Comedian John Stewart. Creative Time president Anne Pasternak. New Museum curator Massiliano Gioni. These are some suggestions from our listeners for who should be the next director of the Brooklyn Museum. As the museum is looking for a new leader, WNYC is asking several experts — and our audience — what we want not only from a museum leader, but from museums in general.
In this segment, we dig into the job itself: What do museum directors do, anyway? We explored that question while touring The Bronx Museum of the Arts with its executive director Holly Block and with Stuyvesant High School arts teacher Leslie Bernstein.
Here are some of the highlights of the conversation.
On what the most important job of the museum director is.
Block: “To have a smile, and to fund raise big time,” she said. “As I often say, it’s the loneliest job in the planet in many ways, because you are always asking people for money, and you are always unhappily telling people they can’t do what they want to do.”
Bernstein: “Reach out to the public,” she said. “It’s important for people to know the options and what is available to them through the museum, and especially to try to educate kids in all sorts of ways.”
What do you love and hate about museums?
Block: “I love being in these kinds of environments,” she said. “What do I hate? The hardest for me is that they are truly underfunded.”
Bernstein: “For me personally, it’s a lot of visual overload, I almost always have a headache after a day at a museum,” she said laughing. “I, too, like the atmosphere. It’s just like a really nice, peaceful place to be, and you go and see things you didn’t expect to see necessarily.”
