Anti-Museum

"One of the people who read the first version of the text in July 2019, was my friend and former director of the National Portrait Gallery in Washington DC Marc Pachter. It was he who told me, ‘you’ve got to do one thing, Charles, before publishing this book, which is to go and visit MONA in Hobart.’ Truth is, MONA, Australia’s self-proclaimed Museum of Old and New Art in Tasmania, had been somewhere in my professional consciousness, but never prominent. For one thing, Hobart is possibly the most inconvenient place to get to in the entire world. Visiting MONA becomes a very curious sort of artistic pilgrimage to this distant place, which I managed in February 2020, just before lockdown, the last of my recent foreign trips. “It’s not just that Tasmania is the other side of the world. Visiting MONA becomes a very curious sort of artistic pilgrimage to this distant place…. a deliberate attempt to turn the world upside down.” As luck would have it, a stopover on my way in the Emirates gave me the opportunity to visit the recently opened Louvre Abu Dhabi , adding two chapters with a single flight. I’m unspeakably pleased I did. MONA ended up being a key element in the final section of my book, a deliberate attempt to turn the world upside down. It’s not just that Tasmania is the other side of the world. The founder David Walsh is a really interesting and impressive figure. I sense that everything he did was to annoy and upset somebody like me. His museum is like two fingers to the cultural establishment and the traditional museum director. ‘I’m going to do everything my way and I don’t care if you disapprove. In any event, there’s nothing you can do!’ The Making of MONA is a big book by a former University of Tasmania sociologist Adrian Franklin. Too heavy for the flight back, luckily I was subsequently sent a copy. Franklin’s approach as a sociologist is almost anthropological, involving conversations with everybody involved in the construction of the museum. He documented and described it in a very thoughtful way. Not only did I very much admire the museum itself, but this book about it too. Franklin and I struck up a correspondence and I learned about a follow-up volume very much based on this big book I found in Tasmania. His approach was something I tried to emulate in my own discussion of museums. Anti-Museum is an academic book and general set of reflections about what Franklin sees, I think correctly, as not just a single move against the traditional museum, but a wider international movement. Much of the recent academic literature on museums I must confess I find somewhat turgid. Anti-Museum by contrast is incredibly clear in the way it presents its analysis. Many sociologists write in a way which is very theory dominated, whereas Adrian Franklin seems able to set things out both analytically and clearly, without resorting to abstruse theory. A model, exemplary book. The final section of The Art Museum in Modern Times I wrote late on, and Adrian’s work helped me with the analytical framework for the whole."