vp200512 What does museum quality mean? STEAMWORK  

  He revisits the museum without walls idea, asking that the subject be looked into to help understand what print professors must do to make the arts part of education to help Earth’s human and other life sustainability by making printmaking the A in STEAM.

 A demonstration of reading notes

In two instances in this essay I found opportunity to test my reading notes “app” which was to be part of the Art Students software Carl Chew and I planned in 1988, but which never was realized. This test probes the possibility now may be the time to share it.

In a world of closed museums …

What does museum quality mean?

It used to mean permanence, enduring, reliable, certified, precious, rare, exclusive, valuable, unique, and of limited access. I suppose all those things still apply. However, in mid-twentieth-Century, Andre Malraux wrote, Voices of Silence: Museum without walls, a book that changed my mind.

Nelson Rockefeller, who was once Mayor of New York City, lauded the book and interpreted it to mean he should finance companies that used modern techniques to reproduce exact replicas of rare works of art. The technology was there, waiting to exploit the market demand for these.

To Rockefeller, the museum without walls meant his walls and the walls of those who can afford these replicas at prices ranging from fifty to five-thousand dollars. Museum shops stock these replicas, in addition to hundred of take-offs from posters to puzzles.

As I read his book, I don’t think Malraux meant what Rockefeller thought. Malraux meant reproductions, but in the mass media. Malraux didn’t mean that companies should start making perfect copies of the Mona Lisa, but merely postcards or fairly good color posters.

It was the consciousness of the existence of masterpieces that Malraux was suggesting, a consciousness that, Yes, there is a painting in Paris, and this is what it looks like. More importantly, to Malraux, is the back story, the words that can go with the painting.

It is the back story that we respond to, words that can written, translated, told, or shown in the media that grabs our attention and sustains our interest. We take away an impression; and the more times we hear it, see it, and tell it in our own way, the more it sticks in our mind.

The icons of the art world, in all their forms – the visual and performing arts – which can be mediated, and their back stories told – become part of the cultural fabric of humankind. If the back story can be translated into the languages of most humans, set to music, acted out or made into a video game, all the better.

This is what museum quality really means to me.

Virtual museums

In the 20^th Century, people of the stature in their fields – such as Malraux and Rockefeller – were not experts in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics - STEM. They were politicians and admen, more expert in behavioral psychology than STEM.

Experts in STEM visited museums, but probably more often the museums of science, history, and industry than the museums of art. Some were no doubt well-paid and therefore they could buy season tickets to the performing arts and museums, too.

I have found a few in those fields who told their views of the arts – Einstein and Feynman come to mind – plus the book on the creative process by Ghiselin which I read when I was a college student. There is no doubt that people in the research areas of STEM are creative, innovative, discovering, and inventive. They share this with many artists, but their work goes beyond the walls of museums.

In fact, even museum walls are the products of their collective work, as is the mediation of what’s inside and on those walls.

Now we have a problem – Earth’s human and other life sustainability is coming to an end. Mass destruction is happening. Thirty years ago, fifteen-hundred of them warned humanity of this and they called for the help of all the world’s people.

Almost no one answered or acted. I wondered then, “How can artists respond?” I called my musings on this subject, “EarthSafe 2022.” It didn’t do any good, but it helped me in my quest for a better world.

My museum without walls

My neighbors, a company called Linksbridge, is also working for a better world. They want to buy our family’s art gallery – what I consider my museum. Our Mini Art Gallery is an art gallery in all appearances, but it’s really my place of musing and carrying out the suggestions my musings give rise to.

What shall I do without it when we sell it to Linksbridge? How can I make it more than self-serving and a pattern of self-indulgence? My life has always been around education and my specialty has always been the arts. Malraux, Einstein and even Nelson Rockefeller were among my guides - like teachers without classroom walls because they are mediated teachers.

The word virtual teachers comes to mind.

How to be a virtual teacher

Is there a book about becoming an effective virtual teacher? Is there a book of the kind Stephen Covey wrote, Seven Habits of Highly Effective People? Maybe his book, and the companion book about effective leadership, would serve as blueprints to write it.