‘Globalisation’, according to the journalist Thomas Friedman ‘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.’ As museums attempt to understand their changing roles at the beginning of the 21st century, they inevitably come up against the politically-charged debate on globalisation.
While some people praise the liberating effects of free trade and greater global communication, claiming that marginalised peoples are empowered as a result, others fear this will bring standardisation and forced assimilation into a Western-dominated world. When people focus on the economic, political, cultural or ecological consequences of globalisation, they see either disaster or potential, neo-colonialism or free trade, empowerment or despair.
Museums have benefited from aspects of the global market in recent years. Free trade, the internet and cheaper international travel have combined to help museums achieve recognition as places of communication between cultures. But at the same time market deregulation and free-trade principles are fostering an environment in which economically strong countries and corporations dominate local, national, and international business. Globalisation for many people means ‘Americanisation’.
But whether commentators are pro- or anti-globalisation, they tend to agree that culture always oscillates between the particular and the universal, between tradition and renewal. Cultural artifacts are hybrid in nature, and cultural diffusion is as old as mankind. But critics differ on how to judge this hybridity in today’s fast world: globalisation in the 21st century has radically accelerated the scope, speed, and depth of cultural distribution. While some assume that this will turn a few into producers and the many into consumers, others embrace cross-cultural exchange as the breeding ground of new cultures.
What role will museums play in this process? Can museums sustain a model that is different to the corporate model, which is largely based on profits and market penetration?
A GLOBAL AUDIENCE?
Transnational corporations like Microsoft, Nike or McDonald have come to symbolize the new world powers. But their expanding production and distribution networks hardly find an equivalent in the museum world. The Metropolitan Museum does not outsource services to cheaper work forces in the Third World; the Tate has not opened a chain of ‘Tate’ museums across Europe; and few, if any museums move out of their urban centres to avoid high rent and maintenance costs. If we are to except the internet, museums remain locally bound entities.
Only the Guggenheim has attempted to establish itself as a worldwide operating museum chain, opening up venues for its collection across and outside the United States. But after its recent closures in Las Vegas and partially, New York, many saw the ‘McGuggenheim’ ambition as a misunderstood adaptation of the corporate dot.com model of global expansion. As New York Times art critic Michael Kimmelman said: ‘Bigger is not better; better is better.’
But migration and tourism – both effects of globalisation – are changing the framework in which museums operate. We might stick to the same building, but our visitors no longer from familiar places alone.
In a gradual reorientation, 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, in the words of Stephen E Weil, museums should change ‘from being about something to being for somebody’.
But who is that ‘somebody’? 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 wider national and international audiences — the global focus.
Tourism has become the world’s largest growth industry according to the World Tourism Organization (WTO). In 2002 the number of international tourists exceeded the 700-million mark for the first time – despite a worldwide economic crisis. In Slovenia, for example, domestic and foreign tourists, nearly 2.2 million, surpassed the number of its inhabitants of 1,9 million last year. So Slovenian museums (as museums worldwide) need to find ways to be increasingly understandable to visitors from very different backgrounds.
Migration has changed the ways museums operate as well. According to the 2002 International Migration Report by the United Nations, ‘most of the world’s migrants live in Europe (56 million), Asia (50 million), and Northern America (41 million).’ Urban centres have become transnational areas that are defined by the rich, ever changing mix of permanent and temporary residents with widely diverse cultural and ethnic backgrounds. Globalisation is happening in our own neighborhoods.
BEST PRACTICES FROM AROUND THE WORLD
It isn’t just visitors who are thinking globally – museum professionals are too.
Decreasing costs for communication and travel facilitate exchanges between museum professionals. Membership in the International Council of Museums (ICOM) has increased over 50 per cent in the past eight years to more than 17,000 members in 142 countries.
Cultural tourism is greatly on the increase. The amount of museums and heritage sites has exploded worldwide after 1945. But the sustainability of many of these young institutions and increasing public expectations challenge museum professionals everywhere to come up with new ideas – or, time-saving, to copy them from already successful models.
The transformation from collection-based to audience-driven museums has become an economic necessity. Access to information from all corners of the world has become part of our profession. As our frames of reference continue to expand, international standards – for example, guidelines concerning Nazi loot – are becoming widely accepted around the world. For many Western museums, this raises the extremely difficult question of ownership.
In December 2002, initiated by the British Museum, 18 of the world’s leading collecting institutions signed a declaration identifying themselves as ‘universal museums…[that] serve not just the citizens of one nation but the people of every nation’. They also boldly stated that they would not return artefacts seized during colonial rule or during similar earlier periods of history.
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 objects to countries that claim original ownership.
The 18 museums may indeed have a legal argument to make about their right to hold and display artefacts 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 objects that reflect their cultural heritage.
THE WEB AS A GLOBAL MEDIUM
An increasing number of our global visitors, however, today do not arrive on our doorstep, but access collections through museum websites. The digital transformation of museums is challenging traditional ideas about what museums are about. Museums no longer are local physical buildings, but global virtual spaces. All over the world, digitization projects are turning hidden collections into visible global assets.
Of course, in this context ‘global’ really means the First World: 72 per cent of Internet users live in high-income countries, which are home to 14 percent of the world’s population. When museums think about globalisation, 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. Integration and fragmentation are the two sides of the globalisation coin.
THE MARKET OF EXPERIENCES
Within a global economy that thrives on mass production and consumerism, museums worldwide have proven to be remarkably resistant towards a standardisation of products and brands. The core asset for museums remains the original artieact that cannot be mass-produced. Museums do not offer commercial merchandise, but cultural experiences.
It is on this market of experiences that the global market challenges museums. Many businesses today sell their products through offering ‘experiences’ and have been very successful to brand their products, partially using museum display techniques and ideas in their overall strategies. But the corporate world is more advanced than museums in communicating their product across lines of ethnicity, language, nationality, gender or religion.
A more inclusive mission, diversification of staff, board and membership, and a broader accessibility of artefacts through multi-layered exhibitions will determine both the ethical signature and economic endurance of museums in a global world. Enhanced marketing strategies and diverse audience development not only are necessary, but welcome responses as they stimulate museums to reconsider their relation with their changing audience.
As globalisation takes us perhaps inevitably toward a standardized consumer culture, museums face some challenging questions. Just as museums have contributed to establish biodiversity policies that help to sustain the natural ecosystem, can they – or should they – also strive to safeguard the ‘cultural ecosystem’? How can museums preserve cultural heritage when culturally specific traditions merge with the mainstream – or simply disappear?
The fear of global cultural monopolies have led the French government to introduce the “cultural exception” concept during the GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) negotiations, claiming the right to support its cultural specificity through government subsidies or other protection mechanisms. The ‘essential duality’ of cultural products as both commercial merchandise and cultural goods that express human diversity has been reinforced in consecutive agreements by the World Trade Organisation (WTO). But is protection the right or only answer?
Undoubtedly, museums will need to reflect the global scale of their topics and the provenance of their collections more fully. Permanent exhibitions at natural history museums already are informed by such global perspectives, no matter how local their focus. Many ethnological museums strive for open discussions with indigenous communities about ownership of objects or display techniques – to the benefit of the community and the museum. ‘Ownership’ will become a major issue for all museums due to the increase in international travel and the accessibility of vast new amounts of historical records and related data.
Museums have to compete in our economy of experiences without loosing their distinctiveness and, especially, credibility. But they have more to gain than to lose by thinking more broadly and reaching out to an increasingly diverse, transnational and virtual audience. With decreasing public funds, they have no chance but to embrace the global market and to both learn and distance themselves from corporate business models.
BIBILIOGRAPHICAL REFERENCE ARTICLE
Klaus Mueller: World Service. In: Museumsjournal, Jan. 2004. Vol. 104, No. 1, British Museum Association