Don't be intimidated by museums. They belong to everyone

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/may/31/museums-not-white-spaces-belong-everyone

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Exasperation levels are high. There have been worse times to be black in the United States, but living memory doesn’t avail us of many. For those of us with a certain racial profile (I happen to have it), unpremeditated movement through public space seems an endangered species of endeavor. This backslide is real. It’s felt as acute, like a new stage in a sustained battering. And it’s vexing almost beyond words.

For those who inhabit our condition, strolling confidently into imposing architectures filled with works of accomplished art may appear to entail a particular risk. Because yes: judged by the makeup of their collections, staffs, supporters and by some of their methodologies, many art museums are the predominantly “white spaces” that critics have long said they are.

But museums are typically sited in the public realm, in the commons – a place of encounters and collisions wherein diverse peoples become a public. Judged by their use, museums can only be as white as visitors allow them to be. And they’ll remain white, in this political sense, only for as long as people of color regard them as discontinuous with the sort of spaces we would never dream of avoiding, such as public schools or the cinema.

People’s feelings of unwelcomeness must be honored absolutely. But it is unwise to essentialize museums – to presume to know in advance which ones corroborate those feelings and which do not. Activist lobbying against prohibitive entrance fees or for more inclusive displays are both more practicable and more likely to change the social complexion of museums than simply capitulating to the idea of these institutions’ “whiteness” or to soft science about the “threshold fear” that effectively bars nonwhite visitors.

“Threshold fear” revives the historical perception that art is the exclusive property, right and concern of the affluent upper classes and the upwardly mobile. It reinforces that invisible but quite effective wall separating inhabitants of the commons from the most privileged artifacts of the historical process in which we together participate, albeit in uneven ways. “Threshold fear” throws up images that are hugely disempowering: it stops the striding citizen in her tracks, abstracts from her the curiosity that brought her to the threshold in question, reduces her to a category, denies her imminent claim on the space of the museum, impedes her assumption of a place in the narratives it offers up and severely constrains her relationship to art.

It’s good journalistic theater, the image of an earnest minority frozen on the street side of a museum’s front doors. But it’s cruel science. It’s the art beyond those doors that matters most, and anything that distorts an individual’s primary contact with art ought fiercely to be resisted.

The way to erase erasure is by active presence, by acting on one’s interest by seizing a place and, when necessary, making oneself felt. “Threshold fear” takes presence and arrests it at the point where it can effect the least change.

It will be necessary to challenge notions like “threshold fear” for as long as art museums continue to concentrate culture in ways that are more intellectually and emotionally stimulating – more personally available for different kinds of people to experience, one encounter at a time, in a kind of private intensity, repeatedly if they wish – than any other place in the commons.

Difference, exclusion and their politics are complicated affairs, and important art occasionally offers unique resources for thinking deeply about them. It has often been the case that art offers the richest insights into what moments of emergency – like ours now – actually do to the subjects of a culture.

Contemporary democratic societies are hard to represent. At their best, museums of art make this difficulty plainly legible in the fragmentary character of their representations. The contradictions that animate society and culture operate at every level. The best art makes these contradictions available to vision and feeling, and thereby to thought. Our most compassionate museums neither mask this quality nor spell it out to the letter. They provide the conditions needed to take a work’s evocations on board, at which point one’s own experience and observation take over. But in order to make good on this potential, they will need our trust, and our presence.

It’s too early in the fight for inclusion to give up on the museum. By reflecting in public on society and culture – what they are and how they’re changing – we will bring our understanding of them to a point of complexity adequate to our desires and our moment, to our troubles and our best wishes for one another.