Drawing passion from the crowds

Should architects of, and curators in, modern museums forget impressive gestures and create more low-key affairs to engage a wider audience? asks Hugh Aldersey-Williams

Social inclusion has damaged museums, the Art Fund trumpeted last week. In the first comprehensive study of museum collecting in the UK, the organisation says that pressure from the Government to make museums appeal to a wider audience through education programmes and other projects has had a detrimental effect on museums, with most having given up collecting.

Behind the concerns about collecting and social inclusion, though, there is a broader question of what and who museums are for. Two recent books explore how museums should relate to the cities in which they are located and to their inhabitants. In The Delirious Museum , Calum Storrie, architect and curator, uses delirium as a metaphor for how museums reflect the chaotic nature of the city. In Cabinets for the Curious , Ken Arnold of the Wellcome Trust reminds us that ever since the first collections were made public, museums have generated their own excitement.

The question of how museums should relate to their public is closely bound up with access. But while inclusion is typically discussed in terms of marketing or curatorial initiatives designed to attract particular groups and to open up the museum to everyone, the trend in new museum buildings seems to suggest the opposite. The Guggenheim Bilbao is the apotheosis of the museum as art object, literally isolated from its city by a bend in the river, and easily overtaking its contents in immediate impact and perhaps in artistic merit - something admitted by the fact that one of the first exhibitions at the Guggenheim was on the work of Frank Gehry, its architect. And consider Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum in Berlin, which is so powerful as an architectural statement that it was opened to the public first as an empty shell, so that it could be appreciated as a spatial experience long before exhibits were installed.

But, conversely, there are museums where the content utterly eclipses the container. Two examples are the Museo Civico in Sansepolcro, Tuscany, Italy, which houses some of the greatest paintings by Piero della Francesca, and the Kroller-Muller Museum in Otterlo in the Netherlands where much of van Gogh's best work is hung.

The thought that grand architectural statements are somehow beside the point is reinforced if you are lucky enough to go behind the scenes and satisfy your vague sense that what is stored there is no less interesting than what is on display - indeed, perhaps more interesting in its uncuratedness. When I clapped eyes on the row of Galapagos tortoises looming through their polythene dust covers in the former London bus depot used as storage space by the Natural History Museum, I discovered a kind of delight that is generally absent from the museum's public galleries. A few institutions, such as Oxford's Pitt Rivers Museum, artlessly produce something of the same effect for their visitors, but all too few.

The wish to make an architectural statement is nothing new. Christopher Wren, William Wilkins, Robert Smirke, John Soane and Alfred Waterhouse were the celebrity architects of their day asked to design buildings to house Britain's most important collections. So there is some evidence that architectural novelty passes and that content reasserts its own merits. As Storrie explains, the unfortunate archetype of the museum is the Louvre, a palace that violently became a public institution. Although architects of the 18th and 19th century scarcely had a stylistic choice, they followed this intimidating formal model in their designs.

Modernism amended the rules, and some architects have tried all sorts of tricks to break down the barriers between museum and public. Sir Norman Foster conceived the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, on the campus of the University of East Anglia, as the antithesis of a palace: an industrial shed. In place of steps up to a pompous central portico is a narrow walkway that simply pierces the skin of the building at the most convenient angle.

Foster's commitment to the place is evidenced by the fact that it reopens on May 21 with his second major expansion of display space, the additions being entirely subterranean so as not to mar the almost Grecian purity of the original building. Robert Venturi and Denise Scott-Brown's addition to the National Gallery offers a covered cut-through for pedestrians from Trafalgar Square to Leicester Square.

But the museum as a kind of "interiorised" extension of the city remains problematic. Display cases become equated with shop windows, culture with commerce. It makes sense as an idea only when, as today, it is possible to enter many of them free of charge. And there's still the challenge of how to attract a greater cross-section of the public. The problem is that exclusion is implicit. Nobody is not invited to, let's say, Pre-Raphaelite Drawings at the Lady Lever Art Gallery in Port Sunlight on the Wirral. But you know the kind of people who will go.

Does it follow then that inclusion must be explicit, a message targeted at particular groups? Such initiatives "impact upon only small numbers of people and are very expensive", according to Andrew Newman, a lecturer in the International Centre for Cultural and Heritage studies at Newcastle upon Tyne University. He adds that there is a risk that this could lead to a focus on the experience of being excluded, rather than on inclusion.

Moreover, it would be highly ironic if, at the same time as architects were being given extravagant licence to create signature landmarks to lure visitors, those responsible for putting on the exhibitions were sacrificing individual vision for focus-group curation.

What we need are curators who can cross boundaries. "Exhibition curating has become the most visible way of making meaning within museums," Arnold says. "But it seems to me that the medium still has so much more to offer.

In the genre of guest-curated shows, we have been exposed time and again to self-reflexive exhibitions whose principal focus has been museum practices and conventions themselves. Frankly, we probably do not need any more cases of old objects without labels, empty frames, paintings deliberately hung at odd angles and the like. Exhibitions with real content, however, that are nonetheless treated as opportunities to experiment - licences to produce provocative essays and in particular to explore unorthodox cross-disciplinary juxtapositions - are still too much of a rarity." Arnold calls for curators from unexpected disciplines, such as science and poetry. One successful example of this is Gothic Nightmares , which has just finished at Tate Britain. It embraced not only art but film, literature, science and the horror genre.

The Sainsbury Centre reopens with an exhibition that also crosses boundaries. Pacific Encounters is the largest display of Polynesian objects ever assembled. It touches on art, anthropology, history and religion, with new scholarship on the cultural collision between West and East at the time of Captain Cook's voyages of exploration. This will be followed by Eye Music , which focuses on the relation between abstract art and music. This exhibition opened last June at the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester. Its synaesthetic range across the visual and aural arts is bound to stimulate interest in perception, cognition and psychology. At the Wellcome Trust, the first exhibition in the new public galleries, which open in June 2007, will examine the heart, not only anatomically, but also in terms of its symbolic treatment in the arts.

In earlier centuries, museums were scientific institutions. Their job was to classify the mass of objects gathered by collectors. Nowadays, we recognise that it is impossible to contain the totality of one subject in a single display case or museum.

Objects need stories. This is what the city street offers - a chaotic procession of authentic exhibits for which we make connections and to which we give meaning. Not finding your way in a city can be tedious, but losing your way can be a revelation. So too in museums - how brave to buck the circulation system and find your own path of meaning? As Storrie puts it:

"The desire of the Delirious Museum is that every visitor should succumb to curiosity, that 'irresistible passion' described by Baudelaire."

Hugh Aldersey-Williams curated Touch Me and Zoomorphic at the Victoria and Albert Museum.