The Newseum

It is a bit unnerving (to say the least) when you’re about to give a big lecture and discover that someone very distinguished is due to give a lecture on almost exactly the same theme, only the day before, and only about 100 yards away from your own venue.

That is what has just happened to me. I was due to talk at the National Gallery in Washington DC on Thursday afternoon on “The Trouble with Museums”. On Wednesday evening Daniel Weiss, who was CEO of the Metropolitan Museum in New York for eight years until 2023 (and so has far more professional hands-on experience of museums than I do), was speaking on “Why the Museum Matters” (he has recently published a book of the same name) at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg Center, just across the road from the National Gallery. Was all my thunder about to be stolen?

Not really, as it turned out. Our presentations certainly interlocked but did not entirely overlap. The Weiss event was more of a conversation/discussion (with Jennifer Kingsley and the audience) and the topics covered were partly focused on the actual practice of leading a museum: how do you weigh up priorities (fixing the roof vs buying a work of art), how do you bring new groups into the museum, how do you deal with the wishes or whims of big donors? But there was also some discussion of issues of cultural property and ownership (is it possible to separate ideas of “ownership” from “where the object is”). And the notion of the permanence of the museum came up several times. What are the particular responsibilities of curators who have in their charge an institution that is meant to last forever?

But that idea of permanence had a certain irony. It was not long before someone (me, actually) observed that the Bloomberg Center, where the event was taking place, had taken over the building which had housed a museum which had failed – and had not been permanent at all. That was the Newseum, a museum devoted to the media, the news and freedom of expression. It started in Arlington, Virginia, in the 1990s but moved to the centre of Washington in 2002. When I was at the National Gallery for a few months fifteen years ago I used to walk past it every day, and vividly remember how the front pages of newspapers from all over the world (changing daily) were on display along the museum’s façade. Inside, major world historical events were covered from the point of view of how they were covered and created in the press, and by journalists who sometimes lost their lives in the process.

The Newseum, Washington, D. C. | © Another Believer, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

It started out quite successfully but was financially struggling by the late 20-teens – and they finally sold the building to Johns Hopkins in 2019. There was some chat after the Weiss event about why it had collapsed. Did it seem too niche to attract a wide audience? Most people thought that it was hard for a commercial museum, charging an entrance fee, to survive in a city where the big museums (the various parts of the Smithsonian and the National Gallery) are all free.

But the basic moral is that some museums are more or less permanent, others simply come and go.

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