The balance is, not surprisingly, achieved by insuring that we can afford to provide space for new work by building up our resources in general. By that I mean that we can no longer sustain the pace of looking of the time before television. But I managed to pull a small group through this morning at a reasonable pace by eliding the experience. If one wants to drink each work in lovingly, it would take quite some time. But our curator Barbara Haskell was as much establishing a framework for understanding American visual traditions as she was championing individual works.
Thematic shows are often harder to build an audience for.
The meshing of corporate culture with museum culture is interesting precisely because the inherent tension between our ultimate motives is always visible and keeps the discussions on a high level. We are working with Intel to augment the websites artmuseum.net and whitney.org, so we welcome you back there. As far as American identity as a topic, we should all remember that Americans are the first nation built from an amalgam of peoples, language groups, religions, and backgrounds, and we need more than most countries to be self-examining. We've been that way since the Founding Fathers. The show is tightly focused on exploring that rich theme.