“If globalization means that the world is a seamless unity in which everyone equally participates in the economy, obviously globalization has not taken place.”—Masao Miyoshi in The Cultures of Globalization (1998)
“Globalization” is a single word with a hundred different meanings. Journalist Thomas Friedman, author of The Lexus and the Olive Tree, believes that “globalization has replaced the Cold War as the defining international system.” He sees a dramatically changing world, driven by a borderless free-market capitalism and new communication technologies. As described by Friedman, “globalization is the inexorable integration of markets, nation-states and technologies to a degree never witnessed before—in a way that is enabling individuals, corporations and nation-states to reach around the world farther, faster, deeper and cheaper than ever before.”
But while some praise the liberating effects of free trade and greater global communication, claiming that marginalized groups are empowered as a result, others fear standardization and forced assimilation into a Western-dominated world. Globalization is, ironically, a polarizing term. Whether people focus on the economic, political, cultural, or ecological consequences of globalization, they see either disaster or potential, neo-colonialism or free trade, empowerment or despair.
Even if we use Friedman’s working hypothesis as a point of departure and agree that globalization is a move from isolated countries to an increasingly interdependent world, we still face some difficult questions. What role will culture play in this new globalization movement? And of more immediate concern to us, what role will museums play?
MUSEUMS IN THE GLOBAL MOVEMENT
In recent years, free trade, the Web, and cheaper international travel have combined to help museums achieve recognition as places of exchange and communication between cultures. New communication technologies and the removal of trade tariffs have made for the easier exchange of cultural goods and services, and cultural products have become more accessible to greater numbers of people. But at the same time it has been widely noted that market deregulation and free-trade principles are fostering an environment in which economically strong countries and transnational corporations dominate local, national, and international business. The result, some critics contend, is a fundamental and growing inequality of cultural production and distribution. The danger is that dialogue between world cultures could begin to sound more like a monologue.
According to Facts and Figures 2000, a study published by UNESCO, since the 1980s, annual trade in cultural goods has exploded from $95 billion to $388 billion. Most of that trade takes place among a small group of countries: United States, Japan, Germany, Britain, and China, which together export 53 percent and import 57 percent of all cultural goods worldwide. In the United States, cultural products—such as films, music, television programs, books, magazines, computer software—constitute the largest share of U.S. exports, surpassing all other industries.
Though some cultural critics insist that cross-cultural trade inspires artistic diversity, others argue that the worldwide dominance of an American mass culture marginalizes indigenous cultural production and distribution. In this debate, the U.S. film industry often is described as a cultural monopoly. For example, despite the large number of films produced by India and Egypt, two countries with robust national film industries, 85 percent of the films screened around the world are made in Hollywood.
Western-dominated homogenization, the often feared McWorld, is a serious concern to some developing countries that lack the economic means to produce and disseminate their own cultural products. Will their cultural heritage be consumed by an imported Western model? Globalization in the 21st century has accelerated the scope, speed, and depth of cultural diffusion. Some believe that a sharp, permanent division will form between a very few producers and the very many consumers, while others insist on the value of an international cross-cultural exchange. Culture in its broadest definition belongs not to one nation but to the world, as evidenced by the global outrage whenever cultural heritage is threatened with destruction.
Into this debate, prepared for it or not, step the world’s museums. Can our institutions develop a different model for operating within a globalized society than the corporate model, which is largely based on profits and market penetration? Can museums, relying on their core principles of education, communication, preservation, the free exchange of art, artifacts, and ideas, along with the current focus on building and sustaining community, offer a new vision of globalization?
THE TRANSNATIONAL AUDIENCE
In a gradual and complex reorientation of their raison d’être, which has taken place over the past three decades, many museums today emphasize serving the public rather than augmenting their collections as their foremost responsibility. Children’s, neighborhood, and community-based museums were the first to adopt the view that, as Stephen E. Weil writes in the summer 1999 issue of Daedalus, museums should change “from being about something to being for somebody.”
But if museums are now “for somebody,” what does that mean? Who is the modern museum audience? As museums strive to determine their civic role and build partnerships with their constituents—often a “local” focus—they also are challenged to communicate with and serve national and international audiences—the “global” focus.
With 689 million international tourists in 2001, tourism has become the world’s largest growth industry, generating $476 billion in 2000, according to the World Tourism Organization (WTO). Although tourism declined sharply after Sept. 11, 2001, and is only slowly recovering in the midst of a worldwide economic crisis, its potential for future growth seems to be undisputed. Since the 1990s, heritage travel has been one of tourism’s fastest growing sectors. According to the WTO, in 2002 the number of international tourists exceeded the 700-million mark for the first time. And according to a 2001 survey conducted by the Travel Industry Association, U.S. travelers listed visiting museums or historic sites as number three among their reasons for travel.
Cultural enrichment has become an incentive of mass tourism. As a consequence, the number of museums and heritage sites is rising worldwide, as is the percentage of the regional and foreign visitors they attract. Migration and tourism have changed the way museums operate. Outside the United States and the British Commonwealth, many museums use English as the lingua franca to accommodate foreign visitors. Large museums, such as the van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, offer audio guides in as many as seven languages, and museums worldwide understand that they must meet tourist demands regarding communication and content accessibility or risk losing a growing share of their audience.
According to the 2002 International Migration Report issued in October by the United Nations, “most of the world’s migrants live in Europe (56 million), Asia (50 million), and Northern America (41 million). . . . In the 10 years from 1990 to 2000, the number of migrants in the more developed regions increased by 23 million persons, or 28 percent.” Urban centers—such as New York, Los Angeles, Miami, London, Paris, and Amsterdam—have become transnational areas that are no longer defined solely by their nations, but by the rich, ever changing mix of permanent and temporary residents with widely diverse cultural and ethnic backgrounds. Globalization, it seems, is happening right in our own neighborhoods.
Iowa’s Des Moines Art Center, for example, is one of many “locally oriented” institutions creating exhibitions and programs that celebrate the diversity of world cultures. Says Director and CEO Susan Lubowsky Talbott: “As our local population becomes more globally diverse, we must respond to stay viable. . . . When we bring international artists to this community, we try and partner them with responsive community partners, from schools to human service agencies.”
Interaction with diverse constituencies, both transnational and local, is challenging museums to develop new communication skills. How will museums develop successful marketing tools to attract visitors with varying interests and cultural backgrounds? How will exhibitions relate to and integrate different minority cultures? As Harold Skramstad, president emeritus of the Henry Ford Museum & Greenfield Village, points out, “Museums will be extremely important organizations in defining the specialness of a place, the ‘there’ of a specific locale.” However, a locale’s “there” might have not one but several interpretations, changing significantly from one audience to another. The Washington, D.C., of the First Ladies, for example, may appear to be an entirely different city to the rapidly growing population of recent immigrants from Pakistan who are settling in the metropolitan region.
Which somebody should a museum be for?
INTERNATIONAL INFLUENCES ON MUSEUM PROFESSIONALS AND MUSEUM PRACTICES
It isn’t just visitors who are thinking globally; museum professionals are, too. No longer do their models come solely from around the corner. Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao and the Tate Modern in London are providing city councils around the world with ideas about how to revive depressed industrial areas of their core cities, and international tourism plays a major role in this scenario. The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s narrative approach to its exhibit content, pioneered a decade ago, is now used by similar institutions worldwide. National museums everywhere are inspired by their counterparts in Australia and New Zealand, whose exhibitions transcend the traditional boundaries of history, art, and science.
Decreasing costs for communication and travel also are making exchanges between museum professionals easier. Membership in the Paris-based International Council of Museums (ICOM) has increased over 50 percent in the past eight years to more than 15,000 members in 149 countries. Although that increase largely comes from European members who number nearly 12,000, ICOM has significant representation in North America, Asia, Latin America, and Africa, and boasts 111 national committees.
As international museum consultant Elaine Heumann Gurian says, “Everyone visits everywhere. Everyone goes to conferences everywhere. Everyone reads each other. Everyone now communicates on the Internet, reads each other’s Web pages, and interacts via list-serves.”
Networking across institutional and national borders, made easier by the Web, has become matter of fact. Many international professional associations have been founded in recent years, including the Instituto Latinoamericano de Museos (ILAM) in 1997 and the International Council of African Museums (AFRICON) in 1999. Moderated mailing lists have created new communication channels and information forums for museum professionals around the world. And our knowledge of international museums has improved. Museum portals—such as the British 24-hourmuseum (www.24hourmuseum.org.uk); the Australian Museums and Galleries Online (AMOL); the Canadian Heritage Information Network (CHIN); and the French JOCONDE Museum Collection Database—provide access to thousands of museums and their collections with a few simple clicks.
Today, information and ideas flow easily from museum to museum across international borders. Says Gurian: “Most places I work with [in other countries] are less timid than the majority of American museums. Having read our material, they believe it and have put it into practice in ways that we are still cautious about.”
As our frames of reference continue to expand, international standards—for example, codes of ethics and guidelines concerning the handling of unlawfully appropriated objects from the Nazi era, as articulated by AAM and ICOM—are becoming more widely accepted around the world. As standards of practices in such fields as collecting, accessibility, conservation, and education become more widespread, they may lead to better museum practices generally, including ethical practices in collecting. For many Western museums, this raises the extremely difficult question of ownership.
UNIVERSAL MUSEUMS, UNIVERSAL CONTROVERSIES
Increasingly, museums are being asked to operate in an international context and to help the public understand the complexities of an interconnected world. The notion of a global culture is not a new one. As long ago as 1827, for example, German writer Johann Wolfgang Goethe wrote, “National literature is now rather a meaningless term; the epoch of world literature is at hand, and everyone must strive to hasten its approach.” Is it the same for “world collections”?
Born from the cabinets of curiosity of the 17th and 18th centuries, museums always have collected—with and without permission of the owners—spectacular and exotic objects and specimens from all over the world. One of the most popular museums of the 17th century was Athanasius Kircher’s Museum of the World, which opened in Rome in 1651. Kircher’s global vision was reflected in the objects he collected for his “theatre of nature and art,” including sculptures from Japan and Egypt, Native American clothing, Chinese maps, artworks from Sierra Leone, and (as his 1678 museum catalogue details) a mermaid’s tail and the bones of a giant.
While collecting has become more scientifically rigorous over the centuries, the problem of original and rightful ownership of artifacts has come under greater public scrutiny. Call it the “Parthenon Dilemma,” in reference to the long running dispute between England and Greece over the legal and moral right to the so-called “Elgin Marbles,” removed from Turkish-occupied Greece by Lord Elgin in 1811 and displayed in the British Museum in London.
In December 2002, 18 of the world’s leading collecting institutions—including the Rijksmuseum, the Hermitage, the Louvre, the Berlin State Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art and nine other U.S. museums—signed a declaration identifying themselves as “universal museums” and stating that the “universal admiration for ancient civilisations would not be so deeply established today were it not for the influence exercised by the artifacts of these cultures, widely available to an international public in major museums.” These institutions also stated that they would not return artifacts seized during colonial rule or during similar earlier periods of history.
Initiated by the British Museum, the declaration also affects other institutions with objects of disputed ownership, such as the Pergamon Altar at the Pergamon Museum in Berlin (claimed by Turkey); the Benin Bronzes at the Royal Academy of Arts in London (claimed by Nigeria); and Egyptian sculptures in the Louvre. The list is long.
While the 18 museums acknowledge and support the recent international conventions against the illegal acquisition of cultural artifacts, they argue that “the objects and monumental works that were installed decades and even centuries ago in museums throughout Europe and America were acquired under conditions that are not comparable with current ones. . . . We should acknowledge that museums serve not just the citizens of one nation but the people of every nation.”
The result, not surprisingly, was a storm of protest. Critics claimed the museums were using the notion of the global museum to support an argument against repatriating certain selected objects to countries that claim original ownership.
Maurice Davies, deputy director of Britain’s Museums Association, described the statement as “a George Bush approach to international relations,” reported The Art Newspaper in its February issue. “It is a very crude statement that doesn’t give credit to the subtlety of thought that many museums give this issue.” Professor Andreas Eshete of Ethiopia, chair of the Association for the Return of Ethiopia’s Magdala Treasures, called it “no more than Eurocentric special pleading” and noted pointedly that “few of Ethiopia’s 60 or so million inhabitants can visit the great museums of Europe or the U.S. to inspect their heritage.” In the United States, Tom Cremers, Web-site moderator for the Museum Security Network’s listserve, was quoted by The Art Newspaper as calling the statement “outright cultural colonialism.” The International Council of Museums (ICOM) and Museums Australia were among the groups publicly critical of the statement, the latter advocating for the return of aboriginal bones, hair, and other human remains in the collections of European natural history museums.
The 18 museums may indeed have a legal argument to make about their right to hold and display artifacts acquired in previous centuries under very different laws and standards. But they still will have to negotiate with ethnic groups and nation-states asserting their right to art and objects that reflect their cultural heritage. As a general principle, AAM’s Code of Ethics for Museums states that “competing claims of ownership that may be asserted in connection with objects in [a museum’s] custody should be handled openly, seriously, responsively and with respect for the dignity of all parties involved.” And this complex legal and ethical issue will not disappear. In fact, with the increase in international travel and the accessibility of vast new amounts of historical records and related data, it shows every sign of becoming more public and more pressing.
THE WEB AS A GLOBAL MEDIUM
One solution might be the Web. New technologies facilitate the transmission of culture, transcending barriers of geography, ethnicity, and, potentially, social status and income. The Web has created a borderless society. As David Weinberger writes in Small Pieces Loosely Joined: A Unified Theory of the Web, the Web is a “place that has no soil, no boundaries, no near, no far.”
In recent years, 1.5 billion Web sites, including millions of individual sites, have been established. Never before have such large numbers of people become producers of cultural content, seeking only the respect of their peers as their main reward. In a way, the Web has become a wildly disorganized museum of humanity, with its search machines serving as rather sloppy curators.
No other medium has made information about museums and their collections more accessible than the Web, whose potential to build new cultural environments through sophisticated exhibitions and educational offerings is just starting to develop. All over the world, digitization projects are turning hidden collections into visible global assets. Of course, in this context “global” means the First World: 72 percent of Internet users live in high-income countries, which are home to 14 percent of the world’s population, according to Deepening Democracy in a Fragmented World, a 2002 report from the United Nations Development Program (UNDP).
In theory, the Web is a democratic medium, where all institutions have equal opportunity and a global audience has access to many museums. In practice, however, as explained in Status of Technology and Digitization in the Nation’s Museums and Libraries, a 2002 report from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, larger museums have a greater presence on the Web than do midsize or small museums. The reasons are obvious: larger museums have more funds and Web expertise than do smaller museums. As a result, the Web doesn’t just facilitate access to cultural institutions, it also contributes to the growing impact of larger, firmly established museums. In fact, some museums, such as the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Tate, have more virtual than real visitors.
In addition, though the images of millions of artifacts have been digitized, there is evidence that they do not reach the audiences that museums envisioned, even in the Western world. Eurobarometer: Public Opinion in the European Union, an October 2000 report issued by the European Commission, found that only 18 percent of users with Internet access visited a museum Web site. In the United States, UCLA’s 2001 report, Surveying the Digital Future, states that only 2 percent of Web users go online to access such cultural activities as downloading music, and only 3.8 percent use the Web to search for entertainment.
For developing countries especially, the potential benefits of the Web remain just that—potential. While in theory one can access the Internet from anywhere in the world, in reality an estimated two-thirds of the world’s population does not even own a telephone. According to Deepening Democracy, 854 million adults in the world are illiterate; about two-thirds of them women. Although the adult literacy rate has increased from an estimated 47 percent in 1970 to 73 percent in 1999, poverty, gender inequality, disability, and illiteracy remain the most visible barriers to cultural participation of developing countries. And the digital divide only deepens this disparity.
When museums think about globalization, it might be wise to keep things in perspective. Although the global economy affects all countries, not all of them profit from it. Nearly 3 billion people live on less than $2 a day. In 2002, the richest 1 percent had total income equal to the poorest 57 percent. Cheaper travel, communication, and cultural goods largely nurture the developed world and a transnational urban elite. The term “global village”—coined in the 1960s by Canadian communications theorist Marshall McLuhan to describe T.V.’s homogenizing effect around the world—has become a misnomer. While globalization fosters greater connections and interdependence among the nations of the world, it also contributes to the divisions between poor and rich, educated and illiterate. Integration and fragmentation are the two sides of the globalization coin.
VISIONS OF LARGER RESPONSIBILITIES
As globalization takes us perhaps inevitably toward a standardized consumer culture, museums face some challenging questions. Can they make a meaningful contribution to the preservation of cultural diversity? Can they effectively document the isolation of marginalized groups, the disappearance of culturally specific traditions, or the alienation felt by immigrant residents? Just as museums have established biodiversity policies that help to sustain the natural ecosystem, can they—or should they—also strive to safeguard the “cultural ecosystem”?
In an increasingly interconnected world, museums have an opportunity, perhaps even a responsibility, to become more aware of the global scale of their topics and the global provenance of their collections. Models already exist, and they can be found in the museum field itself. Natural history museums already have gone through much of this process. Specimens acquired from expeditions to every continent turned natural history museums into unique repositories of world heritage. Today many of their exhibitions reflect a global perspective, no matter how local their focus. In addition, many ethnological museums today strive for more open communication with their constituencies. And though discussions with indigenous communities about ownership of objects or display techniques have often been accompanied by conflict, they often have led to a fuller awareness of the artifacts’ provenance and cultural significance—to the benefit of the community and the museum.
Despite the challenges of taking a more global perspective in their overall operations, museums have much more to gain than to lose by thinking more broadly and reaching out to an increasingly diverse, transnational audience. With their collections as their core, and with their missions of civic responsibility and building community, museums, more than any other institution, have the potential to create real and lasting understanding between cultures. Museums at their best have the special ability to make us feel—wherever we come from—culturally “at home.”
SOURCES
PUBLICATIONS
Castells, Manuel. The Internet Galaxy. Reflections on the Internet, Business, and Society. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.
Cowen, Tyler. Creative Destruction: How Globalization Is Changing the World’s Cultures. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002.
Friedman, Thomas L. The Lexus and the Olive Tree. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux and Anchor Books, 2000.
Hamelink, Cees. J. The Ethics of Cyberspace. London: Sage Publications, 2000.
Jameson, Frederic, and Masao Miyoshi, ed. The Cultures of Globalization. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1998.
Lo Sardo, Eugenio. Athanasius Kircher, Il Museo del Mondo. Rome: Edizioni De Luca, 2001.
Legrain, Philippe. Open World: The Truth about Globalisation. London: Abacus, 2002.
Müller, Klaus. “Museums and Virtuality,” Curator 45, no. 1, 2002, pp. 21-35.
Skramstad, Harold. “An Agenda for American Museums in the Twenty-First Century.” In America’s Museums, a special issue of Daedalus (American Academy of Arts and Sciences), Summer 1999, vol. 128.
Weil, Stephen E. “From Being about Something to Being for Somebody: The Ongoing Transformation of the American Museum.” In America’s Museums, a special issue of Daedalus (American Academy of Arts and Sciences), Summer 1999, vol. 128.
Weinberger, David. Small Pieces Loosely Joined: A Unified Theory of the Web. Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus Books, 2002.
REFERENCES
AAM Diversity Coalition
Center for Arts and Culture. Access and the Cultural Infrastructure. Issue paper by Allison Brugg Bawden, November 2002
European Commission. Eurobarometer: Public Opinion in the European Union. Report Number 53
European Community’s resolution on cultural heritage and globalization
Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS). Status of Technology and Digitization in the Nation’s Museums and Libraries, 2002
International Council of Museums (ICOM) Activity Report, 1998-2001
The Power of Cultural Tourism. Keynote presentation by Gail Dexter Lord at the Wisconsin Heritage Tourism Conference. Sept. 17, 1999, Lac du Flambeau, Wis.
UCLA Center for Communications Policy Internet Report 2001. Surveying the Digital Future, Year Two
UNDP Human Development Reports, including Deepening Democracy in a Fragmented World, 2002
United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). Culture, Trade and Globalisation: Questions and Answers
UNESCO Institute for Statistics. Facts and Figures 2000
UNESCO Institute for Statistics. Literacy report
United Nations Population Division, Department of Economic and Social Affairs. 2002 International Migration Report, Oct. 28, 2002
U.S. Department of Commerce. A Nation Online: How Americans Are Expanding Their Use of the Internet
THANKS
The author expresses his sincere thanks to Elaine Heumann Gurian, Barry Munitz, and Paula Hutton McKinley.
BIBILIOGRAPHICAL REFERENCE ARTICLE
Klaus Mueller: The Culture Of Globalization: Can museums offer a new version of globalized society? In: Museum News, May/June 2003. Vol. 82, No. 3, American Association of Museums.
The article has been reprinted at GLOBAL DEGREE, A Study of Globalization, Vol 1, No. 2. Global Degree is an e-journal studying the impact of globalization and the relationship between business, geography, demography and global economics.