“The Art of the Podcast” – Transcript

[INTRO/MUSIC PLAYING]

DEREK GILLMAN
There was also a discussion, there has been an ongoing discussion for years about who museums are for.

MAURICE BAYNARD
Welcome to Drexel’s 10,000 hours podcast. Our goal is to mine the stories behind our region’s innovators, inventors, and thought creators. We’ll be talking to experts in subjects from fashion to neuroscience to find out where their passion for work, and inspiration for ideas comes from. I’m your host, Maurice Baynard.

[SOFT MUSIC]

MAURICE
Derek Gillman is a distinguished teaching professor in Drexel University’s Westphal College of Media Arts and Design, and is the senior advisor to President John Fry for the university collections. He’s worked in museums all around the world, including the position as the executive director and president of the Barnes Foundation. He also would like you to know that he had a small hand in the Marvel Adventures headquarters, but we’ll get the next story later.

MAURICE
Who is your favorite artist?

DEREK
Paul Klee.

MAURICE
And why?

DEREK
I almost can’t tell you, because I liked Klee since I was about, must have been 13 or 14 when I first came across his work. Which is very sort of weird, to actually start liking somebody, and continue liking them until you’re sort of ancient and archaic.

MAURICE
What’s the story around you first running into Klee?

DEREK
So I know what it was. I was with my mother in an art store. I think we were in an art store. We might have been somewhere, like, one of those places that sell posters. So I remember, I was there looking for a birthday present for my brother.
Now I saw this Klee. And it was a round face, these oval eyes, and just fell in love with the picture. And from then on, I was hooked. I can never get tired of him. I say there are many artists in the world of whom I say, one is too many. But for me, you can never have too many Klees.

MAURICE
Can you draw a line directly from that experience as a young man, to what you ended up doing for a living?

DEREK
Yeah. I think so. Although it’s not a straight line. It’s quite a rather wiggly line.

MAURICE
So I’m excited to ask you about university.

DEREK
Yeah.

MAURICE
Where’d you go?

DEREK
I went to Oxford.

MAURICE
I love the way you say that, like you’re ashamed. It’s OK.

DEREK
It’s OK. It’s all right. Is it all right?
[LAUGHTER]

MAURICE
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So you get there?

DEREK
I get there. I’d always been sort of very evenly divided between the arts and sciences. And so I was beginning to think, no, I don’t want to be an artist after all. And so I persuaded to art schools to give me interviews at the end of the first year. And then I announced to my parents, I was going to leave Oxford and go to art school.

MAURICE
How did that go?

DEREK
Not well. I mean, there was no screaming or shouting, but otherwise not well. So it ended up with my father saying– which was clever. I must say, he was good parent. He said, I’ll pay you to go to art school after you finish Oxford. Cunning. Very cunning. Very cunning. I mean–

MAURICE
That’s a great strategy.

DEREK
–he might have been called on it, but he wasn’t. So back I went, and I changed Chinese. And your next question then I guess–

MAURICE
Is?

DEREK
–why did you change to Chinese?

MAURICE
That isn’t going to be my next question.

DEREK
Oh, good. OK. All right. Let’s do something else.

MAURICE
Yeah. Let’s.
[LAUGHTER]

MAURICE
I’d love to talk about, sort of like, after you left Oxford?

DEREK
After I finished my degree, I went to China for a year.

MAURICE
And how did you get to China?

DEREK
So that was, at the time, there was a British Council scholarship. And they paid for a number of, each year, for a number of students to go to China.

MAURICE
Do you feel like, at this point in your life, you have a direction, you know what you’re going to do? Did you know what you were going to be–

DEREK
No.

MAURICE
–when you grew up?

DEREK
No idea. I think, however, that by the time I graduated, because I’d done my special subjects in Chinese philosophy, and Chinese painting, that I knew I wanted to be in the arts somehow. So when I came back from China, those were the jobs I was looking for. And that was the point at which I felt I’d done five years of higher education, and probably I wasn’t going to call my father on the art school. So that was the clever bit on his part. But I got a job in an auction house. So that was–

MAURICE
So which auction house?

DEREK
Christie’s.

MAURICE
What was your expertise?

DEREK
So I was Chinese specialist. I was one of the two people in the auction world spoke Chinese at the time. And then I spent a few months on the front desk. And then I was thrown into the Chinese department as Chinese specialist. And I studied Chinese painting at university, and that was it, but I learned very fast. I was working if you could just walk us through your resume from Christie’s to the Barnes, stopping to highlight really great positions that you’ve held. Post-Christie’s, I went to the British Museum. So that was sort of fun. That’s where I developed my academic speciality in Chinese sculpture.

MAURICE
How long were you at the British Museum?

DEREK
I was there for four years. And then I was encouraged to apply for museum directorship, which I didn’t think I’d get because I was very young at the time, but I did– at a wretched new university called the University East Anglia, which had only been founded in the early ’60s in Norwich, which is on the bump of England, on the east. So I was there for 10 years. And I ran the university museum.

MAURICE
After those 10 years, then you figured out how to be a museum director. Where did you go?

DEREK
I went to Australia. We went to Australia.

MAURICE
Yeah. What was the circumstance that led you from England to Australia?

DEREK
Somebody who was a mentor at the time said this a fantastic job, and I’ve recommended you for it. And then there was a pause at the end of him telling me all about the job, and how wonderful it was. And then it was like, it was one of those hesitant pauses. And then it came out quite quickly. It’s in Australia, and they want to know by tomorrow afternoon. So we ended up, we picked up our two girls, two little girls, and we went off to Australia, and spent four years there at National Gallery Victoria, which is wonderful. It’s an encyclopedic museum. It’s the oldest grandest encyclopedic museum in Australia. It’s like the Philadelphia Museum of Art in size and collection.

MAURICE
Was your job there to expand acquisition?

DEREK
I was deputy director. And so I was responsible, first of all, for international art, and then all of it.

MAURICE
So my question was, you love Australia. What could have dragged you away from Australia?

DEREK
It was just the concern about being too far from my parents. So we’ve been here for 20 years, and we still really like it. It’s a really good city.

MAURICE
So what’s your first job here?

DEREK
So the first job was at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. And I started as director and provost, and became president and director. And I loved it. The oldest arts institution in America, art school and museum. I said when I became president there, this is great. I always wanted to go to art school, I just didn’t expect to get in at this end.
[LAUGHTER]

MAURICE
Right. Finally, you’re in art school.

DEREK
Finally in. And I did actually– there was one, yeah, I think it was 2004, 2005, where the faculty made me an honorary graduate of the graduating class.

MAURICE
That’s fantastic.

DEREK
I graduated art school. I had done it.

MAURICE
You’ve finally did it.

DEREK
Finally done it.

MAURICE
And you didn’t have to do, like, a senior project.

DEREK
Right.

MAURICE
That’s fantastic. Time heals all wounds. Can you explain the outdoor art there at the– I think a lot of people don’t know what to expect. No? Yes? Right. Everybody in the studio has the same question. Can you explain the outdoor art at the Pennsylvania Academy?

DEREK
I can, but it’s after me. I mean–

MAURICE
Yeah. Understood.

DEREK
It’s all happened past me. So it ended up with two pieces– one by Jordan Griska, who was one of our students, a student when I was there, who did the crashed airplane, the Grumman. Which I’m really fond of, and I think Jordan’s a really good artist. And he’s seems to have been doing quite well. And yeah, it’s so unusual because it wasn’t intended to stay there. It was one of those pieces that was there as an installation, I think maybe for six months originally, and it’s all these years later, it’s still there. But I really think it holds the space. And that’s a very good example of how an artist can sort of emerge unexpectedly for everybody, because a measure of something good is whether it can stand against other good things. So in this case, it was one of the most important buildings in Philadelphia, the [? Furness– ?] the historic great [? Furness ?] monument. Could it hold that space? And it has, actually. I think it held that space really well.
So the other piece at the other end is the Claes Oldenburg, the paint torch. And that was very big. For people who haven’t seen it’s this big paintbrush which has got a flick of paint at the end, and it’s got a separate blob of paint on the ground. And we think of Oldenburg as actually being very well represented in Philadelphia. Because there’s the clothes pin, which is at Centre Square, which is this huge monumental very early sculpture. It’s his first major commission. And then you’ve got the broken button on the Penn campus, outside the Penn library. And then the electrical plug on the Sculpture Garden at the Philadelphia Museum. And then you’ve got the paint brush at PAFA. So you could sort of tour Oldenburg’s work from the beginning all the way through. It’s almost as if Philadelphia is Oldenburg’s Sculpture Park.

MAURICE
So when did you get to the Barnes?

DEREK
I arrived in late 2006.

MAURICE
If I told you I was going to the Barnes, and I didn’t have time to see everything–

DEREK
Yeah.

MAURICE
–what would you suggest I should not miss?

DEREK
You’ve got to stand in the main gallery. I’m not going to say one painting. You’ve just got stand in the main gallery, because the main gallery is a sort of statement by Barnes of his vision, of his educational philosophy. The whole thing started with him wanting to educate his workers. His workers were working class white women and African-American men. And he felt that there were very little educational opportunities for both those groups. He’d worked his way up from nothing, and he wanted to help. And he selected– these were the people in his factory. He said, I can give my workers something which they can’t get anywhere else. I’ll give them an education. It’s very paternalistic, but he did it. And he carried the idea onto the foundation. And he worked with the philosopher John Dewey. And he said, this is about changing the working class. And so when he hung the gallery to articulate an educational view of the world, which was if I can show people how to think about art, then they’ll think about all sorts of things in new ways. It’s almost like, I’ll prime the pump of people’s interest in bigger things– philosophy, art, music, whatever. He used to play music in the galleries. Every gallery is hung to articulate the relationships which he wanted students to analyze. So the main gallery, which is drop dead gorgeous, has all these great works of art, but they’re hung very symmetrically. Barnes’s artists all in this great hall. You can go in there. I don’t recommend you turn away and go out. But that would for me be, you will have got what Barnes was about in that main gallery. And in the corner, there’s a cabinet which nobody pays any attention to, which was the Victrola, which was an early gramophone. And he used to play Debussy, and music, because he’d say analyze the music, look at the paintings– all works in the same way, rhythm, balance, harmony, repetition.

MAURICE
Fantastic. I will definitely look for the cabinet the next time I’m there.

DEREK
It’s on the– yeah.

MAURICE
So what is your current position?

DEREK
So I’m professor at Drexel of art history and museum leadership. And I advise the Drexel president on the university collections.

MAURICE
What’s Derek Gillman’s legacy, when in 50 years, we see all your work as an omnibus. What do you think scholars will extract from it?

DEREK
Oh, when you said scholars, you let me down. People think I should say the Barnes is my legacy, but I think it was when– I was sitting in a movie theater with my son watching Avengers the Age of Ultron, and suddenly the Sainsbury Center flashes up with the Crescent Wing on the screen, with Robert Downey Jr and Chris Hemsworth walking in front of it, saying this is our new headquarters. So I think it’s actually, having a real hand in the Avengers headquarters is my legacy, but I’m not sure that’s what scholars would say.

MAURICE
We wanted to talk a little bit more–

DEREK
About this museums?

MAURICE
–about museums. And then I have a last question. And that was how technology is rapidly changing–

DEREK
Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

MAURICE
–the way in which we interact–

DEREK
Yeah.

MAURICE
–with museums, and how you think that’s going to change in the future?

DEREK
Yeah. Right. So I think one of the really interesting things about where we are now as opposed to where I started in the British Museum in ’81, is that we don’t take museums for granted as institutions that might last forever because the money is just going to pour down from the heavens, because it doesn’t anymore. And museums change, like all institutions change, because of economic pressures. So you know one of the reasons why museums have evolved to become much more audience-centric is because funders want museums to be much more audience-centric. I think left to their own devices, curators would still do things for themselves for the most part. Well, the younger generation wouldn’t. But let’s sort of bring ourselves up to the 21st century. There is a sense now of public ownership in a museum. I think, which is not to do with funding, or where the money comes from, but they’ve become, in a good way, a more significant part of society than they used to be. That doesn’t mean to say that the attendance is always higher. But because of ideas about safe spaces, because of ideas about exploring identity, because of a greater acceptance, or a more widespread interest in contemporary art, and the challenges that oppose often by what’s contemporary art, there is an engagement I think with museums as important places which wasn’t there before. But that is, for the most part, I think a middle class preoccupation. So one of the issues that many of us have been grappling with for years is, how do museums reach out to people, a, who are underserved, or people who are not brought up within a house that says, go to museums– for which museums are not normal places. A football game may be a normal place, but not a museum. So I think that’s a really big issue. I’m not worried about how relevant museums will be because I think there’s so much interesting stuff going on in many museums to engage with different audiences. That even though some museums will be less relevant than others, there’s always interesting things. But this problem of how to engage people who just don’t go. Now there are two issues here. One is people don’t go because they’re genuinely not interested, and they don’t have to be interested. So I’ll often use the analogy here of saying, how do you get Derek Gillman to be engaged with American football? And it’s really hard. I’ll watch the Super Bowl. I’ll support the Eagles, particularly when they’re in the Super Bowl. But–

MAURICE
Once every 30 years.

DEREK
Right.

MAURICE
Derek Gillman is really interested–

DEREK
I have to say–

MAURICE
–in American football.

DEREK
–I see it from the other side. People say, why should I be interested in soccer? I say, yeah, I think you’re right. Why should you be? I mean, there’s no reason. So then why should I be interested museums? I’m interested in lots of other things. So that’s with where you see a museum as part of the available educational leisure opportunities in any country. And you’re not going to coerce people into doing things they don’t want to do. I think the more interesting side is, for somebody who doesn’t think about going to museums, who hasn’t been it hasn’t been privileged to have a house where parents said, try a museum. I mean it’s not part of the milieu. How do you make people aware of an opportunity in a way that isn’t intimidating? Because market research says there are some people– certainly, there are people who find museums intimidating, particularly ones that are classical museums, which have big steps, like the PMA, or the Metropolitan. You know, the temples, the temple museums. And I think it’s a hard challenge. And obviously, it’s nice to think about getting kids in, and hoping they’ll come back. But one of the solutions here to engaging people who might not have thought about museums is much more genuine community outreach. That is, museums doing things outside the museum. Japan has done it really interesting ways, because they’ve had museums in shopping malls for decades. And it’s happening in China too. And I’m really for that. I actually really like– there’s this place that’s K11 Museum in Shanghai where I lectured a few years ago. And I liked it because it’s just in the middle of a shopping mall. And then you go down, and you think this is going to be really cheesy, but it’s not. It’s actually a proper museum. It just happens to be in a place where you don’t expect to see a museum. And where you say, why don’t you come in? Why don’t you try it?

MAURICE
So you think it’s a good idea if we blow up the big stone buildings– and I don’t mean literally blow them up, but move away from them. Because what’s really important is the engagement with the art, not the fact that you’re in that building.

DEREK
All the engagement with knowledge, with history, with our– yeah, there are all these different things that museums offer. Some, like Franklin Institute here, science. There are the Academy of Natural Sciences at Drexel, natural history. You know, it doesn’t have to be art. It’s knowledge.

MAURICE
Right.

DEREK
But, yes. Not blowing them up, but thinking of ways in which we can get out into a space which is an ordinary space, so it becomes an ordinary experience, and not a– it’s special, but it’s part of the real world. So I know, these are all these– some where they’re big questions, some of the basic questions. They’re questions that the museum world’s been wrestling with for the last 40 years. There aren’t easy and obvious answers. One answer is technology, that really helps. I mean, I think we’re all quite excited, everybody in the profession is quite excited by what tech can do. I mean, at Drexel, one the things we’re really interested in, and this is in Westphal, is virtual reality, augmented reality.

MAURICE
Can you imagine me putting on a VR headset, walking through the British Museum while being here in Philadelphia, and getting the same experience.

DEREK
No, you won’t get the same experience but what you’ll get– now, for me it’s different. It’s really interesting, because that would be like watching a TV program.

MAURICE
Even though it’s three dimensional–

DEREK
Even three dimensional, but it was still, because you’re still– even though you’re going to feel you’re in there, you’re not seeing something in any different way really than you’re seeing it on a really high def screen. I mean, TV screen. So for me, it’s the augmented side, where you’re– I’m quite interested in, say, you putting on a headset with AR facility, walking through the Philadelphia Museum. And looking at a Rembrandt, say, Rembrandt’s “Side of Beef”, and then seeing the Soutine “Side of Beef”, seeing crucifixion, which is that we know which is what these paintings of sides of beef really are. And then having a sort of, just in one part of your vision, so say your left eye was seeing the information, your right eye was seeing the actual painting. And I think that’s really interesting. I don’t know. As I describe it, yeah, it’s crude, but technology gets more and more sophisticated, so the experience becomes more seamless. And what we want to do is get away from the idea that you’re not actually engaging with something. Somewhere, you’re still with the object, and there’s a direct experience, which is not the same as seeing it on a screen. There’s no experience that we’ve had yet, no research which has shown that the increase in technology, the increase of access of material on the internet, and of audio guides of apps has actually diminished people’s desire to see the real thing– which is what was a fear originally. You can’t do that because nobody will go to the museum.
It’s nonsense. People are more encouraged to go after they’ve seen it. So it’s all part of enhancing the experience. For me, it’s making it more accessible. So now, I suppose what you could say, this is where it comes back to the early part of this conversation with your VR. Suppose you give somebody who hadn’t thought about going to a museum a VR set, and say I’m going to walk you through the Van Gogh Museum. And I’ll tell you about the paintings while we’re going through. That would be– and then saying at the end, does that interest you? And you say, no, not really. Or, yeah, I’d really like to see these things. Well, actually, you can see some of them at the Philadelphia Museum. Then that would be OK.

MAURICE
Derek Gillman, thank you so much for walking us through the world’s great museums.

DEREK
Thank you.

MAURICE
Drexel’s 10,000 Hour podcast is hosted by me, Maurice Baynard. Our producers are Shaun Fitzpatrick and Nathan Barrick.
Drexel’s 10,000 Hours podcast is powered by Drexel University Online.
[UPBEAT MUSIC]