Museums Civic

Robert SteinDeputy Director

Dallas Museum of Art@rjstein

AND responsibility

Museums have a civic responsibility

Museums Are:

•A Public Resource•Educational Venues•Tax Exempt•Recipients of Charitable Giving•Recipients of Federal Support•Collectors of Cultural Heritage

Clearly museums are

trusted

According to a study by Indiana

University, museums are

considered a more reliable source

of historical information than

books, teachers, or even personal accounts by grandparents.

But are they vital?

The 2010 U.S. census reports that only 14.5% of US

Adults visited museums in the prior 12 months (Census, 2012).

8%Dallas = 6.5M People - 500k Annual Attendance

Civic Engagement

HOW ABOUT

INSTEAD?

1.Transforming Access2.Embracing a Culture of Participation3.Seeking Out Public Dialog

Transforming Access

UNESCO Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity Article 6

While ensuring the free flow of ideas by word and image care should

be exercised so that all cultures can express themselves and make

themselves known. Freedom of expression, media pluralism, multilingualism, equal access to art and to scientific and

technological knowledge, including in digital form, and the

possibility for all cultures to have access to the means of expression

and dissemination are the guarantees of cultural diversity.

UNESCO, 2001

equal Access to ART

Participation in cultural activities, together with access to

them, forms the backbone of human rights pertaining to

culture. Access is a precondition for participation and

participation is indispensable to ensure the exercising of human rights.

Annamari Laaksonen, of the International Federation of Arts Councils and

Culture Agencies, 2011.

Bridging the Culture Gap

If social inclusion means anything, it means actively seeking out and removing barriers, of acknowledging that people who have been left out for generations need additional support in a

whole variety of ways to enable them to exercise

their rights to participate in many of the facilities

that the better off and better educated take for granted.

O’Neill, Mark. 2002. The good enough visitor. In Museums, Society, Inequality, Richard Sandell, ed., 24–40. London and New York: Routledge.

FREE ADMISSION ANDFREE MEMBERSHIP

welcoming new citizens

WHAT ARE PEOPLE SAYING?

When you can slip into a gallery for just 15 minutes to see a favorite

painting, or when parents can take their children without having to

budget for it, the museum takes on a societal function. It's no longer just a fortress or an amusement: it's a civic platform, where education

and citizenship go hand in hand.

For Dallas, a museum membership should be like a library card:

everyone should have one, and it should foster an engagement with

the museum that goes beyond the occasional visit to a kind of civic

pride.

I hope it works. Because in a perpetually privatizing world, the kind of civic culture that the Dallas Museum of Art is trying to foster has become rarer than any antiquity.

Jason Farago, The Guardian, London, 11/30/2012

WHAT ARE PEOPLE SAYING?

A participatory culture is a culture with

relatively low barriers to artistic expression

and civic engagement, strong support for creating and sharing one’s creations, and

some type of informal mentorship whereby

what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices. A participatory

culture is also one in which members believe their contributions matter, and feel some degree of social connection with one

another.

Participatory culture is emerging as the

culture absorbs and responds to the

explosion of new media technologies that make it possible for average consumers to

archive, annotate, appropriate, and

recirculate media content in powerful new

ways. Jenkins, Henry. 2006. “Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century.”

Embracing A Culture of Participation

An information explosion

An information explosion

While discrete

sources of online

information grow

without limit

The ability to

discriminate quality

sources is increasingly

more difficult

A Pressing need for Digital Media LiteracyArt Museums are the Perfect Place to Learn about Media in all its Forms

Seeking out public dialog

Authoritative Authoritarian

authority

A role for museums in civic dialogThere is a growing movement to reinvigorate civic dialogue as vital dimension of a

healthy democracy, based on the premise that a democracy is animated by an informed

public engaged in the issues affecting their daily lives. Civic dialogue plays an essential role in this process, giving voice to multiple perspectives and enabling people to

develop more multifaceted, humane, and realistic views of complex issues and of each

other. Yet opportunities for civic dialogue in this country have diminished in recent years, due mainly to polarization of opinion along ideological, racial, gender, and class lines; social structures that separate rich from poor and majorities from minorities; a

sense of individual disempowerment; and the overwhelming nature of many of society’s problems. Perhaps most fundamentally, the fact that modern problems usually affect different people in different ways often places them outside of the traditional civic

organizations, labor unions, and political parties that organized civic discourse in the

past.

Barbara Schaffer Bacon, Pam Korza, and Patricia E. Williams, “Giving Voice: A Role for Museums in Civic Dialogue” (paper prepared for a Museums & Community Toolkit, American

Association of Museums, 2002).

civic function museums

the

of

has many facets

thank you! Robert SteinDeputy Director

Dallas Museum of Art@rjstein