Transcript

The Role of the Muse: John Boyer at TEDxCharlotte

[Music] well good afternoon so it only now occurs to me that all you have to do is help throw a free party and they invite you to be a speaker at tedex there had to been some reason I just remarkable series of speakers who have come before me we were only half joking earlier it's just so intimidating the remarkable work that we're all getting new insights to uh it is very humbling and so the second thought that occurs to me is what in God's name am I doing on this stage you know it's um the museum business is a it's an odd business in so many ways I think just about everybody has a strong opinion about what museums are and what they're supposed to do and why they're supposed to do that and they've been doing them for a long time and most of you are right in different ways but very often if you're lucky there's a larger story to tell and my story today comes in two halves the first half forgive me is a little history so you can consider that nap time and then the second half is about a new program that as of only this morning I'm happy to say that we're able to share with you little start uh this fall behind me you see one of the different images that constitute what a museum is in the minds of many a room filled with white male intellectuals during the Heyday of the Enlightenment this is the tribuna of the EIT from 1872 to 76 so think of it as a contemporary to the American Revolution and these are the Brethren of Thomas Jefferson and Franklin and others but this particular setting dedicated to the notion that the world of art can change us through Beauty and Myster storytelling accomplishment art has this profound relationship with us that can change everything if we're open to it this notion didn't really start though in the enlightenment it goes back further and when you're not sure entirely what to do as an individual or as an institution and I can assure you the Beckler got shot out of a cannon on January 2nd we were lucky to open there was so much to do in such a short period of time we were still thinking really about what's next and why and how will it matter it goes this far back ancient Greece the treasury of the Athenians at Deli from about 500 BC and I show you this image not only because of the architecture which I'll talk about in just a second but because of who lived here and they of course were the muses depending upon which version of ancient Greek history and mythology you want to embrace there are either three or nine Muses but they focused on three different forms music poetry and literature their role of course was to always be there for you no matter who you were no matter how far your pilgrimage may have taken you when you finally arrived at Deli you engaged the muses and you were changed you some great discovery about yourself about the world around you you were made better you were made whole so it goes all the way back to Deli and when there's a good idea stuck in your head you just can't get rid of it as you can imagine so that so many museums sense Deli since ancient Greece and Rome have held on to this language of classical architecture whether it's the Great Museum in Berlin which many consider the first Public Museum in the west a private Royal collection given to its province in a spectacular building in the classical order or the Great British museum which was founded organized the the basic principle goes back to 1753 and this wonderful building of course erected at the beginning of the 19th century reinforced this model architecturally and ultimately intellectually that we follow to this day whether it's the National Gallery uh from the 1930s and its sprawling partner by imp which I would argue is a classical building in its own right all of them go back to ancient Greece well the great pilgrimage of course was to the Acropolis if you were lucky enough and if you were welcome and when you got to the bottom of the hill there was this remarkable series of stairs very arduous in their flight and when you finally got to the top but before you could enter the sacred ground you got to the Gateway the great propa which had inside of it what a museum there were pictures of great battles of the Athenians and sort of ancestor worship before you can engage the most sacred of moments in all of Athens you had to pass through a room filled with art and beneath a capital like this one as it was Illustrated in a book by of all people luser the great Swiss French architect one of the titans of modernism um he was so deeply in love with and intimidated by the Acropolis that he couldn't help but show multiple images of its buildings over and over again in a book he called towards an architecture translated in English as towards a new architecture and he felt that ancient Greece was tied to this kind of Arcane mathematical rigor that defines all of us as individuals are setting in nature the best of our systems that we create which he called the modular and this is an image also from that book which was then finally picked up by one of his acolytes Mario bota if you look down at the bottom of that image next to the entranceway you see that b himself when he was designing our building your building he too turned to the modular which brings us back to coru which takes us back to ancient Greece all the way back to the muses please don't think of this building as anything other than modern and neoclassical because it is that column is celebrated for some reason so that brings us back to what do we expect out of these museums if one of the basic fundamental tenants was the notion of transformation derived from a relationship with the muses and how do we do that here a great painting from the end of the 19th century of the uh Salon Cor the great Square Room at the Lou shows one person looking at one little painting down at the bottom as though that were the ideal way to engage Works in a great space like this and in many ways they're right here's another image from the same period of an isolated visitor lost in this great Temple of artk it doesn't always work out that way for us I think we know and the French the French knew that going back to the 1840s at one of the annual will sellon for um for art at the Lou here too remember this image in those great vaults because we're going to see it again later so you never know who you're going to be with or what kind of experience you're going to have but the optimum is to try to engage that work that will touch you in some way I have two images by Thomas eens because this is the second half of the story and thinking about our institutional priorities what are we going to do next and with all the different things we can do you've got to be so selective you have to be so careful with the precious assets that we've been given as an institution and that the community continues to share with us this of course the Gross Clinic from 1875 by Thomas ekens and here we see what medicine was like in Philadelphia at its height 15 years later we see him painting the the um agu clinic and suddenly it's a whole new world of hygiene of Science of cleanliness and so in these two images the Arts are now telling us about changes in science science is informing art and what if we could turn that around What If instead art can inform science not too long ago we came across this article in obscure Journal formal art observation training improves medical students visual diagnostic skills and for about the last nine months we've been working with two of the authors there um sha kosin and Alexa Miller to try to advance the same kind of program here what they've done is over an extensive period about 10 months they take a series of 24 medical students and work with them at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston where they have these young physicians at the earliest stage of their career looking at works of art some of them maybe had never done it before at least not knowingly and so they try to improve their visual Acuity that's the main point of this the second half of each session they work through different kinds of medical diagnostic issues they read x-rays they talk about patient visits and at the end of the initial year what produced this study was 24 students took a deep examination oral and written and 36 other students at the same stage in their career but who did not go through it took the same test and what they discovered was on average a 38% increase in the diagnostic skills of these young doctors so by looking at works by Paul Goan they began to really think more closely about color and luminescence in a piece like this by Edvard monk believe it or not they were talking about contour and then they were studying X-rays of pulmonary patients a piece like Yan Steen uh they were the 12th night from the 17th century they were learning about different kinds of ailments that are derived from too much eating and drinking so they were looking at the faces of these figures to try to learn how to see these things with Jackson Pollock it informed their abilities to look at your skin in der derat ological diagnosis in a work like this the Lincoln sisters even cranial and nerve issues and then finally with Mona's fabulous Le japanes the notion of balance and imbalance in neurological patients so they've discovered that doctors can do a much better job now if they can engage these Works in a way that is serious meaningful and consistent and so that's what we're going to start doing this next fall here at the Beckler with the Carolina's Health Care System working in tandem with the Harvard Medical School and uh Harvard University with our first class of students everybody in this room has some story about a moment of diagnosis in their lives I trust that in the vast majority of those cases everything went well you felt fortunate you were lucky it's tough being a doctor especially now rushed constantly always being second guest by the newest forms of technology less and less time in the examination room to read somebody's face to hear their voice to look at their skin to read their eyes to watch them walk it gets harder and harder to do that human contact the program at Harvard underscores the importance of actual face-to-face diagnosis and saving the lives of many and I could never have imagined that the assets that we have at the Museum could make a big difference in the ability of these young doctors to engage their patients more successfully so what do we do this this is a fabulous image from the r Romantic Period showing that same image of the Lou the large Gallery with all those people and the soldiers but now in its ruined and romantic State this is a Folly that actually was embraced for the longest time that it was enough for the individual artist on their own to engage these wonderful Works in solitude and what we know now is that instead The Works that we have in the collection are instruments for improvement in the classrooms with Scientists with Physicians we would be remiss and we would put ourselves at Peril if we didn't exploit every opportunity in front of us so wish us well in the next time a couple of years from now you find yourself in an examination room with your doctor just hope that they had the chance to take the course at the Beckler Museum thank you