Dialogue with the Director Archives Dialogue with the Director

“Rush Hour” by American sculptor George Segal occupies a site on the walk between the new Bloch Building (left and background) and the eastern end of the Nelson-Atkins Building at The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Mo.
Photo ©Timothy Hursley

As a cultural colleague of and collaborator with the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, the Spencer extends congratulations to the Nelson-Atkins on its major renovation and expansion, including the new Steven Holl-designed Bloch Building, scheduled to open in Summer 2007. Director Saralyn Reece Hardy recently sat down with Marc F. Wilson, Menefee D. & Mary Louise Blackwell Director/CEO of the Nelson-Atkins. An excerpt of their conversation follows; the full version will appear here shortly.

Saralyn Reece Hardy: Please talk a little about how your audiences have influenced your thoughts as you have begun to construct your new space?

Marc Wilson: The space is simply the occasion of where it all seems to come together. Museums are full of masterpieces, and if the director and the curators have done their jobs right, they represent high points of achievement in visual intelligence. That is the exercise of visual intelligence by a particular individual, in a particular culture, at a particular time. And though the argument is sometimes made that different cultures don’t have the same definition of art, or even a definition of art—which it is true that they don’t—there is nonetheless in every human culture artistic sensibility that is undeniable. Why? Because having a highly developed potential for visual artistic intelligence is essentially human. It is one of those things that define us.

SRH: You have said that one must spend a lot of time looking to understand the internal rule that the object sets up. Could you expand that thought?

MW: For me the visual experience is the first thing. The second thing is the motivation behind the art. That may be religious, that may be functional. Usually, it has some idea of what the shape should be, of the material’s relationship to the technological background of the society, of the role of the artist who conceived it. It may be at one end completely anonymous, totally functional, and represent material culture that happened to come out of somebody who had great artistic sensibility. At the other end it is personal expression, and with personal expression there’s the risk that the work can’t communicate to anyone else because it becomes too personal. So I find that these are the two things that art should be a window on to motivate society, culture, and religions, all of those things that actually are behind its production. But none of those things accounts for why a particular work that is not of our time will communicate to us over time.

SRH: As you think about your work at the Nelson over time, do you feel that museum practice has moved closer to the experiential side?

MW: No. No, I don’t, and that’s my point. I think that we have left out a lot of what makes the experience. The issue here is what is the primary experience? If we have collected the best based on artistic and visual achievement, and recognized that there is such a thing as visual intelligence and visual IQ, and that these works of art represent the best of the exercise of that intelligence, then what is the prime and first point of contact that the visitor has? Is it the story, the narrative, the religious message, the social message? Is it social propaganda? Historical paintings are meant to illuminate the present. They are not meant to illuminate the past.