"Now I realize that at the Metropolitan we simply have museum storage," Rorimer smiled at me wistfully as we parted. He died not long afterwards, but knowing his energy and his enthusiasm for porcelain, I am sure he had set something in motion before he left off.

Museum exhibits continue to provoke arguments between curators and exhibits specialists. The boom in public attendance is a heavy drain on exhibits staff. More and more existing museums cut down on public exhibition space as storage problems increase and all the attendant amenities are thrust upon them. More staff is always needed; craftsmen, restorers, conservationists, carpenters, upholsterers. Space is at a premium for shipping and receiving including temporary accessioning, inspection, minor repairs, carding, perhaps photographing. All of this work should be done preferably in an in-line manner, near the loading-receiving dock so as to make for efficiency. Elaborate climate-control machinery often must be installed in existing facilities, making vast demands on space in cellars or attics. Ancillary lighting problems make old skylights difficult problems to wrestle with. The resulting aesthetics are often atrocious, but daylight illumination is now shown to be a danger even to oil paintings.

Then there are the services to be added, conference rooms, more offices, cafeteria facilities and restrooms for staff as well as the public, public relations area, perhaps a built-in radio or TV studio, auditorium, sometimes a theater. It is no wonder that many museums today find that two thirds of a building's space is so occupied, and the collections reduced to one third. The resulting storage problem becomes then a fierce fight between those concerned with the aesthetics of exhibition, those who want to show everything, and those who want to make museum storage into a reality.

The curator's role in all this is one which requires a sort of superman. As Eisler 2 points out, today's art curator must be capable of being a courtier with trustees upon whose constant approval his job depends, but must also be a showman, an interior decorator, an administrator and a financier. American art museums still retain some of the attributes of a cultural club. The president and trustees are likely to be dilettantes of the arts to a degree, and beyond the qualities enumerated above most trustees want; "curators who are primarily in the field of post-Renaissance painting, with enough general background to cope with the contingencies of connoisseurship in other areas. General knowledge in the decorative or graphic arts or western sculpture is all to the good." If such curators can restrain themselves sufficiently to get on well with the exhibits staff, then taste alone should allow them to cooperate sufficiently to work out permanent and temporary exhibits which manage to please the public and the critics, at the same time keeping their trustees interested in new museum acquisitions, or lulled into a sense of satisfaction about their own collections. I have already referred to the lack of museum employment of really expert curators in research which the problems of art galleries tend to encourage. As Eisler points out these problems are self-perpetuating. If "experts" have to be hired to write catalogues, and if foundations will even give grants to help pay for such experts on contract, how can a hard-pressed art museum be encouraged to take on expert curatorial staff? It is easier and cheaper to employ the sort of generalized paragon described above, and leave the experts in the history of art departments or in some other city or country where they belong.

The main problem here it seems to me is not so much the dilettantism or hardheaded fiscal practicality of the board of trustees, which might tend to smother innovation but rather questions of space, the groaning board provided by the collections and the lack of more table leaves on which to spread them out. My own point of view is that art museums should start some serious rethinking of their roles, based on an assessment of community support, space and the real meaning of museums, especially in our convulsive age, as centers for research and education.

If an urban art museum is confined to a single "fin de siecle" Greek revival marble palace, and for reasons of zoning or park encroachment or high cost is actually prevented from enlarging its present campus (and here I would choose to use the word campus advisedly, as a symbolic term), then there are two courses open to it, either give up the building and move elsewhere, or compromise, keep the building but move and split into another area. My own

2 Eisler, Colin, Curatorial Training for Today's Art Museum, Curator IX, no. 1, New York 1966, pp. 51–61.

preference would be to give up and start all over again from the ground up, perhaps persuading the municipality to take over the marble splendor for an additional library or perhaps a palace of culture or perhaps even, if run by the town fathers, a palace of sport.

An art museum should consist of perhaps three large spaces. One would be for more or less permanent exhibition, but built rather inexpensively like a high school gymnasium, emphasizing an inconspicuous, flexibility designed series of partitions and wall surfaces inside, with, preferably, artificial lighting. Perhaps on the other side of a courtyard or sculpture area could be the "Jeu de Paume," the temporary exhibition area, broken up into flexible multi-purpose spaces again, for exhibiting everything from monolithic contemporary works of our present sad days of wistfully introspective creation, to period exhibits which could be shown in similarly severe areas but with a few accessories to lend "ton" and verisimilitude. Again lighting and climate control would be stressed and various shipping-receiving facilities as well as security would be highly evolved and carefully planned.

The third large space could be designed to complement the others and should be like a combination stacks and rare book study area of a library. Here all the collections should be stored with maximum accessibility for scholars and conservation experts. Special study and carrel spaces should be set aside for visitors as well as laboratories for demonstration and research. Students in this area should be confined to the graduate level or above, and public educational services would be elsewhere, perhaps in a low ambulatory-like edifice connecting this essentially library structure and the area for permanent exhibits.

The two areas for permanent or temporary exhibits, large and highly flexible, would have to be designed for the realization that present day mass museum attendance is only just beginning. They should therefore be thought of as built in the style of world's fair pavilions whose structure might be constructed on a frame work or base of permanent utilities, light, water, gas, climate control and so on, in such a way that the whole exterior skin could be stripped off or changed around if new developments in twenty years made the original circulation pattern and space allocations obsolete. There is a zoo in England, the Chester Zoo, which makes all its buildings simply cocoon-like spaces, connected to utilities so that as new techniques of maintaining, rearing and keeping animals for public exhibition are developed, the Zoo Board has no hesitation in demolishing a twenty-year old structure created only for semi-permanence in favor of the new shape or size required. This incidentally is excellent practice for modern architects, keeping them humble as well as intellectually on their toes in the process. No architectural dry rot or the production of self-inflating mausolea can exist here.

In such spaces of the future, fifty or sixty thousand visitors a day might be able to come and see some figurative "Mona Lisa", be fed and watered and flow out again. At the second level, school classes and various sorts of teaching opportunities through college age, should be available in workshops, or laboratory surroundings where classrooms with teaching aids could be maintained. Slides and reproductions should be available as well as study collection material, giving a minimal time and opportunity only to the visit to the temporary exhibit or the permanent hall. Some "touch and see" material must be included here, as this is really the sole conveyor of meaning for many young people. To handle something can make all the difference for the intensive class. My own feeling is that tours of the art galleries and lectures in them mean far less to young people than is assumed. Distractions are too easy, and in general a real live handpainted masterpiece is far less momentous an experience for a young person than a teacher or an art loving adult thinks. Young people today have different eating habits as well as intellectual ingesting habits than do adults. Television and snacks between meals, as well as the denigration of mealtime as a family ritual have seen to that. Original works of art do not have the same inherent sanctity for young people. Rather anything hand-made that they can touch carries a special mystique. The possibility of crafts in itself seems almost like an antique magic, and something that many people would struggle with for at least a quotient of time like learning to play a musical instrument. For these things are expressions of individual personality and creativity, a precious buffer against homogenization.

In this day and age, so full of the insecurity of old values and so full of the presence of organic social change, museums would do well to be as "hypersensitive to the forces at work in the contemporary world" as Germaine Bazin says they are, and I do not mean merely solving the groaning board problem of what to exhibit, what not to exhibit and how to label it all. As Bazin suggests, museums of the future may have to be more library-like, a central storage and study area as I have suggested above for the experts, as well as special areas for education, and decentralized small satellite museum for suburbia as well as, I would hope, for the run-down areas. Branch museums near schools in pov. erty areas could do much to increase those quotients of the standard of living not yet contemplated by the planners. The satellite museums could take much of the burden of overwhelming crowds off of the central institution. Museums could place their buffet tables at dispersed points throughout the community, tailoring their offerings to the tastes or appetites of the kinds of people served. Mean while the central complex could bo back to being what an art or a science museum should be, a research institute (Bazin calls it a "cultural complex”) a flexible centre for studies involving the collections themselves.

POSLUDE

The preceding pages have been an attempt on my part to delineate what museums are and how they happened. To me they represent a setting in which little-understood, intangible things occur which have to do with stretching the minds of people. If they thus represent a force for education, it is said to consider that the formal organizations responsible for education do not thing so and fail to use museums properly, or think of them as partners in the process. One of the reasons may be an uncharitable one; schools and educators are clubbable, they have forms of union cards. Museums are rather like libraries of a generation ago. Educators then thought of those as step-relatives, purely ancillary to the processes of education. No one really helped libraries until they learned how to help themselves.

Another reason may be that museums engender a kind of awareness which leads to a sense of pleasure, of enjoyment. Pleasure and enjoyment, indeed, a sense of keen delight, or even joy, all these components of learning are not associated with education. Education is a serious business. Look how many people are involved and how many billions of dollars it costs. It can't be fun! Fun is fun. Education is solemn and serious. At least "training" and the transfer of accumulated facts is solemn work. Even if the latter exercises are not really education, they are assumed to be education by most people, and that's where the money goes. No wonder then that most museums are starving, drying up on the vine.

Museums are hideously understaffed and underfinanced today. They cannot possibly cope with the increasing demands placed upon them by everyone, from the public to the school systems to scholars. The bland assumption by everyone at all these levels that museums are free, that they have time and money to give out effort for every query, for every service required, is perhaps also associated with the idea of pleasure and enjoyment. If people who work in museums manage to have a good time, if they are doing what they want to do at starvation wages, then somehow there's a secret cache of money, of support somewhere. They can't be poor and be having fun! The two don't go together, at least in America. So the theme runs.

Someday Americans will wake up and discover that it isn't so. Either the museums will fold and close their doors, like the poor old mistreated railroads, or someone will have sense enough to realize that real education is fun, and that the museums' sort of education has to be paid for, just like all the other kinds. May that day be soon.

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