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Exhibiting Democracy: Critical Conclusions
What was very striking in an overview of the events, whether publications, conference or
exhibitions, celebrating the democratic reforms of Kleisthenes in Athens was how much
the American political system and ideas of freedom dominated the agenda in the early
1990s. This is not surprising given that most of the celebratory events were backed by
American organisations and took place in America. Neither is it surprising given that the
Americans were adjusting to being the only remaining global super power and had
recently celebrated two hundred years of independence and representative government.
However, it does beg the question whether if it took place now would it be very different?
The word and concept of ‘freedom’ has been given a different edge in America due to the
way it has been articulated in rhetoric around the ‘war on terror’ since 2001 and regime
change has become synonymous with enforced democracy. What is clear is that the two
exhibitions, The Greek Miracle and The Birth of Democracy, were held to encourage a
broader public than academics gathered together at conferences to take part in the
celebration of Athenian democracy, and by extension American democracy. Full public
engagement programmes have been mentioned in connection with both exhibitions and it
would be useful to find out more about those and, if possible, what numbers and kinds of
visitors they attracted. Some of the conclusions and comment on the exhibitions use
‘appeared’ and ‘perhaps’ more readily as there is a recognition that the archives of the
relevant institutions would have more evidence on these issues.
The Greek Miracle
The Greek Miracle was considered a blockbuster exhibition. The attack by Michael
Kimmelman on ‘the power of the National Gallery and the Metropolitan to act like big
game trophy hunters, mounting on their walls the bounty of over nations’ in his review of
the exhibition for The New York Times was also an attack on the blockbuster tradition in
large art museums.1 A blockbuster exhibition generally means a popular subject, large
visitor numbers, an impressive looking exhibition and substantial corporate sponsorship.
The Greek Miracle fulfilled these criteria. The reviews of The Greek Miracle in The New
York Times and by Robert Hughes in Time magazine were critical and hostile,
considering the exhibition to be of little value intellectually. These responses have been
considered as ‘revisionist’ under the heading of ‘new museology’ by Lynn Munson, who
quotes J. Carter Brown’s (the former Director of the National Gallery) response to
Hughes’ comment that the exhibition was ‘an exercise in political propaganda’:
We do share some universal values - the rule of law, the ideal of justice - which
came to us from the Greeks.... It would be a great loss to this country if everyone
1
Michael Kimmelman, ‘Art View: Sublime Sculptures in a Dubious Setting’, The New York Times,
November 22 1992, website [accessed 15/05/2008].*
1
just took whatever piece of world culture they felt they could identify with most
closely and abjured everything else.2
Lynn Munson argues that ‘The Greek Miracle is the firmest statement any major museum
has made to date in support of high aesthetic standards and historical truth’ and suggests
that ‘a serious debate needs to take place - of the sort that emerged in academia over
political correctness - over the state of museums.’ Munson clearly has a political view
point in this analysis and her comments illustrate how devisive the exhibition was for
cultural commentators, as well as how these divisions were linked to the perceptions of
‘politically correct culture wars’ taking place on university campuses at roughly the same
time.
Francis Haskell, by no means a ‘revisionist’ in Munson’s definition of the term, gives an
interesting and thorough account of the rise of the art exhibition in his last book The
Ephemeral Museum. Haskell looks at the history of exhibiting art in a popular manner
from the late eighteenth century until today and considers the ‘blockbuster’ to be a
troubling phenomenon that causes risk to art objects and misunderstanding among both
the academic community and the broader public. One of his comments is of particular
relevance here:
The ephemeral presentation in London, Paris or New York of exotic, and
sometimes only recently excavated, sculptures – whose permanent sequestration
in the museums of these and other western cities would not be possible today –
can radically change our perception of even the most renowned orthodoxies;
national glory can be propagated, and political causes can be promoted, by
judicious displays in well-chosen exhibition galleries [. . .]3
Haskell is of course referring to art exhibitions more generally, but his stress on ‘political
causes’ and ‘national glory’ reflects that of many reviewers of The Greek Miracle.
Haskell continues to point out that exhibition catalogues of such shows are by necessity
incomplete in their analysis of the subject as they have to confine themselves to what has
been chosen or what is able to be displayed. The catalogue of The Greek Miracle
arguably illustrated Haskell’s points.
Reviewers of The Greek Miracle commented that the exhibition was lacking in
contemporary and interesting scholarship, but what exactly where they referring to? The
Greek Miracle drew on the handbook formalism of Gisela Richter that she developed
through ‘morphological analysis of anatomy, drapery and composition’ in the 1930s to
1960s (as recognised by reviewers such as Theodorou in Minerva). It also emphasised the
importance of high-quality originals from fifth-century Greece, thus drawing on the
2
Lynne Munson, ‘The new museology’. Public Interest. Spring 1997. FindArticles.com.,
ttp://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0377/is_n127/ai_19416357 [accessed 01/07/2008].
3
Francis Haskell, The Ephemeral Museum. Old Master Paintings and the Rise of the Art Exhibition
(London: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 3.
2
different formalism of Rhys Carpenter in roughly the same period.4 The academic J. J.
Pollitt was evidently known and involved in the exhibition – at least to the extent of his
catalogue entry – and his emphasis on political development as parallel to artistic
development in classical Athens was one of the overarching motifs of the exhibition:
What was needed to make all these forces [behind an atmosphere of self-belief]
effective and reap their fruit was a will to believe and spokesmen to articulate that
will. The Great Believers and also the spokesmen were Pericles the son of
Xanthippos and the artists like Pheidias and Sophocles who helped to make the
Periclean vision real by giving it witnessable form.5
Arguably, though, there was limited use of his work since Pollitt himself stressed the
importance of vases and forms of Greek art besides sculpture. The development of the
Archaic Kouros to the Kritios Boy stressed by Andrew Stewart was evidently used in the
interpretation of the exhibition. Otherwise there is remarkably little use of Stewart’s 1990
book Greek Sculpture and his emphasis on considering ‘the sculptor’s world’, including
patronage, function of art (religious, political and personal) and the working conditions of
artists. In fact Stewart’s book is not mentioned in the bibliography of the catalogue, while
the earlier work of Richter, Carpenter, John Boardman and Brunilde Ridgway are
consistently referred to. This in itself is not necessarily a problem – John Boardman’s
Thames and Hudson readers on Greek art are classic texts on the history of art – but it
does signify a gap between contemporary scholarship and the academic knowledge
presented in the exhibition.
The Greek Miracle displayed a lack of contemporary scholarship in a number of
important ways. There was no self-consciousness about the image they were projecting,
which could have been informed by Alpers’ 1991 essay or the exhibition put on by Beard
and Henderson at the Ashmolean in 1992. Stewart’s Greek Sculpture positioned Athenian
art within the context of whole Greek world and considered the environment that the
artists worked in. The Greek Miracle displayed objects from Athens alongside art works
created for patrons external to Athens from within the same period and did not appear to
look for differences in cultural context or development. The use of art by Athens for its
own propagandic purposes was touched on but not evaluated – an instance where Nicole
Loraux’s The Invention of Athens (1986) may have been useful. There was no analysis of
the social rituals within Athens itself. This does not just mean religious rituals but also
social rites, such as erotic courtship and physical ideals. For example, there was no
acknowledgment that the Kritios Boy could function as an erotic image or had a warlike
significance as representing the potential citizen (and warrior) body of Athens. The work
of Michel Foucault or Kenneth Dover on eroticism and homosexuality was noticeable by
its absence. The significance of gender and its construction was similarly absent in the
catalogue and there was nothing about the position of women, whether citizens or not, in
the essays. The Hegeso Stele and the depiction of the young woman and slave girl would
have been an obvious place to discuss the position and the role of women and slavery in
4
Andrew Stewart, Greek Sculpture. An Exploration (London: Yale University Press, 1990), p. 31.
J. J. Pollitt, Art and Experience in Classical Greece, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), p.
64.
5
3
Athens. There was also little reference to Athenian slavery, the empire of Athens and
foreign migrants within the city state. Above all there was no discussion about democracy
itself, ancient or modern, which was what taxed most scholarly debates that took place in
1992 to 1994.
Reviewers of The Greek Miracle were critical of its lack of reference to contemporary
scholarship, in both its analysis of Athens and Athenian democracy, and its presentation
of the story of Greek art. Another area of scholarship that appeared to be disregarded in
both The Greek Miracle and The Birth of Democracy was the emerging subject of
museums studies. The study of museums, galleries and other public spaces displaying art
or historical objects known as museology or museum studies was a fairly new area in
scholarship. An important collection of essays on exhibiting objects in museums and the
significance for the cultures on display is Ivan Karp’s and Steven D. Lavine’s Exhibiting
Cultures. The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display which was published in 1991.
Svetlana Alpers’ essay ‘The Museum as a Way of Seeing’ in this volume considers how
the function of objects is changed by placing them in a museum and how that changes
how visitors then ‘see’ objects. Alpers considers a Greek statue ‘removed from its
sanctuary or stadium, eyes gone, color worn to an overall pallor. The museum effect –
turning all objects into works of art – operates here too.’ She points out that there has
been a growing and heated debate over how the material culture of indigenous
communities has been displayed in museums, but the museum effect of looking at Greek
sculpture in a certain way has become subsumed into western cultural traditions.6 These
western cultural traditions were redisplayed in The Greek Miracle as the exhibition had
(from the research carried out so far) little information about the function of Greek art in
archaeological or religious contexts. Neither did the exhibition question the idea of
showing Greek sculpture as art works but rather capitalised on it.
The Cambridge academics Mary Beard and John Henderson curated an exhibition called
The Curator’s Egg at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford (December 1991 – May 1992),
which scrutinised the role of the museum and the way it makes meaning. Arguing that
museums make and increase the value of objects financially as well as aesthetically, a
vase by a well-known Greek painter was exhibited and valued at £100,000 alongside a
pot by an unknown artist valued at £200, this was a very different to the traditional art
historical readings of Greek sculpture and their relation to democracy in The Greek
Miracle.7 In their 1992 book Reconstructing Archaeology, archaeologists Michael Shanks
and Christopher Tilley considered the way in which museums transform ‘artefacts into
objects in commodified time’ and the different ways in which archaeological artefacts are
presented. The mode of presentation used in The Greek Miracle, according to the
principles laid out by Shanks and Tilley, was the ‘Aesthetic artefact’ which ‘conveys the
timeless ability of Man as toolmaker artist’ with ‘universal truth’. 8 This kind of
6
Svetlana Alpers, ‘The Museum as a Way of Seeing’ in Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine (eds.) Exhibiting
Cultures. The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display (London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), pp.
25-32, pp.26-7.
7
Susan Pearce, On Collecting: An Investigation into Collecting in the European Tradition (London:
Routledge, 1995), p. 392.
8
Shanks and Tilley, Reconstructing Archaeology (1992), p. 73.
4
presentation displays archaeological objects in a dislocated way, removing them from
their material and cultural context and presenting them simply as ‘art’. However, Greek
material culture and sculpture has a purpose in western artistic traditions and that
tradition needs to be recognised as well as the archaeological function of ‘artefacts’.
Soon after The Greek Miracle, Alan Wallach critically examined the historical and
political ideology at play in an exhibition The West as America. Wallach introduced his
topic with a broader consideration of how an exhibition of classical Greek sculpture
could be displayed not as ‘masterpieces’ or grouping around a familiar theme but in a
way that ‘attempted to reveal the works under consideration as ideological’. Wallach
considers that practical difficulties would probably make this task difficult due to the
amount of written information needed:
Moreover, the type of historical criticism that now routinely occurs in academic
settings would very likely encounter grave difficulties in a museum. For example
puncturing the myth of Athenian democracy would no doubt arouse the ire of a
public – or at least its self appointed representatives in the press – habituated to
celebrations of ‘the Greek Miracle’.9
Yet, as we have seen reviews of The Greek Miracle in the press were far from being
uncritical or accepting of the generalised celebrations of Athenian democracy. Perhaps
more important would be mounting an exhibition in a public museum that made a
generally accepted ideology more problematic would probably damage chances of
corporate sponsorship.
Recently Jeremy Tanner has traced the way in which the Hellenist paradigm of art history
based on Winckelmann has framed the way Greek art has been presented to the ‘broader
public’ in The Greek Miracle, which:
[. . .] provided a vehicle for both the Greek and the American states to project
themselves through the classical ideal in a manner analogous to the use of
classical art by European states of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in
national museums.10
Tanner also drew attention to the preface by the Greek and American presidents as using
the exhibition and Greek art to project their two countries as ‘nurturing democratic
systems’. Rather than this ‘birth of art’ and development of naturalism in art, Tanner calls
for a sociological reading of the role of art objects in the use of rites and whether these
objects illustrated social change. In this, Tanner echoes Robin Osbourne’s stress on
placing Greek art within the context of its social role rather than simply its political
history.11 In his popular book in the Oxford History of Art series, published in 1998,
9
Alan Wallach, ‘The Battle over The West as America’, in Exhibiting Contradiction. Essays on the Art
Museum in the United States (Massachusetts: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998), p. 106.
10
Jeremy Tanner, The Invention of Art History in Ancient Greece. Religion, Society and Artistic
Rationalisation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 13.
11
Robin Osbourne, Archaic and Classical Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 20.
5
Osbourne emphasised the importance of religious activity in the development and role of
Greek art, as many of the reviewers of The Greek Miracle also stressed. The problem is
less the amount of information given to the ‘broader public’ (as long as it is delivered in a
concise and clear manner), but more how such an exhibition could be sponsored and
whether there is the motivation within the museum and academic world to create such an
exhibition. An exhibition that is more representative of different debates, as well as being
self-conscious about its own ‘way of seeing’.
The Birth of Democracy
The exhibition The Birth of Democracy was a more obviously scholarly exhibition. It was
not a ‘blockbuster’ and did not attract huge media coverage and was more supported by
contemporary scholarship. The Birth of Democracy was linked to a major conference on
‘Demokratia’ in Spring 1993, shortly after the exhibition itself opened, and a conference
on the archaeology of Athens in December 1992. The conferences and the exhibition
were part of the ‘Democracy 2,500’ project, co-ordinated by Josiah Ober and Charles
Hedrick. These co-ordinators and the curators of the exhibition, Diana Buitron-Oliver and
John Mck Camp, were experienced academics open to debates and wide consideration of
the function of democracy in Athens. The conference papers were published in 1996.
Dēmokratia: A conversation on democracy, ancient and modern included different views
on the ‘birth’ of democracy, including an essay by Ian Morris that pushed the roots of
Athenian democracy back to huge changes that took place in Greek society in the eighth
century and the subsequent collapse of elitist ideology in the sixth century.12 A number of
essays thoroughly explored connections and differences between Athenian and American
democracy. For example, Martin Ostwald considered the meaning of citizenship ‘Greek
style and American style’ arguing that Athenian citizenship was ‘communal’ while
American citizenship is ‘individualistic’; while Robert W. Wallace considered the
interaction of the law, freedom and rights and contended that, among other issues, Athens
had few restrictions on personal freedoms and so ‘his personal freedoms were greater
than those of US citizens’.13 A number of essays also explored key conceptual terms and
their meanings that were relevant to Athenian democracy and modern democracy. For
example Kurt A. Raaflaub considers what was meant by ‘democratic equality’ in Athens
through exploring terms linked to isonomia, equality before the law, and isegoria,
equality of speech.14 Paul Cartledge in part responded to Raaflaub’s paper by looking at
the same terms and compared them to modern definitions of the word before looking at
what was going on in Greece aside from Athens.15 Other essays explored the social and
cultural world of Athens, including the triremes, the theatre and education. The final
essay by Philip Brook Manville argued that knowledge-based business organisations not
only could learn from Athenian democracy in their decision making processes, but
12
Ian Morris, ‘The Strong Principle of Equality and the Archaic Origins of Greek Democracy’, Ober and
Hedrick (eds.), Dēmokratia (1996), pp. 19-48.
13
Martin Ostwald, ‘Shares and Rights: “Citizenship” Greek Style and American Style’, Ober and Hedrick
(eds.), Dēmokratia (1996), pp. 49-61 and Robert W. Wallace, ‘Law, Freedom and the Concept of Citizens’
Rights’, Ober and Hedrick (eds.), Dēmokratia (1996), pp. 105-119.
14
Kurt A. Raaflaub, ‘Equalities and Inequalities in Athenian democracy’, Ober and Hedrick (eds.),
Dēmokratia (1996), pp. 139-174.
15
Paul Cartledge, ‘Comparatively Equal’, Ober and Hedrick (eds.), Dēmokratia (1996), pp. 175-185.
6
actually already functioned in that way through people’s greater desire for democracy in
the workplace. 16 In this way democracy is reliant on economic structures rather than
political ones. From Ober’s introductory remarks, it appears that this caused a great deal
of comment and Ober and Manville later published a book together on Business theory
and Athenian democracy in 2003. 17 This connection between business models and
Athenian democracy would appear to further support the ideological intertwining of
democracy and capitalism in the modern world that fed the celebrations of democracy in
the early 1990s.
Some of the same scholars who participated in Dēmokratia: A conversation on
democracy, ancient and modern later took part in Democracy 2500? Questions and
Challenges, which was held at the Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington DC in
September 1993. This conference was jointly organised by Ian Morris and Karl A.
Raaflaub and appeared to be a reaction to The Birth of Democracy exhibition and other
celebratory commemorations. Morris and Raaflaub held the conference due to four
concerns: 1. the interpretations of Kleisthenes and 508/7 BCE were formed purely by
contemporary concerns but that this was not recognised; 2. being consciously presentminded can lead to new insights; 3. recent debates in Classics, such as the Black Athena
debate led by Martin Bernal, have illustrated that there are dangers with the glowing
mythologizing of Greece; 4. the range of scholars involved as been too restrictive and
there needs to be interdisciplinary debate.18 The group involved in Democracy 2500? met
again in December 1993 to refine their points and exchange ideas and the as a result the
collection of papers is ‘more argumentative than what classicists usually publish’. 19
Morris and Raaflaub had themselves spoken at the conference linked to The Birth of
Democracy exhibition and Josiah Ober and Barry S. Strauss who both spoke at the earlier
conference took part in Democracy 2500?. There was therefore an interchange of ideas
between these different forums. What marked Morris and Raaflaub’s conference and
subsequent publication as different was their deliberate disavowal of celebratory talk
around democracy, ancient or modern.
The Greek Miracle was an example of an art blockbuster, albeit one with enormous
political significance. The exhibition may have attracted mixed and, even, hostile reviews
but it appeared to be popular with the public. The reviews suggest that at best it was an
over confident statement that was good to look at, at worst it was triumphalist
propaganda with nothing new to say. The Greek Miracle was symbolic of an international
diplomatic union between modern Greece and America as well as an ideological union
between ancient Athens and America. Slated as unscholarly and an uncritical celebration
16
Philip Brook Manville, ‘Ancient Greek Democracy and the Modern Knowledge-Based Organization:
Reflections on the Ideology of Two Revolutions’, Ober and Hedrick (eds.), Dēmokratia (1996), pp. 377399.
17
Josiah Ober and Philip Brook Manville, A Company of Citizens: What the World’s First Democracy
Teaches Leaders about Building Great Organizations (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2003).
18
Ian Morris and Karl Raaflaub ‘Introduction’, Morris and Raaflaub (eds.), Democracy 2500? (1998), pp.
1-9, p. 4.
19
Ian Morris and Karl Raaflaub ‘Introduction’, Morris and Raaflaub (eds.), Democracy 2500? (1998), pp.
1-9, p. 5.
7
of democracy yet aesthetically handsome, The Greek Miracle at least attracted public
comment and there has not been another exhibition like it. The Birth of Democracy was
more scholarly, more low-key, and did not have the same impact. It pleased an emphasis
on the function of democracy and democratic practice rather than the aesthetics of
Athenian art. More importantly, it also acknowledged different debates and groups
traditionally marginalised in histories of Athenian democracy – slaves and women for
example – while still celebrating the ancient Athenians as democratic predecessors to
America. Added to this was the message that the function of law and the recording of
laws and decisions are crucial to function of archives. Both these exhibitions, directly and
indirectly, played a part in academic debates on democracy, the role of museum
exhibitions that took place throughout the year of the anniversary and beyond.
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Dēmokratia (1996), pp. 377-399.
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8
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9