The Transformative Power of Museums for International Collaboration and Personal Growth
Date：2023-08-07
Joan McEntee, former Under Secretary for International Trade in the U.S. Department of Commerce, highlighted the critical importance of museums in international collaboration and personal growth in her speech at the third dialogue of the China-Europe-America Museums Cooperation Initiative. She emphasized museums' ability to wield soft power as agents of change and their role as repositories of culture and art. McEntee provided examples like the satellite museums and the Guggenheim Museum's impact on Bilbao, showcasing how museums can positively influence societies and economies globally. Furthermore, she explored how museums contribute to human well-being, foster tolerance, and strengthen communities by providing spaces for sensory experiences and creative expressions. McEntee concluded by stressing the significance of museums as global languages that reveal, heal, and transform, making them essential in today's world.
Joan M. McEntee is the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of MKBC and Former Under Secretary for International Trade in the U.S. Department of Commerce. She has served in a number of senior international trade positions in the U.S. government, covering communication, transportation, aviation, defense, and environmental issues. Over the years Ms. McEntee has maintained strong relationships with China and was designated as an economic partner by China’s National Development and Reform Commission. Working with her vast array of Chinese relationships, Ms. McEntee has successfully assisted companies in raising their visibility, resolving problems, and expanding production.
Full text of the speech
Hello, we have learned a tremendous amount about the value of museums and culture today. As we reflect on this wonderful exchange of ideas, I want to address two questions:
—First, how critical are museums to international collaboration?
—Second, how essential are museums for people’s personal growth?
Professor Joseph Nye coined the term “soft power”, declaring “it is what attracts others to be willing to do what should be done”. By using soft power, as caretakers of all forms of culture, museums have the ability to be powerful agents of change, applying their unique and comparative advantage to address critical global challenges facing today’s world.
For example, the establishment of satellite museums in foreign cities enables people in those places to experience artistic creativity, as well as lifestyles from their international counterparts without having to travel. The result of such satellite programs also has had enormous influences in achieving increased international exposure and understanding throughout the globe.
For example, the New York Guggenheim Museum’s satellite program helped to turn a small Spanish city, called Bilbao in northern Spain into a coveted, cultural destination. This addition to that city helped reinvigorate the city’s stalled economy by attracting significant tourism, and this satellite program also has served as a model for other cities, such as Denver and Abu Dhabi. These results demonstrate the soft power of museums to serve as international diplomats, not just as repositories of culture and art but achieving substantial recognition as contributors to the societies and economies in which they are operating.
The 2017 Michelangelo and recent Vermeer blockbuster exhibits involved international cooperation of over 8 countries engaging in museum global relationship building, using this positive soft power.
Museums have demonstrated their diplomatic capabilities by achieving acceptance from international organizations such as UNESCO and the G20 acknowledging the role that the museum community plays along with those of cities, states and countries in efforts to conquer and control illegal artistic looting as well as influencing critical climate control issues. Just as many have embraced the benefits that technology can play in expanding the value of museums, especially to younger generations if applied judiciously. Museum soft power growth indeed is not an aberration, but rather something to be embraced.
So now we ask the second question: How is it that museums as the keepers of art and treasures of the past and the future can have such positive influence on human behavior? What is the underlying “influencer” that promotes museums to engage their “soft power” using their culture, art and antiques to achieve positive results for people daily?
Museums can increase our sense of well-being, help us feel proud of where we have come from, can inspire, challenge, and stimulate us and make us feel healthier. They also enhance life chances by breaking down barriers to access and inclusion.
As we have learned, the work of creating strong communities is continuing to happen at all levels of society, in every corner of the world. It continues in indigenous cultures. It is permeating home, schools, workplaces, neighborhoods, anywhere and everywhere we come together. The Internet and social media have engaged as our “global virtual campfire”, and have the capacity to foster and support healthy community growth if harnessed in the right way. The journal Nature determined in an issue on the science of human cooperation that the strongest barrier to people’s getting along is simply a lack of communication.
With definitive scientific support, today many of us are discovering that creative expressions, culture, and the arts are paramount to the effective exchange of ideas and to our very survival. Creative expressions in the arts and aesthetics, which are a core of what museums are, serve to give birth to new thoughts and new ideas, is a mirror back to one another what is important, and what is needed to weave together common threads of humanity. Culture presented within museums empowers us to reimagine, re-envision and reconnect in order to create a better future together.
Museums are the caretakers of the world’s arts and heritage which throughout history have sparked revolution and cultural change. By their very nature, many of these forms of art reflect and form a timeline as they take the pulse of that very time. But they also have been known to be essential for forecasting the future and serving as an early warning system for society. The Greek chorus became the moral voice of civilization, the Renaissance propelled humanity out of the Middle Ages using music and storytelling, and the artists of 1980s Germany, turned the Berlin Wall into a showcase of artistic peace graffiti.
Creative applications of artistic innovation are transforming museums into becoming sensory samplers of positive human experiences. Such undertakings are designed to encourage greater tolerance of personal, cultural and hopefully, political global differences.
The New York Museum of Art opened an interactive sensory stimulating exhibition called the Mandala Lab as a permanent place for visitors to enjoy a space that was curated using Buddhist principles supporting self-awareness and empathy. In this secret room, you are invited to inhale selections from the library of different smells. A meditative breathing alcove features a sculpture that pulses with light on pace with regulated breathing. In the Gong space, you can tap out to one of the eight Gong Jamaican vibrations.
Arts have the ability to transform us like nothing else as they can help move us from sickness to health, stressed to calm, sadness to joy, as they enable people to flourish and survive.
The arts always offer the highest form of hope — and science is now providing new knowledge supporting their use as the core of museums around the world. Humans are ultra-social creatures who have evolved to require a need “to belong” to something larger than oneself. You see a gorgeous clay pot of Lucca, Italy and you think of how it resembles one of the Xi’an statues of China. A Chinese calligraphy horse drawing immediately makes you think of the flourishing strokes of Michelangelo. Art creates culture and culture creates community and community creates need for cooperation across global borders in order to flourish.
As a well-known artist said, “Art is one of our true, global languages, and it helps the need to reveal, heal, and transform. It transcends our ordinary lives and lets us imagine what is possible.” Museums continue to explore all forms of art and artistic expression. They teach us, they challenge us, they comfort us, and they expose us to differences which lead to better global tolerance and understanding. And yes, this is why we need museums today more than ever. Thank you.
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