Susan Ashley - A Museum in Public: Revisioning Canada’s Royal Ontario Museum

By attending closely to the goings-on in a single, iconic institution, Susan Ashleys rich and insightful analysis deftly reveals not only how cultural organisations are inevitably enmeshed in the wider world but also the exciting possibilities that new ways of conceiving of their publicness might hold for museums of all kinds as they seek to enhance their relevance and value in the twenty-first century.

Richard Sandell, University of Leicester, UK

A Museum in Public is a compelling and critical portrait of the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, circa 2008, at the moment of its multi-million dollar renaissance, which included a spectacular architectural facelift and the promise of a global meeting ground, an agora for all. Combining institutional analysis with ethnographic fieldwork, Ashley shows how lofty rhetoric outpaced action, and corporate cultural norms infiltrated most areas of public service. A Museum in Public demonstrates the layers of analysis needed to see through the emperors new clothes, and to understand the workings of privilege, even as it is democratized. The book also offers glimpses of ways in which publics (including museum employees) carve out spaces of sociability and freedom in the museum. This is a welcome contribution to museum studies, and to the ongoing study of Canadas largest museum.

Shelley Ruth Butler, McGill Institute for the Study of Canada, McGillUniversity, Montreal, Canada

A Museum in Public critically examines the idea of museums as institutions of the public sphere. Using as a case study the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM), Canadas largest museum, the book interrogates the public nature and political dynamics of the ROM as it completed a multi-million-dollar Renaissance architectural project.

Employing an empirically engaged cultural analysis of how publicness was reflected in the ideas, attitudes and behaviours of management, staff, and visitors, the book builds upon an ethnographic description of four public interfaces of institutional operations: structuring, positioning, exhibiting, and interacting. Conceptualizing ROMs new nature as celebrity publicness: engagement as publicity and not politics, Ashley offers insights into how and whether museums like the ROM might achieve political publicness through transparent, open communicative action. As a whole, the book asks museum practitioners and scholars to seriously consider how the ideals of contact zone and engagement with their real need for dissent, conflict, and alternative ways of thinking can truly be made possible within an administrative setting.

A Museum in Public will be a unique resource for scholars and students around the world who are engaged with the ongoing process of democratization in museums. Its on-the-ground reporting on practical organizational issues, offered in a shorter more accessible format, will attract and provoke museum practitioners.

Susan L.T. Ashley is Senior Lecturer in Creative and Cultural Industries Management and AHRC Leadership Fellow in (Multi)Cultural Heritage at Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. She is a cultural studies scholar interested in what, how, and why heritage knowledge is created, shaped, communicated, and consumed in the public sphere. Dr Ashley has published widely, including Diverse Spaces: Identity, Heritage and Community in Canadian Public Culture (2013). She has 20 years of experience with culture and heritage sites across Canada.

Series Editor: Kylie Message

The Australian National University, Australia

Committed to the articulation of big, even risky, ideas in small format publications, Museums in Focus challenges authors and readers to experiment with, innovate, and press museums and the intellectual frameworks through which we view these. It offers a platform for approaches that radically rethink the relationships between cultural and intellectual dissent and crisis and debates about museums, politics and the broader public sphere.

Museums in Focus is motivated by the intellectual hypothesis that museums are not innately useful, safe or even public places, and that recalibrating our thinking about them might benefit from adopting a more radical and oppositional form of logic and approach. Examining this problem requires a level of comfort with (or at least tolerance of ) the idea of crisis, dissent, protest and radical thinking, and authors might benefit from considering how cultural and intellectual crisis, regeneration and anxiety have been dealt with in other disciplines and contexts.

Interpreting Objects in the Hybrid Museum

Collections and Cultural Policy

Helena Robinson

Global Trends in Museum Diplomacy

Post-Guggenheim Developments

Natalia Grincheva

A Museum in Public

Revisioning Canadas Royal Ontario Museum

Susan L.T. Ashley

www.routledge.com/Museums-in-Focus/book-series/MIF

Logo by James Verdon (2017)

Revisioning Canadas Royal Ontario Museum

Susan L.T. Ashley

First published 2020

by Routledge

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and by Routledge

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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

2020 Susan L.T. Ashley

The right of Susan L.T. Ashley to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

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ISBN: 978-1-138-57926-2 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-351-26248-4 (ebk)

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The contrast was striking. I emerged from the hushed environment inside of one of Canadas largest museums, the Royal Ontario Museum, on a chilly day in January 2009 and met with a raucous wall of bodies hoisting placards and green, red and white flags. Young people mostly, in black and white chequered scarves, but a scattering of older folk as well. They were not looking back at the museum though; this crowd was decidedly fixated on the Israeli consulate across the street. ROM security guards patrolled the boundary between the protesters and the museum, keeping a pathway clear for visitors going in and out of the building.