Sometimes you want to cry just to keep yourself from laughing. The librarian was explaining why I couldn’t have access to the medieval manuscripts: You see, these books are made of vellum and they’ve been put on display recently, so the vellum needs to rest. Really? I wrote the goddamn book on medieval vellum, and I was going to ask the librarian if she gave the vellum a little pillow and tucked it in at night and then I thought, better not. Just cry.

This is becoming a bad habit in libraries, museums, and places of higher learning: it’s not so much the people in charge, it’s that the people in charge don’t seem to know what the institution’s for. The Library of Congress is moving to close down its European Reading Room, a much used, much valued access point for its enormous collection of foreign books. The space will be used for tourist attractions.

Daniel Boorstin, the late and former Librarian of Congress, put it nicely in his retirement speech: The Librarian of Congress is supposed to help people learn, and not preach to them or even teach them. Unfortunately Sen. Charles Schumer, who happens to sit on the Congressional Committee responsible for the closing of the European Reading Room, has shown a strong preference for preaching over scholarship, especially when the preachers are well-heeled: for years he’s been working to ease or suspend US laws against importing looted art, proudly providing some of his constituents with endless opportunities for window-shopping, museum-going and library-gawking, and providing others with endless opportunities to thank him.

Meanwhile, a French prosecutor is trying to investigate Nicolas Sarkozy’s role in a kickback scheme involving payments for the upkeep of an art collection that was supposed to go to a government-funded museum, eventually. The prosecutor’s powerless since in France a sitting president can’t be indicted, but it throws a harsh light on the cultural competence of Sarkozy’s government, which is obsessed with the selling and renting of French cultural assets. Once again, administrators and politicians have a hard time understanding what cultural institutions are supposed to do apart from making money for their friends.

That’s what Boorstin must have meant when he drew the distinction between cultural preservation and cultural education: when you confuse the two you end up playing one against the other, as it suits you. But then, playing one against the other’s how politicians and administrators get ahead. Boorstin also said, We must abandon the prevalent belief in the superior wisdom of the ignorant. He probably meant the audiences who, supposedly, would be “educated” by building bigger museums and opening up the doors of libraries. I’d rather he had said, We must abandon the prevalent habit of rewarding bureaucratic and political incompetence that poses as a wisdom superior to the ignorant and educated alike.

Monday, March 31, 2008 12:56 pm