Dismantling the Encyclopaedic Museum Concept

Lost direction (© Urs Lüthi)

Lee Rosenbaum (CultureGrrl) has interviewed Timothy Potts, director, J. Paul Getty Museum, and the discussions touched on a number of topics. The interview concentrates largely on plans to thoroughly overhaul the installation of the antiquities in the Getty Villa, Pacific Palisades

Potts: We will be reinstalling the collection in the Villa on a more historical basis, but that’s a long-term project. The current installation allows you to teach and understand social history and themes and subjects, because the groupings are by subject matter.
But they don’t allow you nearly as easily to understand the progression of cultures historically—why Archaic art looks the way it does, stemming from what was happening in the Orientalizing period in context with Egypt, and all of that sort of thing. You can’t understand that, when things of all different periods are shown together.
Rosenbaum: That’s a huge change.
Potts: Huge, but that’s how things are normally done. This [the current installation] was a huge change. It served its purpose. It was a great way to show the collection and to shake it up and do it differently. But I think that if you really believe that the purpose of the museum is educational, and you want the presentation to serve as many educational needs as possible, I think the historical display allows you to tell more stories.

So the display will be moving away from using the objects (as decontextualised archaeological items) to tell us about people, their lives and society  to making them mere illustrations to a narrative based on the written texts. I thought the idea of the "encyclopaedic museum" (sic) was to allow precisely the sort of cross-cultural comparisons which are now being dismantled. If the average Getty visitor does not know when and where 'Archaic Greece' was, surely there are means (labels, guidebooks, multimedia) to help them put things in order in their own minds, that is the basis of those 'multiple narratives'.  In any case, was the collection not to a certain extent built up with other aims in mind, will the Getty now be de-
accessioning items superfluous to telling the story of the ancient world as kings and battles history?

CultureGrrl, 'My Q and A with Timothy Potts: Reinstalling the Getty Museum’s Antiquities (and more on the Getty Bronze)', ArtsJournal blog June 5, 2014
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