The Latest at Goethe

Museums are thriving everywhere; the visitor numbers are growing. But, what is it that makes a museum good? How can museums be networked? A professional congress examined these questions. It was held in the National Museum, which was not surprising. Yet the city this museum stands in was. By Burkhard Müller

“Why Museums Now?” This is actually not a genuine issue, for, as one participant said, those who operate a museum never need to justify it. Museums are thriving all over the world. At this four-day event, the main question was “how?” The special feature was the place in which it was held. The Georgian National Museum in Tbilisi, the capital city, is not among the world-famous museums of its kind. But, it was the meeting point for representatives and architects from the big museums in London, Berlin, New York, Washington, DC, Singapore, Vienna and Florence, who honoured the seemingly peripheral location with their presence.

Yet, Georgia is only peripheral from the standpoint of the major powers. If instead we look for the place where they all have met and passed through one another, then Georgia is suddenly right at the centre: Influenced from the west by the Greeks and Romans, later by Germany, England and the United States; from the south by Arabs and Turks; from the east by Persians and Mongols; and from the north, the most powerful in impact, Russia. A museum that documents all of this is certainly of global interest beyond its national significance.

Although the congress was held in English, the German element played a major role. Until the time of Stalin, there was a large and culturally significant German minority in Georgia. In 1991, Germany was the first state to acknowledge Georgia’s independence. And there is a large branch of the Goethe-Institut in Tbilisi, which also coordinates the work in Armenia and Azerbaijan. In recent years via a twinning project, the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation has provided the National Museum with extensive assistance setting up. These two organizations, the museum itself and the US Smithsonian Institute were the initiators of the congress.

Consequently, a great deal was heard about the Museum Island in Berlin as an example of how a well thought-out museum landscape can provide stimuli for an entire city; there was even a well-made exhibition in the National Museum about it. On principle, there was quite a lot of consensus among the speakers and during the discussions that museums, going beyond their traditional missions of conservation and education, today must face the changed economic, social and attention-based aesthetic demands of the 21st century. From there, though, the opinions diverged.

Laura Longo spoke on behalf of Florence, where three million tourists annually crowd into the smallest area and mechanically wear down the city and its art in an alarming way. She proposed a “Cloud Museum Project,” a scheme that not only would team up the many cultural institutions through a joint admission ticket, but also aim for a higher degree of coordination using apps and other electronic means. “We want to help everyone to put together their very own personal art experience!” she called. She then incidentally mentioned that the city no longer has something like a local population but is a museum complex and all that matters is skilled management.

At the Smithsonian Institute, represented by Carole Neves, Amy Ballard and Nikolaus Apostolides, the opposite was the case. The immense size of the mall in Washington had led to the many individual museums belonging to the institute standing in a sort of social no-man’s land, which was becoming run down and attracting crime. This all changed radically over the past few decades, as a battery of figures proved: how much office space, how many jobs, apartments and restaurants had been generated there since they decided to drastically tackle the problem zones of the American capital from the museums. It was a success story.

The Georgian National Museum must grapple with difficulties of an entirely different kind. For one, it lacks the funding that the large western museums take for granted. In addition, Georgia, this beautiful country that seems like one huge garden with old churches, grapevines and fig trees everywhere, is not yet finished as a nation. As a state, it is young and the territory it possesses is not uncontested. Today, it is something like Germany was one and a half centuries ago when the Germanic National Museum was founded in Nuremberg. The name recalls that age long ago when we first were attempting to constitute ourselves as a nation by means of museums, theatres and the poetic arts.

Gentrification is looming

The Georgian National Museum consists of ten facilities alone in the capital city. The master plan is to unite them and mark their surroundings with a “Museum Street.” In addition, deliberations are underway for an urban concept centred on Rustaveli Avenue, the city’s busy main axis, which would be transformed into a pedestrian zone. This plan has not yet been divulged to the Georgian public; we were possibly its first audience. And what would there be there to do and see? “Dining, shopping,” proposed Jean-Francois Milou, whose firm was commissioned with the project. In other words, if you do not bring along enough money for at least a cup of espresso, stay away. Today, anyone wanting to drink an espresso in the museum must pay 5.50 lari, or about 2.50 euros, which would be fine if the average income of, say, a museum employee, were not a mere 300 lari a month.

The aim is for the city to renew itself starting from the museums at its centre, in particular neighbouring Old Tbilisi, the heart of the one-thousand-five-hundred-year-old capital. While feverish construction is going on in the rest of the city, this location is dominated by decline; only a few metres from central Freedom Square one encounters an utterly rural lifestyle in the midst of deteriorating buildings. Beyond doubt something must be done here soon. Will this be possible without displacing the established population? No one dares answer this question with a yes. One local congress participant states that it is merely the lumpenproletariat with no sense of history, who actually do not belong here. Hence, we can assume that the gentrification of the city centre will soon begin here as well, pushing the lower classes to the margins.

That is, if the political and economic situation remains stable, which admittedly is anything but certain. The war with Russia four years ago did not lead to peace, but brought the country the enduring enmity of its powerful neighbour. South Ossetia, a region declared independent by Russia, is only sixty kilometres from the capital city. The parliament was moved away to nearby Kutaissi for the most recent parliamentary elections; the house of parliament is going to be sold or leased to Kempinski in Berlin. The National Museum has bullet holes from earlier street battles.

The extensive collections of the National Museum also include a documentary centre about the “Soviet occupation” from 1921 until 1991. It is hulled in darkness and the methods are emotional and manipulative. A freight wagon, covered in bullet holes like Swiss cheese, in which Georgian resistance fighters were liquidated, proved to be a fake. Yet, there are no doubts about the facts: Georgia, which first gained its independence in 1918 with Germany’s help, was victim to a Russian invasion only three years later. And in 1937, Stalin attacked his own people with particular harshness: 5,000 inhabitants of this tiny country were murdered, 190,000 were deported and the old economic and cultural ruling class was entirely obliterated.

From Istanbul, the flight to Tbilisi is another 1,500 kilometres east. Europe is far away, while besides Russia, the two Islamic states of Turkey and Iran are close by. Armenia sympathizes with Moscow and Azerbaijan with Ankara. The country feels trapped between the two and puts all of its hopes in the west. The Cyrillic script, with the exception of one little Pushkin monument, has disappeared entirely from the city. Everyone is learning English. There is, probably unique in the world, a large George W. Bush Avenue. The European flag waves above every public building. What can the west do for Georgia? Not much, as the disastrous war of 2008 demonstrated. Yet, perhaps it can make some symbolic gestures. The fact that this conference was held in Tbilisi, that the representatives of the world’s major museums met here, means something, to wit: Welcome!

This is a slightly abridged article that appeared in the Süddeutsche Zeitung on 26 September 2012. Copyright: Süddeutsche Zeitung GmbH, Munich. Courtesy of http://www.sz-content.de (Süddeutsche Zeitung Content).