Jim Wilson/The New York Times

Liberace modeled his outfits on styles associated with European royalty

April 25, 2005
CONNECTIONS
Shall I Compare Thee to the King's Library?
By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN

LAS VEGAS - It might seem unfair to King George III, but recently, as I surveyed Liberace's collection of vintage automobiles, fur coats, feathered capes and antique pianos in the Liberace Museum here, I thought of the King's Library in the British Museum. In that great, neo-Classical hall - the oldest room in the world's first national museum - sea shells, astrolabes, ancient coins and chronicles of exploration fill shelves built nearly two centuries ago to house the king's 65,259 books.

Why compare such a magisterial accomplishment, which is still reflected in the hushed grandeur of these recently restored rooms, with a collection that is mostly kitsch, assembled by a gaudy pianist for the sake of fans and tax deductions and housed in a shopping mall in 1979? What do 18th-century collectors like the king, who spent about a fifth of his private income on his library, have to do with the highest-paid pianist of the 20th century, who thrilled his fans by outfitting a Volkswagen Beetle with a custom Rolls-Royce hood to carry his rhinestone-studded capes off stage?

In part, I confess, the comparison is a provocation. But it is just slightly more extreme than comparisons that have become commonplace in recent museum theory. The argument goes something like this: the "traditional museum" has extraordinary authority and prestige. But why should it? Its stature has been achieved primarily through the expenditure of money and the exercise of power. And such dominance must now end.

In one recent anthology, for example, "Reinventing the Museum," the editor, Gail Anderson, presents a chart showing a "paradigm shift" between the "traditional museum" and the "reinvented museum." The traditional is elitist; the reinvented, equitable. The traditional is ethnocentric; the reinvented, multicultural. In moving from one model to the other, "paternal" governance is replaced by "mutual respect," a "voice of authority" is replaced by "multiple viewpoints," and a "collection driven" museum is replaced by an "audience focused" one.

The British Museum may even be the archetypal "traditional museum," opening in 1759 "for the improvement, knowledge and information of all persons." Strangely enough, the Liberace Museum actually follows that model. It even adopts the traditional museum's manners, paying homage to its patron and subject, presenting the Wisconsin-born virtuoso, Wladziu Valentino Liberace (1919-1987), as "the epitome of the American dream." The capes and cars are displayed with more care than the antique pianos, but the aura of traditional reverence is intact.

Critics of the traditional museum, though, would see this emulation as a challenge to traditional claims. It is an ironic imitation: the Liberace Museum finally rejects the elitist "voice of authority" and is "audience focused." In that sense, it is "reinvented."

Its challenge may even be partly justified. After all, it is not as if the traditional museum is so sacred and otherworldly that it is untouched by vulgar concerns. Collections confer power and prestige. The British Museum grew out of private collections that reflect glory on the collectors. The king's book collection, acquired by the museum in 1823, shed its splendor even on royalty.

In fact, the king's books may have been as important to the royal reputation as Liberace's 1972 Bradley GT painted with flecks of genuine gold was to his. Liberace even nurtured a kind of cartoon extravagance echoing the indulgences of royalty. "Why don't I step out and get into something more spectacular?" he used to say as the crowds roared. Surely George III was not less aware of the benefits of public display.

Both also invoke past authorities to affirm their accomplishments. The King's Library rooms, which opened in 1828 in the new home being built for the British Museum, were designed by Sir Robert Smirke to pay resplendent homage to Greek mythology and aesthetic ideals. They invoked the honored past to affirm the collection's power in the present.

Liberace did the same. His kitschy outfits were based on styles associated with European royalty - more 18th-century French, perhaps, than 18th-century English. And he, too, had his pantheon: his trademark candelabrum was copied from Hollywood's hokey 1945 biography of Chopin, "A Song to Remember."

Moreover, neither the British nor the Liberace Museum is free from self-celebration. The Liberace Museum, one of the most popular tourist spots in Las Vegas, is a self-built monument to a pianist who was at once a talented musician and a tasteless sentimentalist. Liberace knew he was vulgar - that became his selling point - laughing, as he famously put it, all the way to the bank. His museum is a tribute to luxurious populism - Rolls-Royce hoods fitted atop Volkswagens.

As for the British Museum, it too had promotional presuppositions. It staked nationalist claims, the museum's very existence testifying to the wealth and breadth of the British Empire. There was an explicit set of ideas governing its displays and reflected in the king's collection as well. Though the books were relocated to a new home in the British Library in 1998, as if in recompense, the King's Library rooms now host a permanent exhibition about those ideas: the 18th-century English Enlightenment.

But now we are brought up short. Regardless of how tempting it might be to spin out additional parallels that show the traditional museum to be as vulgar as Liberace's and as worthy of being displaced from its superior position as the paradigm proclaimers suggests, the comparison falls apart. And this is something that polemics against the traditional museum have yet to address fully.

For the ideas of the Enlightenment were not just another set of beliefs that a small group of wealthy people decided to champion. These concepts gave birth to the very idea of the museum. The king's collection was not just a set of volumes collected for amusement or prestige, but rather an attempt to assemble a resource of universal reach, to survey the scope of human knowledge. Samuel Johnson advised the king on his acquisitions. John Adams, one of the king's colonial American nemeses, thought the collection was assembled "with perfect taste and judgment."

And now its founding ideas are put on display. The Enlightenment exhibition shows how, in the 18th century, reason and exploration became founding principles of the new museum. Excavation and experimentation became the guiding methods; collections of coins and rocks and potsherds and fossils and texts were attempts to make sense of the world.

The exhibition points out - with few hints of defensiveness - how these ambitions were themselves colored by ideas of the time. But what it also implies is that the Enlightenment - the reasoned attempt to understand the world in all its multivariate complexity - defined the project of the museum itself.

Over time, of course, interpretations were transformed. Collections were reclassified or disbanded. But the fundamental motivation remained. This was not simply to showcase wealth, broadcast power or glorify the patron. It was to discover the foundational principles underlying nature and human complexity: to examine differences, explore multiple perspectives and communicate to a public. Multicultural. Varied. Communicative. Sounds a lot like the principles of the "reinvented museum."

But contemporary "reinventions" often make the museum more narrow and restricted. And as the King's Library shows, the traditional museum hardly needs reinvention. Within it, even Liberace can find a place.


Connections, a critic's perspective on arts and ideas, appears every other Monday.

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- posted by Michael P. Whelan @ 3:19 PM