1 r r e t p a p C h a WHY CITIES, MUSEUMS AND SOFT POWER By Gail Dexter Lord and Ngaire Blankenberg
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Ngaire Blankenberg
Gail Dexter Lord
My trip to Dubai this time is different. Rather than stay in one of the chilly, mega-brand hotels surrounded by building cranes, I’m in a small boutique art hotel in the AlFahidi Historical District, a historic Persian neighborhood that has recently been assigned a new Arabic name. This little network of shops and galleries is within the Historic District of Dubai, also called Khor Dubai, as part of a project to to transform the ancient Khor (Arabic for creek) area to qualify for designation as a UNESCO world heritage site.
My trip to Winnipeg this time is different. It is neither 25 degrees below zero, nor 30 degrees above, as on so many occasions over the past 14 years. It is a drizzling autumn day at “The Forks,” for thousands of years an historic meeting place for indigenous people on the banks of the Assiniboine and Red Rivers. Now it is a popular mixed-use leisure and cultural park with theatres, theatres, retail retail shops and space for for festivals, concerts, concerts, skateboarding skateboarding and and powwows. Today is different because I’m not here just for meetings. meetings. I’m here to visit the world’s irst national museum dedicated to to human rights, on its irst day open to the public
In my new location, I do what I rarely do in Dubai. I walk outside. In the textile souk, the South Asian sales people irst call out in French French to to entice me into their shops. “C’est jolie,” they say. “Entrez!” I am lattered that they think I am French, despite the decidedly unfashionable rivulets of sweat creeping down my back. They try to capture my attention. “Mary!” they call out. “Eveline!” “Shakira!” “Shakira!” I can’t help laughing at these names, evidence of a growing globalization. “Ah, my friend—a beautiful pashmina. Silk. Come in. Just to look.” look.” Dubai, like many cities around the world and particularly those in in the global South, South, has undergone a remarkab remarkable le transformation over the last 75 years. In the 1930s, it was a small village of about 20,000 people, desperate to recover from the collapse of the pearl trade. Today the lure of gold brings almost 11 million people a year to the sky-piercing high-rises along these reclaimed shores.
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Today will change this city for decades to come. As home to the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, Rights, Winnipeg has decided decided to rebrand itself as “The City of Human Rights Education.” Even before it opened, the museum operated a successf successful ul summer school in human rights education for teachers from across Canada, Canada, broadcast a lecture lecture series called “Fragile Freedoms,” featuring some of the world’s most famous human rights experts, and trained a remarkable 350 volunteers. The nearby University of Manitoba maintains the archives of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the oficial enquiry into 200 years of abuse suffered by Canada’s indigenous people as governments colluded with churches to forcibly remove children from their families and place them in far-away “residential schools” with the stated purpose “to kill the Indian in the child.” Becoming the Human Rights Education City is a bold move and a challenging one:
Laborers and domestic workers chase work they can’t ind at home, service workers and entrepreneurs look for new horizons, investors capitalize on the boom and the post-boom. Consultants and advisors and tourists come for the air-conditioned shopping, good hotels and great food at every price point. We all arrive through one of the world’s busiest and best airports to discover a city full of promise and optimism. I stroll through the perfume souk, the spice souk, the utensils souk, all active working markets, noisy with the loading and unloading of goods from Iran, South Korea and Singapore, the insistent sales pitches, the bargaining, the trafic. I relect on what museums need to achieve for their clients, the government agencies and the varied residents of this burgeoning city-state. What could museums or a heritage district offer for Dubai’s permanent, temporary and transitory residents, many of whom either do not know about museums and heritage sites or think of them as places for “others” in distant countries? What good is a museum or heritage site in this city of gold, driven by development and aspiration, where history is for some just another word for outdated, while for others it is so deeply personal and familial that it has no place in the public realm? Power. Funny enough, it is the same for both the city and its residents. A museum here can confer power on the city’s residents, and power on the city’s government, at home and internationally.
Winnipeg is also home to a large population of marginalized aboriginal people. The museum looks as if a giant space ship has landed. As I enter with hundreds of proud and excited people, we are dazzled by the architecture, which takes us on a one-kilometer human rights journey along alabaster ramps. At each exhibition zone, friendly docents explain the history of human rights, indigenous perspectives, the Holocaust and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. People here assume I’m another visitor from Winnipeg, not the consultant from Toronto who for the past 14 years helped plan this museum. I relect on my Aunt Millie who lived in Winnipeg. She was the founder of the Nellie McClung Theatre Group, named for a famous suffragette. I remember my father’s stories of how cold he felt selling newspapers at the corner of “Portage and Main,” the crossroads of two economies—bootlegging liquor to the U.S. during Prohibition and the Winnipeg Grain Exchange. After many decades in decline, Winnipeg has transformed itself into a regional center for the knowledge economy, with universities, insurance irms, medical research and a thriving arts and theatre scene. Now it’s part of an international network of cities that feature museums of conscience, collecting the stories behind human rights. Winnipeg and the Canadian Museum for Human Rights are now ready to exercise their soft power.
Museums empower. Museums are power. Soft power. Cities, Museums & Soft Power – Pre-proof Not For Distribution | 3
Museums and cities throughout the world are connecting in a soft-power embrace. “Soft power” is a concept that emerged a quarter century ago to describe international relations based not on military nor economic might, but on influence. Soft power is the ability to influence behavior using persuasion, attraction or agenda-setting. Where the resources of “hard power” are tangible—force and finance—soft power resources are intangibles, such as ideas, knowledge, values and culture. Networks and connectivity enable soft power to spread its influence farther and deeper via Web-based networks and networks of cities. And where there are cities, there are museums. Political scientist Joseph Nye, who first formulated the term in 1990, recently explained how soft power has increased dramatically in the 21 st century as the Information Revolution helped to distribute information of all kinds worldwide. i In 2000 there were five million websites in the world; today there are more than one billion, and more than a third of the global population is online. As a result, more people participate in international conversations that were once the exclusive domain of states and corporations that had the economic and military power to exercise control. Today, information can be launched, exchanged and turned into action more quickly, less expensively and among more people and organizations than ever before in the history of humankind.ii Monocle Magazine and the UK-based Institute of Government have rated countries on
their soft-power since 2011, using metrics such as the number of embassies and cultural missions, tourists per year, annual attendance at major art galleries, number-one albums internationally, number of foreign correspondents, UNESCO world heritage sites, think tanks, universities in the top 200, foreign students, restaurants with Michelin stars, and even the number of footballers playing abroad in the world’s best leagues.iii When aggregated, these indicators are thought to predict how influential a country might be in persuading others to agree with it. The British Council identifies the link between soft power and culture in its 2013 report, Influence and Attraction: Culture and the Race for Soft Power in the 21st Century. iv Its
focus, like Monocle’s, is on civil society institutions, such as broadcasting and educational institutions, NGOs, businesses, foundations and trusts, and creative individuals—philanthropists, artists, sports personalities and performers. “Cultural 4 | Cities, Museums & Soft Power – Pre-proof Not For Distribution
contact had originally been elite-to-elite (through royal courts and ambassadors), then additionally elite-to-many (via broadcasting and cinema), and now was e ntering a phase of people-to-people (through travel, migration and the Internet). v Michele Acuto, senior lecturer in global networks and diplomacy at University College, London, argues that not only national governments but also cities exercise effective soft power through international cultural relations and cultural diplomacy, especially in the environment, migration, and quality of life. vi Nye points out that the most effective soft power is generated by civil society rather than government and large corporations, which are the traditional backers of “hard power.” When governments try to generate influence, it is often perceived as propaganda. vii These twin characteristics of soft power—the rise of cities and the role of civil society— are pushing museums from the margins toward the center of soft power. In the not-too-distant past, museums and the arts were mainly impacted by hard power, which is where their funding and governance originated. National governments of all types and large private corporations were the main patrons. They exercised influence, both directly and indirectly, on what museums displayed and collected and how they presented their material. During the Cold War, for example, the CIA, in its propaganda war against communism at home and abroad, viii secretly financed abstract expressionist exhibitions to promote the superiority of American freedom and creativity. In the more distant past, museums were repositories for war trophies, whether acquired from internal wars of aggression against indigenous people or other marginalized religious and ethnic communities, or from external conflicts and colonial conquest. In the museum setting, these trophies became objects of curiosity, displayed to communicate ideas about power and the hierarchy of “civilizations,” so that there would be no doubt about the justice of “our empire” or the superiority of “our civilization.” The objects that had been gifts between rulers somehow validated the notion of high cultural achievement among civilizations that had diplomatic relations. Natural history museums established a scientific standard for displaying collections in a systematic way that would soon be employed by museums of anthropology and ethnography. ix Art museums organized their galleries by country and school, such as “Northern
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Renaissance” or “Italian School,” as though the political reality of ever-changing borders (and accompanying bloodshed) were somehow transcended by the glory of art. Whether we date museums from the cathedral vault or the princely schatzkammer, from the great 18th-century universal collections or from childhood memories of geological wonders and terrifying dinosaurs, museums have always been powerful public spaces where the leading ideas of the time were presented. These ideas were often defined by the museum’s dominant patrons,x based on study of the objects that they collected and preserved. The ideas represented aren’t always good ideas. Sometimes they are very bad ideas indeed, like eugenics and imperialism and man’s “natural mastery” over nature. Nonetheless, museums are places where ideas are openly presented and contested—and have been for hundreds of years. Now museums are in a process of transformation from government and private organizations to institutions of civil society. By civil society we mean the network of organizations that represent neither big government nor large corporations, but have their roots in the voluntary and nonprofit sectors—often referred to as the “third sector” of the economy. This transformation started in the United States, which has been highly innovative in creating and sustaining the voluntary, nonprofit sector. The voluntary sector has been the cultural ethos of American democracy from its earliest days. In the last 40 years, economic changes such as the increasing concentration of wealth in private hands have stimulated the growth of civil society institutions worldwide. According to economic and social theorist Jeremy Rifkin, xi the nonprofit economy is growing faster than the for-profit economy in many countries. More and more museums are being shifted from the governmental and corporate sectors to the nonprofit sector. This shift in patronage has led to new governance structures that reflect a plurality of voices and influences. As a consequence of their place in civil society, museums are finding themselves with new roles, responsibilities and expectations.xii As government financing decreases both proportionately and in absolute numbers, the museum sector has become more dependent on new forms of patronage from foundations, philanthropists, sponsorship and earned sources. This has resulted in a change from inward-looking, collection-focused institutions to outward-facing, donor6 | Cities, Museums & Soft Power – Pre-proof Not For Distribution
and visitor-focused ones. This generational change occurred in two stages, and this book proposes that they are about to undergo a third—becoming centers of “soft power.” The first stage was heralded by the American Association of Museums in 1992 when it released its landmark report, Excellence and Equity: Education and the Public Dimension of Museums.xiii This led to a fundamental change in the museum profession: museums
proclaimed their roles as educational institutions with a mandate to provide physical and intellectual access for the entire public. This expanded “museum idea” echoed the1986 ICOM definition of museums as institutions “for the public benefit” and coincided with legislation in the U.S. and many other countries guaranteeing equal access for persons with disabilities. Over several decades, museum educators were liberated from their gloomy basement classrooms to take a central role in teams identifying the main messages of an exhibition, editing and re-writing text panels, selecting artifacts and communicating with stakeholders. A new emphasis on evaluation accompanied this transformation. Museum educators, like their colleagues in schools, colleges and universities, were passionate about measuring their success in sharing knowledge. It was no longer enough for an exhibition to be “beautiful” or “original” or “steeped in research,” much to the discomfort of some curators and designers. Museums needed to be broadly educational and attract the full diversity of the public —whether or not these visitors had prior subject-matter expertise. The second transformation followed within a decade of Excellence and Equity . It can best be characterized as “ Experience and Branding .” From within the museum sector, there was a strong impetus to expand and intensify the impact that museums were having on the public. Books like The Experience Economy xiv argued that people were no longer buying products but rather experiences. Museum professionals knew that they provided experiences in their galleries and programs. Now these experiences needed to be enhanced and packaged—packaged through branding. The branding of museums started as an extension of the traditional strategic planning process (itself adapted from the corporate world) of communicating the mission of the museum. The brand, which is said to be the “promise of the product,” further reinforces
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the consumer character of the museum experience. And like a consumer brand, helps people find the product, physically and virtually. Museums suddenly had a new importance in the city. They were contemporary landmarks. Not only brands in and of themselves, but also incorporated into the brand of the city. Museums were now seen as an integral part of the promise of their cities. In 2000, the opening of Tate Modern in London was seen as a triumph of branding. Tate became synonymous with London as the capital of “Cool Britannia.” This dynamic combination of experience and brand became the foundation for a consumer boom in museums, helping to overcome some of the marketing defects from which museums have suffered: for example, that the permanent collection will “always be there,” so there is no urgency to visit. The big experience—whether it is the “Rain Room”xv or “The Treasures of King Tut” xvi—is time-bound. You need to consume it during the limited time it is there, in your city or on your screen. New technology and impressive architecture certainly intensified the experience. The remarkable success of the Guggenheim in Bilbao, inaugurated in 1997, proves that the experience of space and place can be more memorable than the exhibitions. The Guggenheim “brand” expresses the meaning of this museum—its sophistication and its relationship to the world of non-objective art. The explosionxvii in “experience architecture” highly influenced the brand of the museum and the brand of the city. In many cases, the experience of the building was the experience of the museum. When Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin opened in 2001, it was without exhibits—the building itself was the storyteller. Symbolic storytelling museum buildings continue to attract visitors and debate: Le musée du quai Branly (Paris 2006), Jean Nouvel’s metaphorical journey into the worlds of “the other”; the EMP Museum (Seattle, 2000), which Frank Gehry shaped after Jimi Hendrix’s smashed electric guitar; the King Abdulaziz Centre for World Culture (under construction in Dhahran) evokes the subterranean stones, the source of petroleum and gas that brought cultural change to Saudi Arabia. Experience architecture creates new landmarks, speaking even to those who never enter the building.
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The third stage in the generational transformation of museums is just beginning: the shift from sites of branded experience to places of soft power. The emerging soft power of museums responds to three social realities: competition among cities for talent, tourism and investment; the forces of globalization and information technology, resulting in new forms of citizenship; and the growing public participation of women.
Cities
As of 2008, for the first time in human history, more than 50 percent of the world population lives in cities and cities account for 80 percent of the global GDP. In wealthy countries, about 80 percent of the population already lives in cities—and city populations in the rest of the world are continuing to grow toward comparable levels. This means that enormous numbers of people are migrating to cities, between and within countries. Property costs are rising in cities worldwide. Cities are on the leading edge of managing the integration process, as new residents and old learn to live together. Cities throughout the world are evolving their own soft power to advocate for solutions to global issues affecting their residents. The C40 network of 69 megacities, for example—containing one-twelfth of the planet’s populationxviii—shares information, develops policies and implements more than 8,000 action steps to combat climate change far beyond what national governments can do. The network of Cities of Migration and others share good ideas about how to manage integration. xix Khalid Koser contrasts the leading soft power role of cities to that of national governments: “You can find the entire spectrum of views within a few blocks in most cities. Cities have the venues and the community organizers. And whatever their perspectives on migration and migrants, city dwellers tend to be open to debate and exchange. While states are building walls, cities are building bridges. While states are launching patrol boats, cities are launching ideas. While states are unilateral, cities are transnational.”xx Cities use their soft power to compete in attracting talented workers, clean knowledgebased industries and high-spending tourists. The creative economy consists of science, Cities, Museums & Soft Power – Pre-proof Not For Distribution | 9
engineering, research and development, technology-based industries, arts, music, culture, design, and the knowledge-based professions of health-care, finance and law.
One hundred years ago during the era of the industrial economy, fewer than 10 percent of the population was employed in this way. Today it is as high as 47 percent in Singapore, 46 percent in Amsterdam and 37 percent in Toronto. xxi The economist Richard Florida has persuasively argued that creative workers gravitate to certain urban environments because the creative economy depends on access to people and ideas, not to land, natural resources or raw materials. Creative workers can and do move from place to place in pursuit of the best work environments. Richard Florida identifies the characteristics of cities that support the creative economy as the “
Three Ts
xxii—talent,
”
tolerance and technology. He has developed measures for these
qualities so that cities and countries can be compared. Talent is measured in terms of the percentage of the population with a bachelor’s degree or more and the number of research scientists per 1,000 workers. Tolerance is evaluated in terms of the openness of a community and the degree to which it has modern values, welcomes gay people, diversity and self-expression. Technology is measured in terms of rese arch and development expenditure as a percentage of GDP and the number of high-tech patents achieved. As the principal custodians of human capital, cities experience the immediate benefits of a healthy, happy, productive and sustainably growing population. Conversely, cities suffer the consequences of poverty, marginalization, pollution, inequality and unemployment. Cities are addressing urban challenges by mobilizing networks, including universities and colleges, cultural institutions and museums, government agencies, private sector organizations and individual citizens using their soft power to change behavior or to come up with innovative solutions. Cities are magnets for civil society organizations in a myriad of fields, such as health care, poverty reduction, environment, democracy and the arts. The new and expanded museums built in the last 17 years are mainly located in cities: 44 percent in cities of 1.5 million people or more and 20 percent in smaller cities with populations between 200,000 and 1.5 million.xxiii A recent study estimates that the entire nonprofit sector makes up five percent of GDP in economically advanced countries. xxiv Formerly referred 10 | Cities, Museums & Soft Power – Pre-proof Not For Distribution
to as “the third sector,” it is now being described as the social commons where people generate “the goodwill that allows society to cohere as a cultural entity.” xxv Prominent museum associations are asking how museums, which are now more than ever civil society institutions, can contribute to this social commons. The Museum Association in the UK launched a campaign on July 1, 2013 called “Museums Change Lives,” promoting the impact of museums on “individuals, communities, society and the environment.”xxvi The American Alliance of Museums themed its 2015 Annual Meeting “The Social Impact of Museums.” Tourism could well be the fourth “T” of Richard Florida’s Three T’s of the creative economy because cities attract visitors, including tourists, visiting friends and relatives and students. Many of these visitors immerse themselves in the city’s values as expressed in the city brand—tours, festivals, events, shopping, museums, theater, sights and sounds and contact with citizens. The impressive European Union program “European Capitals of Culture,” begun in 1985, has effectively promoted both major and minor cities as urban experiences and has stimulated urban regeneration, including many new museums. With over a billion tourists annually worldwide, tourism has become a significant economic, social and cultural force. Tourism is being harnessed to address a number of issues, from the environment to the development goals. The United Nations Environment Program, for example, has identified tourism as one of the ten economic sectors “best able to contribute to the transition to a sustainable and inclusive green economy.”xxvii The World Tourism Organization, another UN body, builds on the critical economic role that tourism plays in developing countries to promote responsible and sustainable tourism and further the values of poverty reduction, gender equality, environmental sustainability and cross-cultural understanding.xxviii Museums are particularly suited for tourism. Unlike many other cultural forms in the city, they are open throughout the year, offer facilities for group tours and enable an instant overview of a new culture and city for a wide range of travelers.
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Trans-local Urban Citizenship
The very idea of citizenship derives from the city and the special status that was conferred on city dwellers. Today citizenship is a matter for national governments and involves issues of sovereignty. And perhaps paradoxically, not all citi-zens (city dwellers) are equal. A global city is a place where the services essential to the work of globalization congregate: the lawyers, accountants, management consultants, hedge-fund managers and the like—those who are needed to operate international corporations. Renowned sociologist Saskia Sassenxxix points out three “structural facts” about global cities: they concentrate wealth among owners, partners and professionals associated with the global firms; they are increasingly disconnected from their region and country; they are also home to a large marginalized population that does not benefit from the financial activities of the big firms. Global cities are unequal and growing more so every day. They are in fact two cities: one experienced by its elite in fenced-off, privatized spaces; and another experienced by the service workers, industrial workforce, unemployed, children and youth whose sense of belonging or home is fragile and easily taken away. Museums are increasingly funded by the elites even as they turn th eir programming toward the others. While global cities are at the forefront of technology and development, often creating new nodes of power, the structured inequality of contemporary global cities is surprisingly similar to the post-colonial city. One impact of colonialism on cities was to formalize inequality by turning “natives” into migrants and foreigners. This legacy is exacerbated today by the forces of globalization and the growth of sprawling “informal settlements” with their islands of gated communities and villas. xxx For Sassen, this tension can be seen in all global cities, not just those with a colonial past. “It’s about conflicts—between a financial machine for super-profits and an older, modest profitmaking economy, and between disadvantaged communities and the forces of gentrification and policing to “cleanse” the city. xxxi It is a battle to lay claim to the city itself.
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Within this space of marginalization, Sassen points to new forms of identification and citizenship based on a “trans-local” identification.xxxii All labor (and not only the creative class) is mobile. Most major cities are home to a number of immigrants, labor migrants and others who are part of equally complex, transnational networks. It may seem invisible and powerless, but this labor class is also developing new forms of power and influence through trade and soft power. Many urban foreign workers send significant percentages of their earnings “back home.” This remittance economy represents a net development benefit that the United Nations calculates as more significant than international aid. xxxiii Globalization is experienced on an intensely local level through immigration and trade. Diasporic networks endure because of travel and communication. The information revolution has given the marginalized the means to network and consolidate individual agency, creating new forms of global citizenship. xxxiv Public libraries are creating spaces for people to exercise agency through information technology. It is no coincidence that Toronto, which welcomes 125,000 immigrants a year, also has the top performing public library system in North America. Toronto’s library system, like so many others, exemplifies the “sharing economy” and the social commons: everyone has access to information in an uplifting space where people can build a shared sense of identity and trust. Most library systems are civil socie ty institutions that are city- or county-funded and governed by local citizens with support from foundations and friends organizations. Museums are studying libraries to learn from their experience.
Women at a Tipping Point
Women make up nearly two-thirds of service workers, xxxv 60 percent of university campuses, 60 percent of students in courses related to the cultural sector (UK) xxxvi and more than half the creative class. Women also participate more on social media than men.xxxvii While women continue to be underrepresented in spheres of political power,xxxviii they continue to flock to civil society, voluntary and philanthropic organizations and on-line participation. Women have a better chance of being in a
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leadership role in the social commons xxxix than they do in the political realm, although the glass ceiling here is also thick and bruising. Women have been relatively successful in the social and cultural commons, including city government, compared to national and state-level political processes and in corporations.xl Museums in particular offer women an important role in the public realm that they may not have otherwise. Women exercising their power in the social commons is not a new phenomenon. In the U.S. after the Revolutionary War, women were prevented from participating in most aspects of public life. Upper-class women who wanted to contribute to socie ty started benevolence societies with mostly humanitarian aims—healthcare, temperance and abolition of slavery. Although not allowed to make public speeches or chair meetings, women worked at setting up the organizational structures and raising funds for these new civil society organizations.xli Eventually however, women were barred from many of the institutions they founded, except for those in the realm of culture and the arts, which were regarded as properly “lady-like.” New museums benefited from their skills in organization and public service, whether in art museums, or history museums, which transformed from all-male clubs to community-focused, historic preservation societies under the leadership mainly of women. xlii In the MENA (Middle East North Africa) region today, women are playing an active role in founding, curating, supporting and staffing many of the new museums whose roles many of their founders see as primarily education. xliii Museums are seen as places of safety and exclusivity that empower women through employment and the sale of women’s museum-related publications, art and craft reinterpretations of collections and exhibits of objects relating to women xliv. Museums are regarded as acceptable for women, whereas other spheres of public participation may not be. In the U.S. and the UK, women are still underrepresented as directors in the major museums, although the disparity is mostly driven by the largest museums. For most museums, however, with budgets of less than $15 million, female directors on average earn $1.02 for every dollar that male directors earn. In addition, women compose about 63 percent of all professional and senior-level staff in the field, twice the average representation of men. The percentage may be even higher if one counts women who 14 | Cities, Museums & Soft Power – Pre-proof Not For Distribution
are currently serving as interim directors, consultants, and heads of professional associations and university museum studies programs. The American Alliance of Museums’ 2014 National Museum Salary Study showed that in the U.S., women outnumber men 2 to 1 in director positions of small museums, those with annual operating budgets up to $250,000. “The disparity decreases with budget size,” the study states, “and at museums with budgets at or above $1M, the ratio flips and men start to outnumber women. At museums with budgets over $3M, the ratio of female to male directors is 1 to 1.3.” Women directors earn only 71 cents for every dollar paid to male directors, the study showed, as calculated from the median in this field-wide survey.xlv While there are still disparities between the genders in museums, notably among the most senior positions in major museums, on the whole, women are more powerful in museums than in other cultural industries where they represent less than half of the work force. Feminist journalist Sally Armstrong xlvi believes that women’s power is at a tipping point. She sees a growing soft power alliance between women of north and south and east and west for economic, social, cultural, religious and sexual equality. Women comprise the majority of museum workers but have still not achieved equality in the executive offices or in the boardroom. The power that women have is based in the social commons. Museums may open up a new front for feminism and soft power.
Powerful Cities Have Powerful Museums
Museums are beginning to understand themselves as networked civil-society institutions with soft power that can enhance the importance of cities and empower their residents and visitors. Museums enhance the soft power of cities when they are signifiers of pride and distinctiveness; when they are anchors providing stability, memory, employment and a forum for exchanging ideas; and when they are nodes in an international cultural
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network promoting lasting relationships among and between cultural workers and civil society. Museums empower people when they are patrons for artists and thinkers; when they amplify civic discourse, accelerate cultural change, and contribute to cultural intelligence among the great diversity of city dwellers, visitors, policy-makers and leaders. The very presence of museums signifies that a city is proud of its culture. As branding specialist Simon Anholt says: “If you are perceived to have culture —whatever that means—then you are perceived to have selfrespect. Therefore you are worthy of respect… So the cultural institutions are simply the means by which that is communicated and shared by other people.” xlvii
The presence of museums as public and accessible places that display and preserve artifacts and works of art demonstrates confidence, even though there may be people who vehemently disagree with the approach. For example, two new national museums in Paris, the Musée du quai Branly (2006) and the Cité nationale de l'histoire de l'immigration (2007) communicated confidence in France’s post -colonial relationships, even as these two museums drew criticism. The key factor in terms of soft power is for the museum to be open to debate and disagreement. The opening of the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg in 2001, with its tagline “Apartheid is where it belongs— in a museum,” signified that the city was ready to examine the trauma of its not so distant past. It is significant that this museum was created independent of government as a private-public partnership with a casino. Museums created in the Apartheid era were racist and existed to justify a system that made the minority feel proud at the expense of the majority. These apartheid-era museums reflected the hard power of the state and were not open to criticism or debate.
Landmarks or Place-makers?
We distinguish two very different roles for museums in the built environment of cities: as landmarks and as place-makers. As a landmark, the museum building brands the city or the neighborhood. It signifies a level of cultural attainment (as in the new 16 | Cities, Museums & Soft Power – Pre-proof Not For Distribution
contemporary art museum in Aspen), innovation (such as the green roof of the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco) or democracy (like the Constitution Center in Philadelphia). Often museum landmarks signify that a city possesses something unique and creative in the increasingly privatized urban public realm dominated by monotonous billboards and giant TV screens—the same shops, logos and images that define urban space the world over. Landmark buildings are attractive, and they attract developers to revive declining cities and influence tourists, residents and mobile workers to become cultural ambassadors and citizen diplomats to promote the city as a destination. The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and the Pompidou Center Metz are good examples of landmark museums that have successfully helped renew cities in declinexlviii. In this era of power diffusion, museum buildings are more than landmarks. They are also cornerstones in successful place-making. Place-making refers to the interactions between people and place in the creation of social capital (the capacity of people working together to solve problems). Museums present beautiful, accessible and meaningful spaces in which communities and individuals can meet, exchange ideas and solve problems. Place-making explains why museum space matters so much to so many today. Museum space is emphatically three-dimensional, punctuated by threedimensional objects. It is a kinesthetic experience: our mere movement seems to change the space, and the place somehow changes us. Because this is an interpreted space—a place with assigned meanings—we may also be challenged to see things in a new way: to find our own way, figuratively, at least. Guido Guerzoni (page xx) analyzes the reasons for the museum explosion of the past 30 years and the impact on the soft power of cities. Not all landmarks and place-makers are expensive permanent museum structures. Lourdes Fernandes, in her essay on temporary cultural spaces (page XX), explores the phenomena of pop-up museums, biennials and festivals. A city’s anchor institutions are those that have proven to be sites of community sustainability, such as hospitals, universities, libraries, community centers, places of worship and museums. The value of anchor institutions is to preserve memory and to adapt the knowledge of the past to changing contexts. Anchor institutions accumulate a Cities, Museums & Soft Power – Pre-proof Not For Distribution | 17
body of knowledge through the efforts of professional staff and engage with the public through exhibitions, websites, programs, and collaboration with artists and scientists. Members of the public are invited to contribute their memories and knowledge about collections and events through “crowd sourcing” or other means. These anchor institutions are challenged to develop new ways of organizing such knowledge, reflecting changes in the origins of knowledge and the ways in which it has been collected. Museums as anchor institutions exercise soft power based on community participation. Ngaire Blankenberg in her essay on page XX describes how museums exist within an internet-facilitated culture of stewardship in which transparency and the inclusion of multiple voices is critical to achieving soft power. Post-colonial city governments and patrons seek to distance themselves from the institutions of the past, seeing them as the source of outdated and harmful values. The vast majority of museums in the global south were established by colonial governments as symbols of their hard power. These museums have consequently been de-prioritized by new governments formed after independence. In many developing countries, cities prefer to fund community-based arts or creative industries rather than museums. Lacking funding for cultural leaders, local governments often outsource arts administration, which results in the loss of institutional memory and weakens the city’s influence. The soft power of civil society stems from having a stable base from which to engage—meaning that people who have secure income and the opportunity to build certain skills are most likely to be able to advocate, mobilize and engage with others (government, private sector, community) in order to influence and change behavior. Batul Raaj (page xx) describes how Patna in the Indian province of Bihar reclaimed history, memory and influence by building a major new museum. Gege Leme, in her analysis of Brazil’s museums (page XX), shows how museums are supporting the development of civil society. Even though a museum’s origins may be steeped in racism, colonialism and elitism, there is still value in the artifacts it holds and the opportunities it presents for reinterpretation—starting with whom it employs and how it operates. Without public museums, this institutional cultural memory is privatized and in danger of being forgotten. 18 | Cities, Museums & Soft Power – Pre-proof Not For Distribution
The Canadian Museum for Human Rights in Winnipeg and the many civil rights museums and institutes in Atlanta have been designed with soft power in mind and are building networks with their cities, as Joy Bailey and Gail Lord describe on page XX. When it comes to soft power, museums are particularly strategic for international relations, whether as symbolic meeting places or as part of a network of relationshi ps with other museums through loaning collections and exhibitions, as well as professional training and exchanges. Mohamed Gamal describes in his essay on page XX how the Grand Egyptian Museum in Cairo will promote soft power in the form of intercultural understanding. Museums have always played a role in the soft power between nations. Objects were exchanged as diplomatic gifts and this practice continues to be a tool in international diplomacy, as Frederica Olivares explores in her essay on page XX. What was once a process of exchange dominated by the political or corporate elite has expanded to include exchanges between the employees and associated cultural workers of museums. The International Council of Museums and the International Sites of Conscience are just two of the many professional organizations that bring museum workers together for conferences and professional training. As people speak to one another in a context of shared interest, they find ways of exchanging values, information and understanding. For women and others long excluded from political power, this is a particularly important way that leadership is developed and demonstrated. S oft power can also be contentious. Face-to-face contact among cultural workers is a critical way museums support the spread of ideas and values. Without the formality that marks moments of international cultural diplomacy, cultural workers are able to exchange viewpoints and ideas, and form alliances and networks that go beyond cities and nations. They become ci tizen diplomats. Robert Punkenhofer explores the role of creative workers and artists as cultural nomads in his essay on page XX. Whether internationally or within their cities, museums support and amplify the work and ideas of artists, scientists, historians, curators and thinkers—communities whose voices may not have had a platform previously. In their exhibitio ns, museums turn the creativity of individuals into a resource—for the economy (employment for artists), for identity (the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco) or for science (The Cities, Museums & Soft Power – Pre-proof Not For Distribution | 19
Science Gallery in Dublin). In this role, museums are power converters, transforming creativity and knowledge into influence, encouraging us to see new perspectives and even to change our behaviorxlix. Encouraging human creativity often requires confidence-building, skills-training, human networks, civic participation, risk-taking and intercultural understanding. Museums have great potential in each of these areas. Sociologist Robert Putnam l has demonstrated that participation in cultural activities is one of the most effective means of creating a civil society in which people work together to solve problems and create knowledge. An open civil society is the necessary foundation for the creative economy.
Power Conversion
The capacity of museums to convert power is demonstrated in the ways they engage with and promote women in professional networks and forums of influence. These women, in turn, use their networks to influence and grow the cultural, social and political sectors. Museums are cultural accelerators. They convert the passive experience of change into the capacity to manage change. For example, displaying 300 years of transportation objects from the ox cart to the jet in a few hundred square meters of exhibition space intensifies our awareness of change. Similarly, when visitors to the Canadian Museum for Human Rights learn about six genocides inflicted on people around the world, they are better able to understand the patterns that emerge and spot the danger signs in the society around us. Because artists express change in advance of its full impact on the rest of us, works of art are the ultimate cultural accelerators. Curiously, museums are still seen by many as static places when in fact they are just the opposite. They are one of our society’s main adaptive strategies for managing change. We see this in countries in Africa and Asia that are undergoing massive change and are simultaneously building new museums at an astounding rate. Museums must preserve the past while also helping people adapt to the present and future. In China, as An Laishun writes on page XX, there is an explosion of new museums as that country adapts to some of the most rapid social change in human history. 20 | Cities, Museums & Soft Power – Pre-proof Not For Distribution
Museums provide deep, comparative knowledge. They help people understand how values and ways of living have changed over time, and why. A museum might show the progression of an artist’s style in a retrospective exhibition, reveal how the treatment of immigrants today is different from their treatment 100 years ago or track the technological changes in making music. The more we are able to view themes and events over time and geographically, the more we develop contextual intelligence—a valuable 21st -century skill that includes the ability to understand an environment in flux and act on it. li Contextual intelligence is critical to exercising smart power—being able to judge which tools should be used with which people or institutions to bring about change. Museums empower city dwellers and visitors with contextual intelligence, enabling us to understand the past behavior and values of a society (albeit through the museum’s filter) and consider how to adapt our own behavior. Museums also promote social inclusion: for example, Canada’s Cultural Access Pass that grants new Canadian citizens free entry into museums for one year, or New York City’s new municipal identification card that provides documentation for new immigrants while admitting them into participating museums for free or Brazil’s culture coupons developed to provide the nation’s poor with access to culture, from movies and books to museums. In highly competitive, fast-changing cities, museums have emerged as a vital resource for developing contextual intelligence and cross-cultural skills. All museums have the potential to exercise soft power. But not all museums will choose that role. In Chapter Two we suggest how museums can use their soft power to help meet the rapidly evolving needs of cities.
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i
Joseph S. Nye Jr. “The Information Revolution and Power,” in Soft Power Revisited: A Current History Anthology, (Amazon Digital Editions, 2014) ii ibid. iii Monocle, January 2014 iv British Council, 2013 v ibid., p. 3 vi Michele Acuto, Global Cities, Governance and Diplomacy, the Urban Link (Routledge, 2013) vii Nye, Op. cit. viii Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (The New Press, 2 nd Edition, 2013) ix See Batul Raj’s essay “xx” on page XX x For more on the impact of patronage on museums and culture, see Lord and Lord, Artists, Patrons and the Public: Why Culture Changes (Alta Mira Press, 2010). xi Jeremy Rifkin, The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), p. 17. In the US, Canada, Japan, France, Belgium, Australia, the Czech Republic and New Zealand, the nonprofit sector makes up on average five percent of the GDP, equal to the construction industry and nearly equal to the GDP of banks, insurance companies and financial services. xii Chapter 2 explores the implications of this direction for the soft power of museums in more detail. xiii American Alliance of Museums, Washington, DC., 1992. xiv Pine and Gilmore, The Experience Economy , Harvard Business Review Press; Updated edition, 2011. xv “Rain Room/EXPO 1” at MoMA, New York, 2013. http://randominternational.com/exhibitions/rain-room-expo-1-at-moma/ xvi “Treasures of Tutankhamun,” international touring exhibition, 1972 -1981. Among the most successful museum exhibitions of all time, in terms of revenue and audience numbers. xvii This explosion is brilliantly analyzed b y Guido Guerzoni in Museums on the Map 19952012 (Turin, 2014) xviii C40 cities http://www.c40.org/ xix Citiesofmigration.ca xx Khalid Koser and John Salt, “The Geography of Highly Skilled International Migration,” International Journal of Population Geography , Vol. 3 No. 4, pp. 285-303. xxi Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class Revisited , 2011 (New York: Basic Books), p. 270. xxii Richard Florida and Irene Tinagli, Europe in the Creative Age, Carnegie Mellon Software Industry Center and DEMOS (February 2004) xxiii Guerzoni, 35 xxiv Rifkin, 7 xxv ibid., p. 17 xxvi http://www.museumsassociation.org/museums-change-lives xxvii http://media.unwto.org/press-release/2014-11-06/harnessing-power-one-billion-touristssustainable-future xxviii http://www.unwto.org/tourism&mdgsezine/ xxix Sassen book reference xxx http://radicalantipode.files.wordpress.com/2013/11/book-review_delgado-on-pieterse-andsimone.pdf xxxi “Artisans for Incorporation: An Interview with Saskia Sassen” http://www.citsee.eu/interview/%E2%80%98artisans-incorporation%E2%80%99-interviewsaskia-sassen xxxii Sassen on the transnationalization of labor and the formation of translocal communities. “ The loss of power at the national level produces the possibility for new forms of power and politics at the sub-national level. Further, insofar as the national as container of social process and power is cracked it opens up possibilities for a geography of politics that links subnational spaces across borders”. xxxiii http://www.undp.org/content/dam/undp/library/Poverty%20Reduction/Inclusive%20develop ment/Towards%20Human%20Resilience/Towards_SustainingMDGProgress_Ch4.pdf xxxiv http://prq.sagepub.com/content/66/1/91.short 22 | Cities, Museums & Soft Power – Pre-proof Not For Distribution
xxxv Florida,
p. 55 Challenge Unit (ECU) (2011) Equality in Higher Education: Statistical Report 2011 (London: Equality Challenge Unit). Quoted in What Do You Need to Make It as a Woman in This Industry? Balls!” Work Placements, Gender and the Cultural Industries, Kim Allen in Cultural Work and Higher Education, Edited by Daniel Ashton and Caitriona Noonan, Palgrave Macmillan xxxvii Pew research study http://timenewsfeed.files.wordpress.com/2014/02/383521infographic-battle-of-the-social-sexes.jpg xxxviiihttp://www.unwomen.org/~/media/headquarters/attachments/sections/library/publications/ 2014/wmnmap14_en%20pdf.ashx xxxix ibid. xlfile:///C:/Users/ngaire/Documents/Museums,%20Cities%20and%20Soft%20Power/Research /Sex-and-Power-2013-FINALv2.-pdf.pdf xli “Women in the Temple: Gender and Leadership in Museums,” Marjorie Schwarzer, in Gender, Sexuality and Museums: A Routledge Reader . Routledge xlii Schwarzer, p. 3 xliii “Museums, Women and Empowerment in the MENA Countries,” Carol Malt. Article first published online: 28 Nov 2007. DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-0033.2007.00624.x. xliv Malt ibid xlv http://aam-us.org/about-us/media-room/2014/2014-salary-survey xlvi Sally Armstrong, Ascent of Women (Random House Canada, 2013). xlvii http://monocle.com/film/Edits/museums-as-soft-power/: Simon Anholt, Independent policy advisor http://www.simonanholt.com/ xlviii Mohamed Gamal in his essay in this book details the urban development that is expected in Cairo as a result of building the Grand Egyptian museum. xlix Nye, Op. cit. l Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone, Simon & Shuster, Toronto (2000) li “Contextual intelligence, the ability to understand an evolving environment and capitalize on trends, will become a crucial skill in enabling leaders to convert power resources into successful strategies.“ (Nye, p. 15). xxxvi Equality
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