Journalism has been in true upheaval of late in response to the power of the Internet and its democratizing power, giving rise to a concurrent debate over journalistic authority. Alan Rusbridger, the editor of The Guardian of London, recently noted that the old order of business in journalism is now in tension with “a world in which many (but not all) readers want to have the ability to make their own judgments; express their own priorities; create their own content; articulate their own views; learn from peers as much as from traditional sources of authority.” In its more extreme forms, what Bill Keller of The New York Times has called the “wisdom-of- the-crowd view” sees professional journalism as elitist and alienating.

Substitute the world of art for that of professional journalism and you will see why I’m taking up this point. I am an advocate for many forms of democratization in museums: the opening up of museums to less experienced visitors and the sharing of the museum’s voice—suggesting that multiple readings of a work of art are possible, that individuals must ultimately find their own way to art, with our help—are enormously positive developments of the past thirty years. During these years works of art and the museum audiences have been placed on a more equal footing. We need not be wholly subservient to the idea of an unyielding work of art whose meanings are inviolate and unbending. Yet in art, as elsewhere, the power of the Internet and of the mass participation it enables run the risk of drowning out the value of expertise.

Is this a bad thing? What is to be feared about all of us making our own judgments? Leaving aside the impacts of these matters on politics (and on a nation’s governability), I believe there is much to be said for mind-opening expertise—distinct from stifling authority that leaves little place for participation. Expertise can be everything from a useful filtering tool—helping us understand and manage vast  amounts of information—to a civic good in which society benefits from a shared base of reliable information on the basis of which we can make informed judgments.

When it comes to art and architecture, we are all perhaps self-imagined experts—a reflection that art and architecture matter, that we all have a stake in the quality of our visual environment. But just as expertise is a good thing in brain surgery or bridge engineering, there is an important place for the expert when it comes to good design or great art. In the visual arts, an expert guide can help us sift out the mundane from that which is more likely to sustain close looking, or can lead us to deeper understandings we might not come to on our own. Separating the authentic from the forgery, whether in ancient American ceramics or Renaissance panel painting, is one such arena demanding expertise—and here at Princeton we are blessed with ten curators with hard-won expertise in their own fields. An expert guide can be essential in approaching works of art substantially alien to our own lived experience—a fourteenth-century ivory reliquary, for example, or a nineteenth-century African ritual mask—or art whose language is highly conceptual, or whose meaning demands detailed knowledge of context. That expertise need not eliminate the possibility of active participation if it is brought to bear in ways that allow for, or even foster, dialogue, informed dissent, and engagement.

My first undergraduate art history course was with one of the great art historians of his generation, Frederick Hartt, who not only wrote one of the classic (though Eurocentric) art history survey textbooks but was profoundly knowledgeable about the Italian Renaissance, his area of particular expertise. It was in this survey course that I began to imagine a life as an art historian, not because I was drawn to Hartt’s particular brand of art history, but because his knowledge, conviction, and personal relationship to the art he presented—the fruits of a lifetime of research, reflection, and close looking—helped me find my way into what could have been a bewildering new language. At Princeton, our curators—ranging from Kelly Baum investigating the challenges of contemporary Land Art to Cary Liu and Eileen Hsu helping us rediscover a forgotten Chinese ceramics workshop—are also acting as essential guides to the world of art and ultimately to the rewards of close looking.

James Christen Steward Director