The Great Museum Debate

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The Great Museum Debate
Often in my frustrated moments—more and more frequent as the years pass—I tend to refer to France by my pet name for it: “Talk-a-lot.” I know of no other nation whose citizens can spend so much time, energy and often anger debating how many angels on the head of a pin. Hardly a day goes by without a choice of vehement late night talk and debate shows on radio and television dissecting for hours not only major political and social issues but also the most trivial concerns. As in the United States, with Presidential elections on the horizon (just three months away in France) the pace and frequency has increased enormously. But the  elections often seem almost secondary compared to the hot issue currently being discussed constantly in every possible French media forum. That is whether the nation’s prestigious Louvre museum was right or wrong when it decided recently to help set up a branch museum possibly to bear the Louvre’s name in the United Arab Emirate of Abu Dhabi. That possibility has sparked a petition signed by more than 4000 French and international art-world officials and experts provocatively titled “Museums aren’t for sale!” The Louvre is French, after all. It is a proud symbol of France’s great cultural heritage. Why, these high-level critics are complaining, should its treasures be shipped abroad where ordinary French citizens will have little chance to see them and possibly may lose them forever?  And why should the prestigious title of ”The Louvre” be cheapened by allowing it to adorn a less glorious outpost installation thousands of miles away? What’s worse, say the critics, is that the Louvre seems to be doing this essentially because it will be raking in from Abu Dhabi some 700 million Euros in return for the art objects and exhibition expertise it is providing and, in particular, for the use of its good name. Since international museum exchanges and loans are a traditionally common practice, why all the fuss? Well, say the petitioners, inter-museum exchanges of art works should be for cultural or scientific enrichment. Private industry can help a bit with costs but an essentially government institution’s art treasures, like those of the Louvre, shouldn’t be peddled about on long-term loan or, worse, actually sold, simply to collect money. Once you start doing that, say the Abu Dhabi project’s detractors, where will it all end? Their stark worst case answer to that question is a future where mostly state-run French museums wind up as virtually empty shells, their most important art works travelling around the world for financial gain. At the moment, Abu Dhabi is envisaging not only a French-sponsored museum but three others as well, all four to be placed together as a cultural complex on a man-made island just opposite Abu Dhabi city, the emirate’s capital. The four museums have been designed by renowned architects from around the world. One is Japanese, one French, one an Anglo-Iraqi and the fourth, an American, Frank Gehry, whose museum will be sponsored by the Guggenheim foundation and become its biggest such effort in the world.  The museum quartet project, still in the scale model stage and not scheduled for completion until 2012, represents a major effort by the emirate’s to open its doors to outside cultural influences. France’s part of the project and just what name it will bear is still under negotiation but termed very near completion by its sponsors. It would have French museums—possibly including others as well as the Louvre—providing a prestigious collection of art works to the emirate on a long-term loan at the moment programmed for 10 years. That’s the time frame the emirate nominally would use to gradually acquire enough works of its own to replace those on loan. The objection of the Abu Dhabi deal’s opponents is that such long-term loans outside of France far exceed the usual  time frames, which tend toward a few months and only rarely as much as a year.  Even more worrisome to them is the possibility that some of the French works treasures might wind up being sold in the end and never return to France? French law forbids that but recent statements by officials of the current government have been just vague enough to keep sale worries alive among the protesters. If you want something even more confusing but very French about all this, how about the fact  that one of the leading opponents of the Abu Dhabi project is Fran�oise Cachin, a former Directrice of all the museums of France. And one of the supporters of the plan is Francine Mariani-Ducray, the current holder of Cachin’s old job. Mariani-Ducray and her supporters say there’s no question of the key French art treasures disappearing on never-ending, money-making road tours. With some 95 percent of the country’s museum collections in reserve and not on display at any given time, there is plenty of cultural heritage in place, they insist, to satisfy French and foreign art fans including the roughly seven million who visit the Louvre each year. Actually, such high-pitched cultural squabbles are nothing new in France. The same kind of outcry from French art world officials and aficionados erupted in 1962 when then French culture Minister Andre Malraux dared send the Mona Lisa from the Louvre  for exhibit in the United States and again in 1993 when then French President Fran�ois Mitrterrand actually turned over to the president of South Korea an ancient Korean royal manuscript that had been in the French national library. It took years for the protests to die down when a giant glass pyramid totally out of…
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