Museum & Gallery Studies

A Conversation with Gary Tinterow. In the years since I was an intern here at the MFAH [The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston] in 1975 and 1976 the museum world has changed tremendously. There's been a seismic shift in the way museums see themselves and the way they serve communities. When I was a young man museums were places for specialists, they were run by specialists, and they were conceived for specialists - kind of like a research library.

That's what museum used to be - no longer - now they're community centers, now they attract, and rightly so, the most diverse audience that they can. And they see themselves as places of self-discovery where anyone can walk off the street, without any previous knowledge or training, come in and see what other human beings before them have made and learn from these objects, and as I like to think discover themselves. I think of works of art as mirrors, in which you look at this object and you see aspects of your own interests, personality, upbringing, culture, beliefs, values, reflected back at you. Sometimes all these things are challenged by the object, that's there in front of you. But I see that as a mirroring imitative experience; sometimes it's traction, sometimes it's repulsion, but it's always (when it's working) an engagement between a viewer, a visitor, and a work of art, an installation, an environment, and when you multiply those works of art and those visitors you get a community. And that's what museums have become: community centers, not for basketball or sports teams, but for intellectual growth, for spiritual sustainment, for a place to ponder the big existential philosophical questions (who are we? where do we come from? Where are we going? Why are we here?).

This museum has all the ingredients for anyone to come in and discover themselves and to actually answer those questions.

Video source: The Museum of Fine Arts, Huston. (2012, August 31). The role of museums today [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cjx1F-N3YbQ