Temples of culture under siege

A couple of years ago, I was walking up Quincy Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts with Ivan Gaskell, a curator at the Fogg Art Museum, when he asked if I had ever met Jim Cuno, the director of the Fogg. I hadn’t, so we knocked on his door and left three hours later, having embarked on a long conversation which I have continued, at intervals, ever since.

Cuno was meditating about some of the implications of 11 September 2001: the sense that the public was beginning, once again, to seek out the therapeutic value of great museums; the hubris attached to the decline in the number of visitors to the Guggenheim; the importance of a huge endowment to the independence of the Harvard Art Museums. Cuno described how he was organising a series of lectures on issues relating to public trust in museums, alongside the highly privileged Harvard Program for Art Museum Directors, which allows newly appointed American museum directors to spend time at Harvard talking, thinking and meeting other museum directors, as a way of enabling them to remind themselves of the core values of museums — the reasons for their existence and not their budget sheets.