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ABSTRACT
In the early 1950s television was the hot new broadcast media. The post-war economic boom meant that more and more American households were purchasing televisions, and television programming was growing to meet demand. The moment was rife with the potential to reach more and more people through the dazzling allure of television. Many American museums saw the potential to expand their audiences beyond their building to reach people who had never stepped foot inside a museum, effectively expanding the reaching of the museum into American living rooms. This idea was not without controversy. In fact, larger debates circulated at the time about whether or not television could be educational as well as entertaining. This essay examines three museum television programs that debuted in 1951–1952 and were amongst the first television program produced by museums. Produced by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Penn Museum, and The Museum of Modern Art, each program reveals individual approaches to the use of emerging technology for educational purposes. This essay considers the value of history in understanding and responding to contemporary debates about technology and change.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
About the author
Briley Rasmussen, PhD, is Assistant Professor and Director of Museum Studies at the University of Florida. Her research explores the intersections of museum histories, art history, and museum education in order to inform contemporary practice and how museums engage with and serve communities. She holds a PhD from the University of Leicester, an MSEd from Bank Street College of Education, and an MA from the Courtauld Institute of Art. She also had an over 15-year career as a museum educator, holding positions at the J. Paul Getty Museum; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Neuberger Museum of Art; and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
ORCID
Briley Rasmussen http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1766-5805
Notes
1 Roberts, Knowledge to Narrative, 69.
2 Griffiths, Wondrous Difference. See also “The Mannheim Conference on Museums as Places of Popular Culture.”
3 Ibid. Conversations documented from the Manheim Conference in 1903 indicate that the practice of circulating exhibitions was implemented at the turn-of-the-century. Improvements in color reproduction technology simply made this a more widely used strategy for museums, particularly art museums.
4 Boddy, Fifties Television. The first examples of museum television series debuted in 1951, the same year as Amos and Andy, I Love Lucy, and Dragnet, and pre-dated 1950s staples such as Father Knows Best, Leave it to Beaver, and The Donna Reed Show (1954, 1957, and 1958, respectively).
5 See Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art.
6 See Lynes, “Highbrow, Lowbrow, Middlebrow.”
7 See Ogata, Designing the Creative Child.
8 Spigel, TV by Design, 153.
9 Television held great promise for its potential to educate Americans and share arts and culture with them like never before. The false dichotomy of setting high-minded arts and education programming in opposition to the crass and intellectually devoid wasteland of commercial television had not yet been established. By the early 1960s, the idea of commercial television and the arts being in opposition to one another became firmly established by FCC chair Newton Minow's 1961 “vast wasteland” speech to the National Association of Broadcasters. Spiegel, TV by Design, 7.
10 The National Gallery of Art presented a program in 1947 that televised a concert and offered a dramatized description and analysis of Raphael's St. George and the Dragon. Museums – particularly art museums – all around the country followed suit, including the Art Institute of Chicago, Brooklyn Museum, Cleveland Museum of Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, City Art Museum in St. Louis, Albright Art Gallery in Buffalo, and the Walters Art Gallery. These programs, however, were not developed as series with regularly scheduled broadcasts. The first museum to create a television series was the San Francisco Museum of Art (now SFMoMA).
11 The museum was founded in 1916 as the Art Museum of the San Francisco Art Association in the Palace of Fine Arts, built for the Panama Pacific Exhibition the previous year. This early iteration of the museum focused on organizing temporary exhibitions and maintaining a periodical library. The museum was incorporated in 1921. It moved to War Memorial Veterans Building in the San Francisco civic center in 1934, where it remained until 1994. Then, it moved to its first independent and purpose-built museum building on Third Street, where it remains today. During these early decades, the museum had no permanent collection, few funds, and no director.
12 Reiss, Grace L. McCann Morley. Quoted in Smith Bautista, Museums in the Digital Age. 93.
13 Reiss, (1960) quoted in Smith Bautista, Museums in the Digital Age, 101.
14 Rubens, “SFMOMA 75th Anniversary Oral History Project,” 11.
15 Schoener and Wurlitzer, “Television in the Art Museum,” 70.
16 See note 14 above.
17 Schoener and Wurlitzer, “Television in the Art Museum,” 72.
18 Ibid.
19 Ibid., 73.
20 Ibid.
21 Ibid.
22 Rainey, Reflections of a Digger, 56. Quoted in Helguera, What in the World, 5.
23 Ibid., Reflections of a Digger, 275.
24 Helguera, What in the World, 13.
25 Full episodes of What in the World are available online through Penn Museum Collections (https://www.penn.museum/collections/videos/playlist/list.php?id=7). In 2010 Pablo Helguera restaged/revived What in the World at the museum.
26 Dessart, “What in the World,” 37.
27 Ibid.
28 Ibid.
29 Ibid.
30 Dessart, “What in the World,” 38.
31 Ibid.
32 Spigel, TV by Design, 148.
33 It is worth noting that MoMA was also based in New York City, just blocks from the headquarters of each major television network, and at this moment, William S. Paley, President of CBS Television, was a trustee of the museum.
34 “Excerpts of Remarks by Nelson A. Rockefeller”, The René d’Harnoncourt Papers, IV.138. The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York.
35 Ibid.
36 Douglas Macagy headed the Television Project. Over the course of three years, from 1952–1955, Macagy conducted research on the relationship between museums and television, resulting in a book-length report called The Museum Looks in on TV. In this report, Macagy gives great consideration to the medium of television and how it presents new experiences and modes of viewing. Similarly, he considers how modern audiences are changing their viewing experiences. He argued that modern viewers are “distracted” and they consume everything in “haste” (Macagy, “The Museum Looks in on TV” (1955), 4). Macagy presents an unsympathetic and rather pessimistic view of the modern viewer, rife with judgments about class, taste, and suburban middle-class living. He claimed that modern television viewers were unable to engage with television on a thoughtful level and were only interested in “movement and story” (Macagy, “The Museum Looks in on TV” (1955), 4). He constructs the image of television viewers as “restless hermits” who view the world from the comfortable confines of their living rooms (Macagy, “The Museum Looks in on TV” (1955), 4). Macagy determined that due to the technological constraints of television, the museum would be unable to utilize television to reproduce works of art. While Macagy desired to be able to communicate aesthetic experience and a Benjaminian notion of an artwork's aura through the television, he concluded that this was not possible, and should not be attempted (Spigel, TV by Design, 157, referring to Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”). Instead he advocated that it be used to develop aesthetic appreciation. His report focused a great deal on the museum coming into people's living rooms via their television sets, arguing that “through the television museums might in some suitable manner introduce themselves behind home walls” (Macagy, “The Museum Looks in on TV” (1955), 13). This understanding of both the viewer and the experience of watching television shaped how the museum presented content. Focus was placed on exploring how art was made and the ideas and practices of artists, as well as thinking about who might be at home watching TV and what they cared about.
37 The program was presented on live television. Ten episodes were recorded and made available for circulation through the museum's film library. These ten episodes are still available for viewing through the museum's film study center.
38 D’Amico discussed clichés as thinking that driven by mass media or culture. He often cited examples such as comic strips, cute kittens, or holiday decorations. He argued that these images had nothing to do with the original experience of the thing. Thus, children would produce a product without ever having had the experience of it. He encouraged children to work from their own imaginations and experiences.