Censorship and Expression: The Challenge off the Provocative in Museums.

When is provocative too provocative? This past week, three pieces were pulled from the Guggenheim Museum’s show “Art and China After 1989: Theater of the World”  due to protests from animal rights activists concerned about the portrayal of animals in this exhibit. The works pulled from the exhibit depict eight Pitbull’s on eight treadmills trying to fight each other, pigs engaged in intercourse, and insects, snakes, and small lizards underneath a lamp.

The removals from the Guggenheim follow the removal of Scaffold, a sculpture opposing capital punishment, drawing from controversial hangings in U.S. history from the Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis, as well as protests at the Whitney Museum of Art surrounding Dana Schutz’s painting Open Casket,  portraying  Emmitt Till’s mutilated body.

The censorship vs expression battle between museums, artists, and the public is nothing new. Marcel Duchamp faced criticism for his found object art in 1917, and Picasso’s 1937 mural depicting the massacre of a Basque village was censored in the 1960s because Americans thought it was insensitive to Vietnam.

Artists have a right to express, but does a museum have the right to display works that may cause harm to others or that causs harm to the subjects of the work (in the Guggenheim case the animals)? If museums are held in the public trust, they should listen to the responses of the audience. Yet at the same time, museums are not neutral institutions. Whether implicitly or explicitly they push social, political, and even economic themes. The issue of censorship becomes clear when the staff, faculty, and museum goers safety comes into question. If the public is threatening violence over an exhibit, pieces need to be removed.

Perhaps in the case of the Guggenheim the works were correctly removed because they display physical harm done to animals, which is not good art. The animals were actually in these perilous situations to be photographed. Yet in cases such as Dana Shutz’s at the Whitney, she was not putting any creature in physical harm with her paintings, rather members of social activist groups did not feel she had authority as a white woman to paint a black man’s brutal  death. In the cases of censorship how does a museum weight physical vs. emotional harm in their decision to remove a piece?

As with most controversy, there is no clear answer to the expression v. censor debate. Yet I do feel that any physical harm or violence incited over the pieces in a museum should trigger the removal of the object so as to protect the workers and visitors. These protests against artwork may begin to pop up more frequently as social media fuels social protests and change. Museums will need to figure out a means to deal with the bold and provocative while remaining safe institutions for the public.

In recent weeks, the museum world media has been inundated with the articles regarding the Berkshire Museum’s plan to auction off 40 pieces of art in its collections to support a $60 million renovation and expansion. As expected, the auction proposal was met with criticism from museum professionals, institutions, and the American Alliance of Museums.

According to an article published last week by NPR, The Berkshire museum, located in Pittsfield, MA has faced an annual budget deficit surpassing $1million annually for the past 10 years. Van Shields, the executive director of the museum, claims that the institution has no choice but to sell a portion of its collection, or die out as an institution. AAM fired back urging The Berkshire to reconsider its funding plan, because this sale of art breaks the public trust and ownership of non-profit museum collections. Collections, said AAM, should not be treated as a financial asset.

This situation leave the Berkshire Museum between a rock and a hard place. How can they otherwise fund raise, and remain a museum at all, while facing extreme financial deficits? Grants alone are unlikely to provide millions, and dependency on a large donor seems unrealistic. They would most likely need to restructure their entire campaign, which could be possible, but could also take years that the museum may not have to meet its annual expenses. However,  the backlash from the museum world if the Berkshire continues with the auction plans (said to be set within the next 6 months) could be detrimental to the museum, and could result in measures such as a ban on loans from other museums, and loss of accreditation.

Looking at the Berkshire Museum’s mission statement below sheds a little light on the place for auction sales within the mission of the museum, and the truth is, the collection is not mentioned:

Berkshire Museum’s mission statement:                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           “Bringing people together for experiences that spark creativity and innovative thinking by making inspiring educational connections among art, history, and natural science.”

Very technically speaking, an auction of 40 pieces of artwork, expected to sell for at least $50 million,  could expand the progression of the mission, because without funds, the museum would not be able to exist or spark creativity and innovative thinking without the financial means to do so as an institution. Nowhere in the mission is there mention of preserving, collecting, or hoarding a massive amount of objects.

Yet if one of the purposes of a museum is to serve the public in good trust, then the Berkshire Museum’s decision to auction off art is not in good ethical standing. For example, two of the pieces to be auctioned are Norman Rockwell’s “Shuffleton’s Barbershop” and “Shaftsbury Blacksmith Shop.” Rockwell spent the last 25 years of his like in Pittsfield, and gifted these works to the community for public enjoyment and appreciation. The auction of these pieces does not present the good of the public interest. Perhaps selling more pieces of lesser value than a Rockwell would better serve the public interest, but then again, that could place objective value on art which is meant to be subjective to the beholder. The situation is not an easy one.

As museum staff structures themselves move toward more business like models (the number of Executive Directors with MBAs is on the rise) where do collections fit in? Are they permitted to be on the free market for the very survival of an institution? Or do they still rest in the untouchable public domain?