Marc Pachter is director at the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC, and Acting Director of the National Museum of American History. He has served as the chair of the institution’s joint venture in video history with the Sloan Foundation and as a consultant to Smithsonian World (PBS). While a firm advocate of the use of new technologies, Marc Pachter remains a believer in the spiritual role that museums fulfil in modern society.  He predicts that, as surrogates of artefacts become all the more easy to reproduce, the need and desire for the authentic artefact - the 'object as witness' - will become even stronger.

ABSTRACT

Democracy and museums

Everywhere one looks in western museums there are discussions, often heated, about what some see as the competing obligations of museums in our time to audiences and to collections.  There is a sense, in certain quarters, that the modern museum is asked to pander rather than inform.  Those who set up this opposition are afraid that the call to end elitism is really a call to end quality.  Their opponents see the traditional view of the museum and its assertion of standards as a device to protect curatorial priesthoods against a presumptuous public who demand of museums that they justify themselves within the context of wider community needs.  It will be the goal of this lecture, first to trace the origins of museums in enlightenment aspirations, and then to race ahead to our own contentious times to examine the value of ideals of quality for a modern democratic society.