The Berkshire Museum, a venerable, century-old museum of art and history in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, is making enormous changes to its dowdy displays. Two years of planning, 22 focus groups (uh-oh), and two multimillion-dollar fundraising drives have yielded a “New Vision,” described as a bold, creative approach to save a struggling cultural institution. The Board of Trustees proudly announced
the creation of an exciting new interdisciplinary Museum. . . . Treasured objects from the collection will be integrated with cutting-edge technology, new interpretive techniques, and a fresh perspective that aims to extract contemporary relevance from historical artifacts.
That’s a lot of buzzwords, most of them lamentable. (You can tell a curator has a certain contempt for the “historical artifacts” in her charge when she insists upon extracting “contemporary relevance” from them.) But what those buzzwords—especially the tired and hidebound expression “cutting-edge technology”—mean in practice is clear: screens. The Berkshire, like many other desperate museums, seeks to leap into the digital age by transforming itself into a glowing, interactive, multimedia experience. The people who run museums seem to be convinced that kids, liking video games as they do, will tolerate museums if only they are dressed up like video games. We suspect the whippersnappers know the difference.
To pay for all those screens the museum has handed over some 40 works of art to Sotheby’s to sell at auction. The cache includes two Norman Rockwell paintings—works donated to the Berkshire decades ago by no less than Rockwell himself. The museum hopes that one of the paintings, Shuffleton’s Barbershop, will fetch $20-$30 million. Rockwell’s three sons are suing to stop the sale. If there were a Massachusetts statute against tacky ingratitude they’d have an open-and-shut case.
The locals share the Rockwell brothers’ dismay. But protests, petitions, and canceled memberships have failed to persuade the museum’s poohbahs to relent. In a recent press release, the museum explained that the canvases being put up for sale are “not essential to the Museum’s refreshed mission and do not directly contribute to its new interdisciplinary interpretive plan with its heightened emphasis on science and history.”
Not essential? In The Scrapbook’s view, the Berkshire is trading unique objects for ubiquitous technology. The community is right to be irate as it knows it’s getting a birthright-for-pottage deal, exchanging original works of art for interactive touchscreens.
Screens are banal. You can get them at Best Buy.
The museum’s website has the pleading tone of an organization under siege, but the “Frequently Asked Questions” tab is most revealing. Loyal patrons of the Berkshire are wondering many things, but most tellingly, “What is interdisciplinary interpretation?” The answer, if the FAQs section were being perfectly honest, would be, “A pseudo-intellectual fad of dubious provenance.”