A glitzy rebranding could draw the museum away from its main purpose: to make us wonder
In a ground-floor gallery at the Royal Ontario Museum, a glass case holds a sculpture of a seated Buddha. It’s an exquisite object, made of lacquered wood and fashioned by a Japanese craftsman in the 1800s. On the side of the case, a caption reads: “The G.O.A.T. of mindfulness didn’t need an app.”
Like so many cultural institutions, the ROM suffered during the pandemic. It had to close three times, for a total of 14 months. Attendance plummeted. Before the crisis, the museum got about 1.3 million visitors, the most of any museum in Canada. If they succeed and draw big crowds, more power to them. The ROM has to jostle with a host of other Toronto attractions, from the sharks in the aquarium to the sports teams in the downtown arenas, to the shows in the theatres – not to mention video games, streaming television and all the lures of the digital world.
The biggest risk is that the ROM will lose sight of its mission. Museums, at heart, are about understanding our world through objects. The ROM has 13 million of them, from a striped hair-nosed bat to a bust of Roman emperor Lucius Verus. Each tells a story. Sometimes, yes, the story has something to say about our current time. The rather clever slogan for the ROM campaign reminds us that “we live on in what we leave behind.
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