Moving the Barnes: No Hobson's choice

Moving the Barnes:
Not a Hobson's choice

GRESHAM RILEY

Thomas Hobson (1544-1631), who rented horses in Cambridge, England, gained lexical fame by offering his customers only the horse nearest the stable door. Accordingly, the term “Hobson’s choice” came to define an apparently free choice that is really no choice at all. Centuries later Henry Ford, a disciple of Hobson, promoted his Model T Ford by inviting customers to “choose any color so long as it’s black.”

Today, in Philadelphia, opponents of the court-approved relocation of the world-famous Barnes art collection from Merion to Center City attempt to justify their opposition by offering the public a Hobson’s choice. According to Robert Zaller in his most recent posting on this website (“Why the Barnes is important”), the Barnes collection “stands or falls” on the basis of its Merion location. The Barnes collection, Zaller writes, “cannot be replicated or reconstructed. It can only be preserved or destroyed. The choice is now ours.”

I submit that this is really no choice at all. In fact, defining the issue in this manner is a gross simplification, because there are other alternatives. The Barnes collection can be both preserved and relocated.

How? The first step is to recognize the fallacy in the New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl’s admonition (quoted approvingly by Zaller) that “altering so much as a molecule of one of the greatest art installations I have ever seen would be an aesthetic crime.”

Maybe so, maybe not.

Schjeldahl’s admonition thrusts us willy-nilly into the complex issue of personal and institutional identity: Under what circumstances does a thing lose its identity and become something different, and when does it remain the same? More specifically, how can a collection (or indeed an individual or institution) retain its identity as the world changes around it?

What Hume had to say

Philosophers and other scholars have pondered this topic over the centuries. In A Treatise of Human Nature (Vol. 1), the 18th-Century Scottish philosopher David Hume argued persuasively that neither objects (like ships) nor vegetables nor animals (like oak trees and humans) lose their identities in the midst of radical change. About ships: “A ship, of which a considerable part has been changed by frequent reparations, is still considered as the same; nor does the difference of the materials hinder us from ascribing an identity to it. The common end, in which the parts conspire, is the same under all their variations….” And about vegetables and humans: “An oak that grows from a small plant to a large tree is still the same oak, though there be not one particle of matter or figure of its parts the same. An infant becomes a man, and is sometimes fat, sometimes lean, without any change in his identity.”

For Hume, the key to preserving identity lay in maintaining a “common end or purpose,” not conserving each and every plank in the deck of a ship or every cell or molecule in the vegetable or animal. This insight brings us naturally to the issue of whether or not to relocate the Barnes collection.

Three things that matter most

As I argued in my previous article on this topic, “The Case for Moving the Barnes,” the important issues to decide are what objectives in the Barnes Foundation’s mission are most fundamental in Hume’s sense of defining a “common end or purpose.” I continue to believe that in the case of the Barnes, these common ends are: (1) implementation of Albert Barnes’s distinctive philosophy of arts education; (2) preservation of his distinctive installation of his collection; and (3) primary focus on the working-class publics whom Barnes intended as the beneficiaries of his idiosyncratic pedagogy. So long as these objectives are honored and implemented, the identity and integrity of the Barnes collection will be preserved, no matter the other changes that might occur.

Zaller would have us believe that art museums and public trust collections like the Barnes differ in that the former are “dynamic entities” and the latter are “permanent repositories of art.” Even if we accept this distinction (which strikes me as spurious), it fails to address the fact that the Barnes collection’s current Merion location frustrates the achievement of the Barnes Foundation’s most important goals.

But in fact the Hobson’s choice posed by Zaller (“Be preserved or be destroyed”) is misleading. Trust collections are no less susceptible to the effects of time than museums. The issue is not to fear change or attempt to freeze time, but rather to master time by preserving identity throughout the vicissitudes of change. The way to achieve this is to stay focused on mission—most important, what is central to the organization’s mission.

Something would be lost, yes, but....

I am pleased that Zaller agrees that opponents of the Barnes collection’s relocation need to address the issues I raised in my earlier article. In turn, I agree with Zaller that proponents of the move, of whom I am clearly one, need to concede that something would be lost in the relocation. The something lost, however, would not be anything central to the Barnes Foundation or its mission. What would be lost is the location of the mansion in which the collection is currently housed, surrounded by its gardens and arboretum.

To be sure, these particular features cannot be replicated by simply planting more trees at a new site on the Parkway. On the other hand, to elevate the relationship of exterior flora to the mansion that houses the art to the same level of importance as the spatial relations among the paintings and the different rooms to one another is to insist upon a Hobson’s choice. The Philadelphia public, which has a vested interest in the Barnes Trust, deserves better.

Nobody I know, including the Pew Charitable Trusts and its leaders. wishes to see the Barnes collection “lose [its] specific character and become simply another capital asset,” as Zaller writes. At issue is exactly what defines the collection’s “specific character” and how this “character” might be preserved over time. The answer, it seems to me, is not to attempt vainly to stop time by seeking some kind of romantic/mythical permanence. Rather, as David Hume saw so clearly, the task should be to seek clarity about goals and purposes that allow institutions to retain their identities while all else about them changes.


Gresham Riley ([email protected]) is president emeritus of Colorado College (Colorado Springs, Col.), former president of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and a professor of philosophy who is currently engaged in an extended research project on the topic of evil. He lives in Old City in Philadelphia.


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