Well over a year into the pandemic, many of us are craving opportunities for direct interaction in a lived, physical space. “So many of us have been engaging with colleagues, family, and friends through Zoom and other virtual exchanges since the pandemic began,” observes Josh Basseches (MBA 1992), director and CEO of Canada’s Royal Ontario Museum (ROM). “The experience of going to a museum is about encountering and connecting with authentic objects and with people.”

Basseches’s first strong museum memory was in 1976, when King Tut was making the rounds. The first US stop of the blockbuster exhibition, Treasures of Tutankhamun, was at Washington, DC’s National Gallery of Art, where Basseches, then age 14, was dazzled by the gold statue of the boy king, the carved alabaster lions, and the elaborate death mask. “That’s when I fell in love with museums,” he recalls.

After HBS, at his first job with Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, Basseches oversaw multiple aspects of the museum’s exhibitions, including financial and staff management, marketing, sponsorship, and negotiations. Before joining the Royal Ontario, in 2016, he was deputy director at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts. And from 1998 to 2004, he was executive director at Harvard’s Museum of Natural History.

At the ROM, Basseches is leading a campaign to make art accessible to all. He emphasizes art’s problem-solving powers, whether it’s encountered on the street, in a gallery, or among ROM’s 13 million objects, from a bust of Cleopatra VII to Chinese Yuan dynasty murals to Benjamin West’s The Death of General Wolfe. Art, he says, can nudge viewers toward perceptions that are invaluable to critical thinking. For example, Basseches often visits ROM’s Potato Peeling 101 to Ethnobotany 101, a large multimedia piece by Cree artist Jane Ash Poitras, which juxtaposes preconceived notions of Indigenous culture with the deep knowledge and connection of Indigenous peoples to the natural world. “If I’m wrestling with a thorny problem, I visit this work to be reminded that I need to seek insight and perspectives that are very different from my own,” he explains.

And finally, Basseches reminds us, art can just make you feel better about the world, decreasing depression, anxiety, and loneliness, according to some studies. “It’s not a silver bullet, and traditional medical treatment is of utmost importance,” he adds. “But engaging with art—whether it’s a second-century Roman bust or a nineteenth-century American painting of the Hudson River—gets you out of your usual head space.”

How to: Live artfully

Look outside museums. In other words, “go local.” Artists and their work are everywhere, and art needn’t be museum-quality. “So much of the art we love are objects we enjoy for themselves, beyond any potential investment value or recognized worth. An art teacher at my son’s school has done some beautiful work in pastel, so I bought one.”

But do visit them. “Museums meet you wherever you are—angry, sad, overworked, happy,” says Basseches. “You can engage with galleries and collections in ways that fit your mood and spirit.” It’s also, by its public nature, a social experience—whether you go with a friend or family member or alone.

And don’t be intimidated. “Gravitate to what engages you; don’t feel the need to like this or love that,” Basseches advises. “The experience is about emotion, not just intellect. There is no ‘right way’ to connect with art.”

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