Cover Story : Your Ticket to Eternity : Commentary: As symbols of lasting value, art museums continue to grow in popularity. But the notion of the institutions themselves is changing, for better and for worse.

Not long ago, the National Endowment for the Arts released some survey results that turned a lot of heads. It seems that in 1997, the most recent year for which statistics are available, an astounding 68 million American adults made a visit to an art museum. If that remarkable figure is correct, it accounts for slightly more than 1 out of every 3 adults in the population.

What’s more, each of those adults made an average of 3.3 trips to an art museum. These numbers represent an amazing fourfold increase since a 1991 survey prepared for the Assn. of Art Museum Directors. The steady decline in already minimal art education in America’s beleaguered public schools might lead one to suspect the numbers would be going the other way, yet even accounting for survey discrepancies, the reverse apparently is true. Compared to performing arts such as classical music and theater, art museums are by far the most popular choice of Americans attending arts activities today.

As the 20th century closes, what does the appearance of these unprecedented numbers mean? The expanding popularity of art museums signals a profound alteration in the place these institutions traditionally have occupied in American life. Once a touchstone for the specialized discipline of art history, art museums are becoming something they’ve never been before: a form of mass entertainment.

Talk to different people, both within the art museum field and without, and you’ll get lots of different explanations for the phenomenon. A few are idealistic, most are practical.

In an increasingly fragmented and materialistic world, the idealists suggest, people are hungry for something they can’t get from going to the movies, surfing the Net, shopping at the mall or spending the day at an amusement park. Press them on exactly what that “something” is, and after vague gestures in the direction of intangibles such as authenticity of experience or spiritual renewal, voices start to trail off.

Pragmatic answers are more numerous. Typically, an art museum ticket costs less than an evening at the opera or a theater matinee. Families can attend, without the added expense of baby-sitters. Your time is your own at a museum, too, where you, not the 8 o’clock curtain or the two-acts-plus-intermission, can control the pace.

Art now gets fairly steady publicity in the general media--including otherwise art-unfriendly TV--thanks largely to astronomical sums paid for paintings and sculptures today. Museums offer multiple activities--restaurants, stores, lectures, films, children’s game rooms--that appeal to diversified audience expectations honed on the familiarity of suburban malls. Tourism is one of the largest and fastest-growing industries today, and museums, increasingly promoted by internal marketing departments and advertised by civic tourist agencies, are a natural for travelers in search of things to see and do.

The explanations go on. Which ones are correct? Take your pick.

Or, more probably, pick several or even all of them. Despite our fondness for the myth of the magic bullet, rarely if ever does a single cause explain a widespread social effect.

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Still, there is one common denominator that deserves special mention. In 1997, the same year represented by those NEA statistics, Philippe de Montebello, director of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, offered a pointed explanation for the public’s rising attraction to art museums--especially larger encyclopedic museums such as his own. His remarks, made in the keynote address at the convocation of the College Art Assn.’s annual conference, have been widely discussed in the museum field.

Aside from the real and significant pleasure to be had in contemplating wide varieties of wonderful works of art, De Montebello said, the public derives something quite specific from its museum pursuit. In a world of ever-shifting fashions, increasingly fast-paced change and constantly slip-sliding relativities, where today’s accepted truth is tomorrow’s disappointing fiction, people crave the security, confidence and stability that come from the museum’s implied promise--which is that the art inside represents enduring quality. What’s here today will not be gone tomorrow. A growing public expects to find at the museum some constant against which the relentless topsy-turviness of modern life can be tested.

“I am absolutely convinced of this,” De Montebello said.

I think he’s exactly right.

I also think it doesn’t matter that this commonly expected sense of “enduring quality” inside museums is itself mostly a fiction. Every art professional knows that museum collections are composed of objects that represent a wide range of quality and divergent, even contradictory values; they know that even our sense of what constitutes quality is anything but fixed. Some art holds its favored place in seeming perpetuity; other art falls from favor or gets rehabilitated or finds a new perspective from a hitherto unseen angle.

Still, every museum professional knows that--rightly or wrongly--the public takes for granted a bottom line, beneath which the works of art collected do not sink. Art collections are living organisms, yet our sense is that they at least hold out the possibility for fixed values that will outlast us. A museum is a repository. Through sheer force of institutional weight, the accumulated material fragments of the past create an anchor against the passing tumults of the day and the inevitability of social drift.

Recognition of this idea is as old as the century itself--albeit in a less than sanguine way. In 1909, Italian anarchist poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti published on the front page of a Parisian newspaper his Futurist manifesto, a linguistic machine-gun spray passionately denouncing all that stood in the way of a new social order for a new century. Celebrating speed, dynamism and violent change, Marinetti contrasted the accelerated pace of modern life with the massive burden of grand tradition represented by museums--tradition that, especially in Italy, with its innumerable layers of cultural sediment reaching back to antiquity, held the society back.

“We want to glorify war--the world’s only hygiene,” the poet thundered, courting the gathering storm of mechanized apocalypse that soon engulfed Europe in the Great War. “We want to destroy museums, libraries and academies of all kinds.”

The concept of the museum as a repository for established and enduring values is slightly different for institutions that specialize in contemporary art. Indeed, some regard the very idea of a museum devoted to contemporary art to be an oxymoron--an argument about established future consensus being projected onto a hunch about the unknowable present. In contemporary art museums, and in other specialized or encyclopedic museums with contemporary programs, the struggle over what will be remembered and how is more intense.

Not surprisingly, the dramatic change of the art museum into a form of mass entertainment is causing myriad stresses and strains in the way these institutions operate. Mass entertainment functions by different rules than art museums are used to--rules that, in fact, threaten to erase the very sense of enduring stability and deep, lasting connection to individual works of art that De Montebello identified as the art museum’s unique lure.

The most obvious example of the dilemma is the steadily enlarging prominence of the blockbuster exhibition in the last 20 years. Museums increasingly rely on them as a source of revenue, either through the direct income to be earned through ticket sales and the purchase of souvenirs in the shop, or through the expansion of a membership base that they can generate. Commercial considerations are always a necessary feature of prudent museum programming, but any honest museum professional can name shows for which commercial value was the primary or even sole consideration. When that happens, important, irreplaceable values embodied in the idea of not-for-profit institutions are jeopardized.

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More subtly, a diet of blockbusters changes perceptions and expectations on the part of a general audience. Common is the museum professional’s lament for permanent collection galleries that languish nearly empty of visitors, while temporary blockbusters are mobbed and long lines of curious patrons snake out to the street, waiting patiently to see widely publicized shows that, artistically speaking, can be less significant than what hangs every day in the permanent collection rooms next door.

Organizing shows in anticipation of vast public appeal is not inherently inappropriate. When safe blockbusters become the norm, though, and institutions rely on them to keep a larger general public coming through the doors, two troublesome prospects loom: The here-today, gone-tomorrow transitoriness of the blockbuster steadily erodes the fundamental idea of the museum as a repository; and, bored by the routine, the art public that forms the art museum’s core audience can be lost, damaging institutional credibility.

There’s no use pretending that the transformation of the museum into a vehicle of mass entertainment isn’t happening, and even less in wishing it away. Change is hard--but inevitable. Yet, neither is there any use in encouraging art museums to give up what they’ve always done best, in order to accommodate their newly evolving place in American society.

Rather than merely mimic the mass entertainment already out there--entertainment that is often emotionally coarse, intellectually vacant and commercially vulgar--museums have an opportunity to offer mass entertainment of a different order, one that will distinguish itself from the rest. Accomplishing the task will be no mean feat. To do it, museums will need to reinvent what mass entertainment has been so far--and to reinvent it in their own distinct image.

* COMING MONDAY: Art museums should be elitist--and free.

* TUESDAY: Billions for buildings, nothing for art?

Commercial considerations are always a necessary feature of prudent museum programming, but any honest museum professional can name shows for which commercial value was the primary or even sole consideration.