It hardly needs restating that the blockbuster art exhibition--the "Treasures of" and other such shows whose selling point is monetary value or pure exoticism--has over the last twenty years transformed virtually every aspect of the museum world. They have attracted visitors to museums in numbers unimaginable even a decade ago. In the process they have filled the coffers of both the institution and the host city with much needed cash in the form of gate receipts, bookstore and restaurant sales at the museums themselves, and for the cities, everything from hotel rooms to sales taxes. After the Renoir retrospective concluded in Boston a few years ago, the city fathers reported that it had earned approximately $20 million for the city. It is fair to say, in other words, that no major museum and no city can now afford to be without at least one blockbuster on its exhibition calendar each year. If it didn't exist today, then someone would have to invent it.
But like all addictions, the art world's craving for the blockbuster exhibition has not come, as it were, free of charge. At its best it is a kind of Faustian bargain for the museums, in which their tinkling cash registers and glowing bottom lines are arrived at in exchange for attracting to the museum large numbers of people who may have no serious interest in art except to the extent that it can be regarded as a form of entertainment, something no more demanding than television, even if it doesn't resemble it in every respect. The museums have on many occasions been all too willing to give the public what it wants, never mind that it risks cheapening and debasing not only the art on view but the very purpose of a museum.
Another price that has been exacted for the blockbuster exhibition--and one only lately realized--is what one might call the "revolving door" or "dark house" syndrome. That is to say, members of the public troop through the exhibition and, once at its end, march right out of the museum (via the strategically placed sales desk, of course), never bothering to look at anything in the museum's permanent collection. Between the blockbusters, they never go near the place, conceiving of it as a theater, dark and empty when there is not a big show "playing." Once again the permanent collection, which is usually of superb quality itself, is ignored, even when parts of it have been included in one of the institution's own blockbusters. (Last winter, you could hardly get into the Metropolitan Museum's Renaissance Painting in Siena exhibition, which included many Sassettas and Giovanni di Paolos the museum itself owns. Since the show closed, the Renaissance galleries in which those paintings are regularly displayed have been as deserted as they always are.)
These two consequences of the era of high-profile, high-rolling art exhibitions are by now well known. The museums themselves have been talking about them recently, and have even taken steps--in some cases some fairly disquieting steps--to alleviate them.
The Hinterlands
One consequence that is not so well known is what it has done to the museums, some small and others not so small, in the hinterlands. New York, Washington, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Dallas are common enough venues for these exhibitions, but they hardly seem to travel anywhere else. In the meantime there are all the rest of the museums in the country, most of which cannot afford to organize their own blockbusters and have, in
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