Why Do Colleges Have So Much Art?

Campus museums are home to prodigious exhibits and installations that blur the line between academics and civics.

Featured on theatlantic.com

Look up at the University of California, San Diego, and there may be a small blue house teetering on the roof of a building—a dramatic piece of contemporary artwork. In Austin, the University of Texas raised nearly $22 million for a one-of-a-kind Ellsworth Kelley chapel, while a bold, new 41,000-square-foot contemporary-art institute is underway at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) in Richmond. Public or private, rural or urban, college museums are tackling ambitious projects like never before, promoting academic curators—who were once part of a sleepier, insular art world—to be lead actors on the cultural stage.

But not everyone agrees that school museums should compete with their mainstream counterparts or that students necessarily benefit more from having art of such magnitude as opposed to more modest collections. The ongoing art wave raises questions about whether college museums have outlived their primary purpose as educational institutions and perhaps now serve a different function in both academic and art circles. The historian Dominic Green recently critiqued the “worldwide arms race among museums,” with each trying to outdo the other. Green was referring to the “grandiosity” of the Tate Modern in London and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, but the same sentiment applies to campus art: How much is too much?

Historically, college museums have called themselves “teaching museums”—in other words, places where students can experience objects and artifacts first-hand, as opposed to merely studying them in textbooks or online. Campus collections were meant to push conversations not only in art-history courses, but across disciplines and departments, too. And often, they still do—while filling a cultural gap in college towns. A recent exhibit at the University of Virginia’s Fralin Museum of Art titled Andy Warhol: Icons, for instance, showed, as the interim co-director Jordan Love described, numerous, epic Warhol silkscreens of figures from Saint Apollonia (the patron saint of dentistry) to Annie Oakley, Liza Minnelli, and Marilyn Monroe, tracing the historical concept of the celebrity. “The Fralin is one of two fine-art museums in Charlottesville,” Love said. “We take pride in providing visitors with the opportunity to view works by world-renowned artists, without having to go to Richmond or D.C.” As a teaching tool, this show asked the university’s sociology, English, history, and media students: From medieval times to the age of Instagram, how do icons gain their status?

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