MUSEUMS

"Riches, Rivals & Radicals: 100 Years of Museums in America" by Marjorie SchwarzerAmerican Association of Museums, $40


Did you know that museum visits in this country far surpass attendance at all professional sports events combined?

Or that during the 1970s and '80s, new museums were opening at the astonishing rate of nearly one every other day? By the end of the 1970s — the decade that brought us the record-setting "Treasures of Tuthankhamen" show — museum visits per year were over 500 million, double the population.

Did you know that on Sept. 13, 2001, when New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art reopened after the terrorist attacks that had paralyzed the country, 8,200 people poured through its doors to be comforted by beauty?

All that and more is spelled out in Marjorie Schwarzer's unlikely page-turner, a new history book called "Riches, Rivals and Radicals: 100 Years of Museums in America."
Schwarzer puts the sometimes nutty world of American museums in context, from its unassuming 18th-century origins to the recent era of "starchitect" trophy museums. The information she dredged up is fascinating, beginning with the word's origin as a place of inspiration, based on the Greek muses. Our own Bellevue Art Museum made history with the unfortunate distinction of being the country's only newly built museum ever to close down.
From the start, museums struggled with the notion of audience. Ostensibly geared toward educating the masses, big-city museums tended to locate in public parks (which in the days of segregation were off-limits to nonwhites) and upscale neighborhoods where the working classes didn't dare congregate. In the 1890s, a director at New York's Metropolitan Museum specified that dirty and foul-smelling laborers were not to be admitted.

Scandals of one sort or another have plagued museums, too. From the paranoia and censorship of the McCarthy era to the ethics issues and controversies over "deaccessioning" — the practice of selling works from the collection — Schwarzer recounts it all with a deft touch. She doesn't rub it in, for example, when she notes that in the 1930s the Museum of Modern Art selected for its first building an architect "who happened to be on MoMA's board."

Chair of the museum-studies department at John F. Kennedy University in Berkeley, Calif., Schwarzer begins her book with an utterly engaging overview that's as entertaining as it is well-synthesized. She walks us through the era of curiosity cabinets and P.T. Barnum, to the grand Beaux-Arts buildings and European art favored by the newly rich industrialists. The "tension between popular entertainment and authenticity began very early in the museum world," Schwarzer points out.

The rest of "Riches, Rivals & Radicals" is broken into intriguing sections on museum buildings, collections, exhibitions, and patronage, that make you itch to visit all the places she describes, now intimately familiar.


Whether you are entrenched in the art world or simply a bemused observer, "Riches, Rivals and Radicals: 100 Years of Museum in America" is an enlightening, funny and satisfying look at some of our most revered — and occasionally reviled — cultural institutions. The book helps place our current obsessions about buildings and collections in a broader continuum of fluctuating philosophies and fortunes. For better and for worse, our museums reflect the times we live in.