Malcolm Rogers

Humanitas Visiting Professorship in Museums, Galleries and Libraries (2011-2012)

The Humanitas Visiting Professorship in Museums, Galleries and Libraries is a unique initiative at the University of Oxford dedicated to examining the crucial role that cultural institutions play in society. Ambitious in its scope, the initiative holds Visiting Professorships that bring individuals of outstanding practical and academic expertise to the University Oxford, which is home to some of the oldest and most important museums, libraries and collections in the Western world.

The initiative enjoys a special relationship with the Humanitas Visiting Professorship in Contemporary Art, often overlapping to provide a dynamic forum for exchange about arts and culture.

The Visiting Professorship in Museums, Galleries and Libraries has been made possible by the generous support of Foster + Partners and is hosted by Balliol College, Oxford.

Malcolm Rogers is the Director of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Professor Rogers’ inaugural lecture was on the subject of ‘The Art Museum in the 21st Century’. Drawing on his long and eminent career at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, as well as on his extensive experience as an art historian, Professor Rogers sets out his reflections on the ideal of accessibility; both its importance in a democratic age but also the challenges, pragmatic and philosophical, which the concept encounters.

He makes a trenchant case against the excesses of an academic-theoretical approach to the public presentation of works of art, and champions instead the more inclusive ways in which a museum might display its treasures to the widest possible audience.

In a final conversation Malcolm Rogers and Dr Brown, the Director of the Ashmolean Museum, discuss and compare their experiences of overseeing the extensive renovations of the Ashmolean Museum and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.