Mikhail Piotrovsky. Why does the museum need expansion?

This year saw the 30th anniversary of Mikhail Piotrovsky becoming director of the Hermitage. The intervening years have brought many events that inevitably had an effect on museum life. The head of one of the largest museums in the world speaks about relations between the custodians of the eternal and the public, about admirers and ill-wishers, and about the role of the latest technologies.

– Mikhail Borisovich, the museum’s mission in the life of society, its tasks – have they changed over these 30 years?

– The mission is the same – to preserve historical and aesthetic memory, to pass it on to other generations.

The task in these years has been to preserve the Hermitage as a model of the classic encyclopaedic museum. And in doing so to preserve everything that today makes up the concept of the Hermitage: imperial traditions, the history of the revolution and the evacuation, the history of the purchases and sales, the scandals around the museum, the struggle for the old art and the new…

To accomplish that much had to be changed. The Hermitage expanded, became a museum that sets the world fashion, introduced the practice of creating open storage facilities and “satellite” centres as part of an integrated system. It’s a known fact that when they were creating the Louvre in Abu Dhabi, they looked to our experience. The Hermitage has become a public forum.

Right now, protest actions are being carried out in museums around the world on various grounds. One gets the feeling that there you can do anything you like. Our museum is a public place: it decides for itself what should take place on its premises. New forms of involvement in the life of the community do not make it an appendage to someone’s social life.

The museum has become more active. it is on the cutting edge from the point of view of the latest technologies, but not in order to conform to some sort of standard. You have to take the habits of the new audience into consideration and speak with them in a language to which they are accustomed, but speak about what you want to say.

– You said that the audience has changed. In what ways?

– The audience has become more diverse. The pandemic changed a lot of things. Before it, in museums around the world the main visitors were tourists, mainly in groups. The numbers were in the millions, and everyone sought to achieve that. Both here and at the Louvre, people came in droves. Tourists do of course see something, do take things in, but it was a walk around to tick a box. It left no opportunities for the individual viewer for whom the museum is not one entry in a list of places to visit, but the chance to gain a special, out-of-the-ordinary impression.

Now we do not have the crowds, although tourists are coming. Many want to have a guided tour. They need to be taken around the museum, especially those coming for the first time. It turns out that many are coming to the Hermitage for the first time. There are no few people able to walk around the museum and find peace of mind – many individual visitors, people with children, those who come as couples. They get the kind of pleasurable experience that previously was only available in the depths of winter.

Thirty years ago, the times were different. The Hermitage stood half-empty. there were fewer visitors than there are now. I was trying to explain to people that it was a splendid time to visit the museum with children. They can sit on the floor, quietly examine the ceilings and the pictures... Now, too, that opportunity’s there. I don’t know how long it will last.

During the pandemic, we had tens of millions of visitors online. We value them. That was difficult to organize. Our colleagues’ enthusiasm helped. Many people who will never come to Saint Petersburg in person, were able to get to know the Hermitage through the Internet.

At the same time, though, the number of “couch visitors” also increased. They are not tourists, who do come all the same, do buy tickets. Couch visitors look without grasping what a complex organism the museum is. They are used to glossy magazines where everything has to be immaculate, to cinema and TV. They get aggressive, demanding to know why the light is glaring off a painting that they are viewing during an online tour.

They cannot grasp the difference between a tour guide who puts things in a way that everyone can understand and a major specialist speaking about their own research work. It’s a different genre, intended for a different audience. It happens that someone sitting on the couch doesn’t like the opinion that’s being expressed.

Mediation is popular nowadays – an interactive kind of tour where there is a conversation between the specialist and the visitors. There’s the opportunity to get into a discussion

Inclusion brings people into museum life who were previously cut off from it. For those with hearing difficulties, there are tours in sign language. For those with impaired vision, special lighting, three-dimensional images. In the halls of Classical Antiquity, we have installed sculpture that people can touch. All of that provides additional opportunities for the museum to interact with visitors.

The modern-day audience is diverse and more aggressive. They live to a significant degree in the social media, where it is possible to display aggression without consequences. That is a reality that needs to be taken into account. However, the principle that “the customer is always right” does not apply in a museum. Some reactions come unexpectedly. Lectures in English or Italian suddenly arouse angry responses from our own compatriots – what business does a Russian museum have to go telling things to foreigners?

New technologies help the Hermitage perform its function as a world-ranking global museum. Today all our exhibitions are in the cloud, so that people can see and understand how active life is going on in Russia despite sanctions and isolation

– I should like to expand on your idea of the museum as a forum. Why does the museum need to go beyond its walls? Is it a means of influencing the life of the city, to attract greater attention?

– The Hermitage has never been short of attention, apart from a period 30 years ago when all museums were neglected. It is more a means of exerting influence. I often repeat that the museum has things that it would be useful for the world around to take on board. The museum is a good-natured institution, kinder than society. It has an economy that is not founded on profit. It does not simply show things, but engages in a dialogue of cultures, taking a stance against xenophobia. It is a way of life that unites different eras and cultures. We want to take what to the museum does out into the world, into people’s lives. That is why we try to hold what are more than purely museum events.

The Hermitage’s forum is the ground floor of the General Staff building, which is a venue for musical performances, exhibitions, a day of children’s books, presentations of the cultures of different countries and of charitable foundations...

– The Hermitage “embraces” Palace Square. On the one side there’s the Winter Palace, on the other the General Staff building. Even the [Alexander] Column has been transferred to the museum. The museum has been fighting for many years for a special status and rules in respect of Palace Square. How do you rate those efforts?

– It’s a constant struggle, as in many other cases. We are always fighting against vandals, with people who like to climb on the roofs. We create barriers. The square does attract people. One of our vice governors at some point said that the square is an empty space – in order to put something on there, people don’t need to agree with the traffic police and obtain a permit, they only need to come and get on with it. And the fact that that makes the square ugly is no-one’s concern.

A piece of bad luck helped. After the arch of the General Staff caught fire as the result of a badly organized celebration on the square, the a basic set of rules for Palace Square were introduced. They do exist. Many things are not permitted on the square. Almost all events are agreed with the Hermitage. The Scarlet Sails celebration [for school leavers] can be held there, as well as the Day of the City, but there just need to be some sort of restrictions. The ideal event is a military parade: they march across and go away. The most terrible thing is when the square has structures built all over it. Worse still when several companies want to do something there at the same time. One lot want pictures on the façade, another lot to build a palace, at third to stage something… we do try to regulate that. There is a special person responsible for the entrance zone on the square, who is constantly trying to get people to build things quickly, at night, if possible, and quickly take them away again.

It is important to get people to perceive Palace Square not as an empty space, but a special one on which the Hermitage stands, the headquarters of the military district and the former headquarters of the imperial guards, as well as the Alexander Column. A sacred place, not simply a city square. Our conceptions of this place are gradually getting adopted.

– A question about museum expansion. The Russian Museum has its palaces. The Hermitage has the General Staff building, the Menshikov Palace, the Staraya Derevnya Restoration and Storage Centre. Why does the museum need expansion?

– We have a concept of the Greater Hermitage and a hierarchy of access to the collections. The museum’s expansion is based on the idea that the collection should be accessible to people. It is impossible to exhibit everything in one place. That is why we are creating Hermitage centres and making open storage facilities. The complex in Staraya Derevnya is the equivalent of the Hermitage on Palace Square.

Another reason is that museums are indeed cramped. They are short of space. All museums worldwide are asking for money to construct buildings. It is not difficult to put up a new building. Architects are doing it all around the globe. But then it starts: huge museums with the lights burning, custodians sitting around, support staff. A person can spend a maximum of three hours in a museum, a little more if they eat there. So, you have a problem: a huge museum that’s half empty. The drive for visitor numbers begins.

A museum is the stocks, restoration, research and part of the items exhibited in the main display. Expansion is needed in order to show the collections and have good working conditions. We are opening repositories accessible to the public, with admittance to the restoration workshops.

Part of museum expansion is exhibitions. Any exhibition outside of one’s own premises is a difficult business. It’s always expensive, risky, involving a thousand rules, agreements, guarantees... The point of it is to share the collections and to tell people about Russian culture, about how western art came to Russia, about Catherine the Great and Peter I, about the Russian revolution, the incorporation of the Crimea, the avant-garde, the icon, our rulers’ collecting activities... thanks to the exhibitions that we put on together with the Pushkin Museum and Tretyakov Gallery, Shchukin and Morozov became the most famous art collectors in the world. They collected splendid pictures, which is a good thing in itself, but by doing so they influenced the evolution of painting in France and in Russia.

That needs to be told about everywhere. Exhibitions were held around the world – the Russian avant-garde, Classicism, icons, Fabergé... Exhibitions are Russia’s showcase.

A museum is not Disneyland. It gently teaches people that history can be close to the truth, that there can be not one single truth, but several, that cultures are different and that is a beautiful thing...

– The Hermitage has allowed contemporary art onto its premises. Is that a way of attracting young people?

– Contemporary art is a Hermitage tradition. Catherine II bought paintings by contemporary artists, and Nicholas I bought pictures by Caspar David Friedrich.

We present contemporary art within the context of the classical kind, and not as something exceptional. There are museums and galleries. The museum is history, the gallery is the present day. At one moment, it seemed that we were on the point of having a major museum of contemporary art and it would be sufficient for the Hermitage to hold an exhibition a year. No such museums have opened. The Hermitage had to take the work of public education upon itself – bringing things in, showing them, telling about them, provoking a scandal or a discussion. The Department of Contemporary Art was created so as to demonstrate that such art does not exist in isolation, that its sources lie in the past. We were successful in that, even when there were scandals. Now the situation is getting more complicated, but the latest technologies are coming to our aid. Contemporary works are themselves a part of those technologies. The art being created nowadays is highly technological. It can easily be reproduced, but also easily disappears.

– What has been the most difficult thing in the past 30 years?

– It was difficult when I realised that this is impossible, that can’t be done, that’s impermissible, that’s against the rules... It’s hard even now. Thirty years ago it was difficult to have museums forget what was going on outside of their walls and get on with work. Many people don’t remember. Let me remind them: there were no hopes, no clear prospect – that was only just forming. We opened up to the world, and it turned out to be a jungle where everyone was trying to eat us – joint ventures, criminals... The world was trying to buy up our collections. We found the means to resist and learned to live in an open world.

It was a difficult decision to bring out and show the displaced art. It was difficult to talk about the sales, to organize exhibitions of those works, bringing them back here. It was difficult to create exhibitions about Nicholas and Alexandra, about the revolution...

Now we have isolation, a cancel culture policy. We are concentrating, seeking new recipes and we’ll find them.

– The biggest success?

– Everything on the whole has been a success. Because we have managed to show that the Hermitage is the best museum in the world. We have preserved traditions, a body of staff that can still be called the Hermitage team. There have been moments when certain people ceased to be patriots of the Hermitage.

What is an indicator of success? For some people it’s acquiring a large number of enemies. That means they’re doing things right. The Hermitage has always irritated many people and still does. For some it’s too big, too conservative or too progressive... It is irritating, just like any successful person. But no other country in the world has a museum that is so loved.

The task is to preserve that reputation.

– You have many scholarly works to your credit. How do you find the time?

– The director of the Hermitage should be a “player manager”. I do not have much time, but I do try to pursue my oriental studies, as well as teaching at the oriental faculty, programmes of Islamic studies… I live an active life in the scholarly academic world.

Besides that, the museum is scholarship in itself. I write many forewords for exhibition catalogues. I do so when I have the dummy catalogue in my hands. I read and study it, then I write about what it seems to me my colleagues haven’t said, what they omitted to point out. I am trained as a scholar, a historian, a philologist. That’s important to me.

– What can you tell us about future plans?

– As I already said, we have found ourselves in a fresh crisis, so there can be no delay. We need to develop a strategy for life under these conditions.

We have completed the first stage of the Greater Hermitage project, created open storage facilities and, despite everything, new ones are being built. I am delighted to see how the walls of our library building are growing in Staraya Derevnya. Soon they will cut off the sunlight from Hermitage Square. Our centres abroad (Amsterdam and Venice) are on ice. We are developing the existing centres in Russia – Vyborg, Kazan, Yekaterinburg, Omsk, Vladivostok, Nalchik. We are holding Hermitage Days across the country. This year there have been eleven such events. We do not have branches. These centres are not subdivisions of the Hermitage; they are independent satellites. We provide the content; they develop in their own ways. The result is positive.

The next stage of the Greater Hermitage is new technologies. In isolation we will need their help to create a parallel museum that will be visible everywhere.

We will overcome the difficulties and bring up a new generation.

The Hermitage is a conservative museum. People work here for a long time. It is not a charitable institution – we know how to squeeze the most out of people. Now, though, the baton needs to be passed on, across several generations at once.

This material was published in the Sankt-Petersburgskie Vedomosti newspaper, №222 (7306) on 25 November 2022 with the headline “Why does the museum need expansion?”

The original text can be found here: https://spbvedomosti.ru/news/culture/mikhail-piotrovskiy-zachem-muzeyu-nuzhna-ekspansiya/