Director's Letter Spring 2015

For many years—since at least the so-called “culture wars” of the 1980s and 1990s—art museums and cultural nonprofits have toggled between two arguments to justify public investment in the arts. The first is what I’ll term the intrinsic argument that the arts are good for us—that we are better people for considering great paintings or listening to stimulating concerts. Especially in economically challenged times, this argument is often seen as soft, as too purely reliant on emotion. The second is what I’ll term the extrinsic argument that investing in the arts is good for the economy. Increasingly solid data supports this, confirming how many billions of dollars the arts inject into the U.S. economy, how many millions of people are employed in the arts in the U.S., and so forth. But I’ve always been fundamentally dissatisfied by this argument: what does it say about the value we place on the arts if we must cite economics to justify them? When it comes to new investment, isn’t it likely that there are other sectors of the economy (energy? manufacturing?) that are better multipliers of investment?

Happily, a new kind of data is emerging that supports the intrinsic argument that engaging with the arts is good for us but that goes beyond the purely emotional appeal. Controlled studies are showing that students with an education rich in the arts have better grade point averages, score better on standardized tests in reading and math, and have lower dropout rates—findings that cut across all socioeconomic categories. Studies of brain function are revealing something we have intuitively suspected for a long time, namely that engaging with art activates areas of the brain that otherwise remain underutilized. Engaging in the act of close and sustained looking can, in a sense, make us smarter—or at least better at what we do by better using our brains. Some of these findings require extended periods of study—tracking the performance of students who visit museums against those who do not, over long periods of time. And most of the studies with which I am familiar have focused to date on primary school students, not least because their exposure to the arts is easier to track and monitor. But in the context of Princeton University, it is tantalizing to consider what the findings of such a study focused on the young adult brain might be. Much is made of the negative relative to that young adult brain—the effects of alcohol or drug consumption, for instance, while the brain is still developing. I would argue that it is time to consider rigorously the effects of positive stimuli such as sustained engagement with works of art.

In the last issue of this magazine, I wrote about the enduring importance of the humanities, a topic I will continue to consider in the future in the particular context of how an art museum can serve as a center for the arts and humanities and thus enrich human experience. Outcomes such as a deeper understanding of global cultures, an awakened empathy for others—people past and present whose life experience may be different from our own—and a fuller appreciation for the journey of life itself are among the benefits of the so-called universal museum in which I am interested. In a season in which we explore the role of images (photographs, film, and more) in the unmaking and remaking of the American city in the 1960s and 1970s, and in which we reveal the long-awaited new installation of our galleries of the art of the ancient Americas (among the nation’s best collections of this kind), these strengths and possibilities are amply on view in our own galleries.

Connecting these two phenomena—hard data supporting the benefits of close looking and the capacity for enriched understanding—suggests that the universal art museum is indeed positioned to be a singularly powerful center for learning. To be at once universal in scope and intimate in scale is an attribute of the Princeton University Art Museum that is nearly unique in American higher education—and may therefore make the experience we afford doubly potent. In a time when higher education as preparation for life is once again under assault, we would do well to consider the ways both old and new in which the art museum occupies an irreplaceable place on the college campus—and in public life.

James Christen Steward

Nancy A. Nasher–David J. Haemisegger, Class of 1976, Director