Director's Letter Spring 2014

Last evening I had the opportunity to talk with a large group of Princeton graduate students working in a range of disciplines, from neuroscience to economics, in the context of a High Table held at the Graduate School. Among the topics that we discussed were questions of how university museums might be uniquely positioned to connect the humanities to people whose expertise lies in remote fields, and how to do so in the digital age, when many prospective visitors may question the very notion of authenticity and originality—when digital experience itself may seem to be equally authentic.

Sitting at the helm of a museum whose collections date back to the 1750s and now number more than 92,000 objects, I often consider these questions—not least to feel confident that my philosophical perspectives on the museum experience haven’t themselves become a kind of antiquarianism, a clinging to views shaped by youthful museum-going or formative hours spent in darkened art history classrooms in an era still dominated by Kodachrome slides. Thinking about the role of the globally encompassing university museum (of which there are few, at the end of the day), the words of Princeton University’s twentieth president, offered in his inaugural remarks last September, came to mind. As he explored his chosen theme—“The Ideal of a Liberal Arts University”—President Eisgruber observed that “Great universities are places where the human spirit soars,” challenging us to hold fast to the long-term benefits of a liberal arts education, benefits that are “usually unknowable and occasionally implausible.” Challenging the purely economic model of higher education—in which value is determined by boosts to future earnings—he concluded that a “liberal arts education is a vital foundation for both individual flourishing and the well-being of our society.”

The Princeton University Art Museum seeks to live these ideals and to be a site in which individuals flourish and society prospers. It is our conviction that no education is complete without exposure to the arts—those forms of expression that humans have used since the earliest days to memorialize significant events, express our beliefs, capture beauty, and touch the divine. Of all the tools and resources that a great university may have to do this work, a globe-spanning art museum is particularly suited to remind us of our highest aspirations, of the values that bind us to one another across our differences—and thus to foster global thinking and awaken empathy. Like the great liberal arts teachers President Eisgruber described, the direct experience of great works of art can impact everyone—students, scholars, and second-graders alike—as it can “fire their imaginations, dispel their misconceptions, explode their prejudices, stir their spirits, and guide their passions.”

Offering an intimate environment for the direct experience of some of the best of the world’s art, this museum may be unique in American higher education in affording insights into such a range and quality of global visual culture under one roof—a roof encompassing the worlds of Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Through our collections, exhibitions, publications, and diverse educational and social programs, we are committed to advancing the University’s mission of teaching and research and to serving as a cultural resource and gateway to the University for visitors from across our community and around the world. Indeed, our new five-year plan seeks to ensure that this museum grows deep into the twenty-first century as a place where the human spirit truly does “soar.”  

Linking the role of the university and of the university museum to the question of authenticity, I was reminded of the words of the great German writer W. G. Sebald. His central theme, as articulated by the narrator of his 2001 memoryscape Austerlitz (combining fiction, reportage, travel writing, and photography), was “how little we can hold in mind, how everything is constantly lapsing into oblivion with every extinguished life, how the world is, as it were, draining itself, in that the history of countless places and objects which themselves have no power of memory is never heard, never described or passed on.” As we are accosted by tumults of information, often passed to us through the most dubious of filters, with increasing challenges to the very notion of expertise, museums can be places of memory and of “passing on.” Works touched by the hand of the artist—by the hand of genius—that have withstood wars, the rise and fall of empires, or dramatic changes in values over decades and centuries can be bulwarks against oblivion. But they can also be our individual and collective memoryscape, affording windows into the past and hope for the future as they stir our hearts and minds and bind us together.

James Christen Steward 
Director