Global Museum: Antwerp's opportunity

How does one design a global museum?  Any museum that is not a website, needs to contain its collection within a building and make sure to secure funding from a specific political entity, which usually means attracting the right kind of influential audience.

The new MAS in Antwerp has all the holdings of a museum about globalization and its history, but it has not put them all together into a coherent form. The MAS holds diverse collections brought together from many smaller museums.  The topics range from paintings and porcelain, the history of Antwerp, anthropological artifacts from tribal peoples in the Pacific, African and the Americas, the history of shipping, traditional folk culture in Flanders. 

How did the MAS end up with this hodge-podge?  It does not take too much imagination to realize that the content of these collections reflects the interests of Antwerp's ruling elite during the nineteenth-century. Some of the upper class wanted to demonstrated their refined taste by collecting European decorative arts, others were filled with civic pride and another group traveled the world.  All three could be spun together into a narrative of globalization.  If Antwerp were not such a major port, we would hardly have found a collection of Indonesian and African masks in the MAS.  Why not link the presence of these collections with Antwerp's colonial and global economic history? 

As the exhibits now stand, the history of the city is told compellingly in terms of the religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Golden Age as art historians sometimes still call it.  This historical narrative structures the most coherent and exciting part of the MAS, but with a broader and longer view, the history of Antwerp would easily be placed within the context of colonialism and the spread of European capitalism across the globe.  The curators have all read Ferdinand Braudel and Immanuel Wallerstein. Thus, it would not be so difficult to link Antwerp's history within the Spanish Empire and the later nineteenth-century anthropological collections.  But such a curatorial approach would require presenting Antwerp as more than just the gorgeous sacrificial victim of the Eighty Years War.  It would require the museum to address the question of nationalism, Flemish, and as well French and German.  It is not so hard to see how one group of nineteenth-century collectors would become fascinated with African art, while another would focus intensely on Flemish village life.   Domestic ethnography is the nationalist response to colonial expansion.  Finally, the museum's vast collection on Antwerp shipping provides the obvious link between all the other collections.  

Why not turn the museum into an investigation of Antwerp's global past?   The answer surely has everything to do with Belgium's awkward political present.   The conflicts between Walloons and Flemings are so exhausting that most Belgians just discreetly refer to them for fear of unleashing yet another ideological cavalcade.    This reticence, this desire not to wade into the broader terms of Belgian political history, stymies museums such as the MAS who are obliged to present more than their local heritage.