For the past three years, it’s been growing-that spiky mass of girders at the corner of Avenue Road and Bloor Street West. And growing with it are anxieties about how the radical space will change the way patrons think of the museum.
By next June, the Crystal, the centerpiece of a massive restoration and expansion project, will have transformed the ROM into one of the city’s most distinctive buildings. But cultural commentator Adam Gopnik warns that a certain danger comes with making the museum a social locus.
“We want to avoid the ‘museum as mall,'” he said. “That is, a place of pleasure in its cheapest form.”
Gopnik spoke at the inaugural Eva Holtby Lecture on Contemporary Culture at the ROM on Friday night. Best known for his frequent columns in the New Yorker, Gopnik discussed the changing nature of museums and the ROM’s current campaign to become a modern cultural institution.
“MoMa [New York’s Museum of Modern Art] reminds one of a mall,” Gopnik lamented, referring to the hoards of visitors who fill its trendy halls by the thousands but tend to be more absorbed with each other than with the museum’s collection.
“Building a good museum is an art. What we want is a mindful museum,” said Gopnik, a long-time resident of Montreal before moving to the United States in the 80s.
He told the assembled crowd that in the past museums were essentially mausoleums for dead civilizations, preserving artifacts from bygone times to let patrons encounter them in an intimate setting. This led to a very solitary, albeit deep museum experience.
In contrast to earlier institutions, Gopnik believes that these days museum-goers “want museums as a metaphor for our own life,” and seek a more exciting and outgoing institution. The new kind of museum cropping up in cities like New York and Madrid aims for direct aesthetic pleasure and “puts art in your face as soon as you enter it,” said Gopnik. At the same time this new ‘mindful museum’ serves as “a central arena in the social sense,” providing a forum for the city’s academic and cultural expression.
Becoming a social space is high on the agenda of the ROM’s leadership, who launched Renaissance ROM, one of the world’s largest museum restructuring projects, in 2003. By its completion in 2007, the ROM will have 27 new galleries and 30,000 square metres of new and renovated space, almost doubling its display space and-it’s hoped-greatly increasing the flow of visitors.
Christopher Holtby, whose father Philip Holtby is sponsoring the lecture series in honour of his late wife, introduced the evening with remarks about turning the ROM into an interactive, communal space. He praised the revamping for helping the museum “bring new and innovative ideas to a forum where we will listen, discuss and enjoy.”
