne, England, 1979. 263 pp., illus. €14.25. ISBN: 03-050386-8. Reviewed by Cifford Phillips** The analysis referred to in the title of this book was made of the Akron (Ohio) Art Institute for the 1971-72 fiscal year. The author is Professor of Economics and Urban Studies at the University of Akron and the editor of the Joumol of Cultural Economics. The Akron Art Institute is a middle-sized art museum with a primary servicearea of about 572,000 persons. It has afloor area of about 23,000 square feet. In theyear under study the museumhad an annual budget of about $250,000, a membership of 1639 individual members, and an annual attendance of 37,736 persons. As an economist, the author was especiallyinterested in determining how efficiently the museum was operating from a cost standpoint. He performed cost-benefit analysesof exhibitions and educationalservices, and used questionnaires and interviewsto obtain pertinent information about other departments. Some aspects of theauthor’s methodology are not alwaysprecise.The cost-benefit analysis is a tool that does not seemespeciallywelladapted to a non-profit enterprise, especiallyone where the ‘benefits’ are often quite intangible. For example, in analysing the relative costs and benefitsof the museum’s exhibition program, Hendon can compute the costs in dollars and cents, but since the museumdoes not charge for its exhibitions, he cannot compute the benefits in comparable monetary terms. Instead he usesasa measure of benefitsthe public’swillingnessto pay in other respects. Included in this category are travel expenditures, membership fee allocations, endowment income allocations, special fund raising, sale of catalogues, and special donations. When all these items are added together, benefits exceed costs by about three thousand dollars. Yet some of the allocated items can be no more than educated guesses, and the largest item on the list, $38,800.17 in travel *Dept. of Philosophy, Bucknell University, Lewisburg, PA 17837, **480 Park Ave., New York, NY 10022, U SA . U SA . expenditures, does not actually...