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Underground > Art, Fashion & Design >

The Best Museums In The World.

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05:15 / 26.10.05

A friend is working on a contract, and has asked me for this help:

What are the top ten or fifteen museums in the world in terms of curatatorial technique, educational programming, exhibition technique, and technological integration?

I realize this is a wide range of criteria. What we're looking at doing is submitting a proposal for massive renovation projects at several state-funded museums in a developing nation. The museums in question range from a national museum with a diverse collection of art objects and historical artefacts to an on-site archaeological center to a reasonably small and narrowly-focused Islamic art museum. But they're willing to draw from art, history, ethnography, science and tech, even children's museums, just so they are really effective at doing what museums do.

I know you folks are really smart, and we have a few museum professionals here as well, so since I'm just a lowly student I thought I'd gather more opinions.

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05:27 / 26.10.05

Oh, and another thing. This is a sideline, but if any of these museums happen to be examples of how a gift shop can be a really effective part of museum programming... bonus points!

Goodness Gracious Meme

14:23 / 28.10.05

Are we doing your homework, perchance?

I'm way out of touch with this stuff, but for 'doing the best with what they have' I'd nominate the PM Gallery and House in West London - not particularly famous or well-off, but are putting on ambitious shows - high quality control and doing something that's currently very unfashionable in London, namely to have a slant towards (post)colonial/diaspora-concered work.

It's not all they do, but they're building a rep as a space that shows excellent and often very questioning work from a variety of perspectives with a flavour of, I don't know, race/cultural concern, to it. The gallery is attached to a 'Manor House' built by Sir John Soane, a prominent English architect/collector/art writer as his 'country residence', and the PM often make use of this juxtapos in v.interesting ways, installing contemporary pieces in the house which point up the 'conversations'/tensions bewteen contemporary artists with diaspora concernes and C18 English Enlightenment thought.

Last few things I've seen have been great, very much with a focus on some aspect of these issues, but the quality of work/approach has meant the work is very rarely simply didactic. Thought provoking and as I say, kinda out on a limb in the London contemp art scene.

Wonderful place.

Goodness Gracious Meme

14:45 / 28.10.05

Having reread yr reasons why, I'd also look at the Hayward, which had a big refit of its own a few years ago and has emerged as (IMO, of course) a massively revitalised institution. Curatorial design of their last few shows has been astonishing, great in-house work and link-ups with international curators/collections, they've also gone big technology resources as a way of getting people through the door, eg with current show, Universal Experience (contemporary art looking at tourism), there's a invitation to bring holidaysnaps in to the media centre and have them incoporated in new video work on tourism. They do lots of stuff like that.

Dunno anything about how the shop figures in their strategy I'm afraid.

The H had been looking a bit tired, as a space and as a project, and is going great guns now...

(Though, want to underline that I'm way out of touch with this stuff professionally, so these are just personal opinnions really!)

All Acting Regiment

14:17 / 29.10.05

I would argue that the Cafe is more important than the gift shop. Though of course a publicly (under)funded museum needs the gift shop to operate, I find it suggests substitution: as if the plastic dinosaurs and Tutenkhamun pencil cases are supposed to replace the actual exhibits in your memory. Whereas the Cafe suggests the idea of powering you up, it's a study aid, it gives you energy to observe and think.

In terms of museums that just present you with the The Source, I think the dinosaur room at the Natural History Museum in London is still pretty fucking amazing. It's not too heavy on the flashy bits; the helpful extra information is tucked down by the sides of the fossils which are lit beautifully (within a dark room) and really give you an impression of the size of those things.

Then, you turn a corner, and there's a quite brilliant animatronic reconstruction of a pack of dromeasaurids clustered round a little sauropod and eating it. There's no introduction, you just walk round and *bang*. It doesn't in any way outshine the real fossils, nor does it sensationalise the subject matter: it just brings it to life for a brilliant moment.

Then you've got the Museum Of The Moving Image, which I beleive has the original King Kong puppet. When I saw this, I Squee'd.

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00:59 / 31.10.05

I would argue that the Cafe is more important than the gift shop. Though of course a publicly (under)funded museum needs the gift shop to operate, I find it suggests substitution: as if the plastic dinosaurs and Tutenkhamun pencil cases are supposed to replace the actual exhibits in your memory. Whereas the Cafe suggests the idea of powering you up, it's a study aid, it gives you energy to observe and think.

The cafe, certainly, can be very helpful in a museum; it can allow one to sit and process, as you say. But another good way to do this is to have strategically placed comfortable group seating in the galleries, with low tables and some information about the nearby exhibitions. I think this would actually encourage discussion, which would increase processing of the information offered by the exhibitions.

The gift shop, however, should offer for sale objects, books, videos, and other materials that are teaching tools that one can take home, which will act as triggers for recall of the information absorbed, and continue to instruct long after the visit is over. The gift shop gives the museum the power to reach into people's lives and keep offering education even when the people aren't visiting the museum. This increases, rather than decreases, the museum's value and impact. As a side effect, of course, museum gifts remind people of their pleasant visit and encourage them to return. Your mention of plastic dinosaurs and Tut pencil cases merely reflects the fact that most museum gift shops lamentably don't take advantage of the educational opportunity afforded them.

Thanks, both of you, for your suggestions. My friend is working on his proposal, and if all goes well, you will have contributed to improving some museums on the other side of the world. Go you!

11:24 / 26.03.06

I've not visited for perhaps 10 years, but I have been very impressed by the Horniman Museum in South London. One of their long-standing collections is an enormous variety of musical instruments. Just having all these things on display used to make it a wonderful visit for a child. Additionally I've always had a soft spot for musuems that just crowd as much as possible into the space they have, and fill the gaps with all the information available about the exhibits - Horniman certainly has an element of tat.

But since then they've done immensely well by using computers everywhere - for example so you can listen to the sounds of all the instruments. The overall effect is that the museum is an even more exciting place for children to visit - but there's enough information there to keep even a nerd like me content.

Now, all this may be totally misremembered; perhaps I should visit again and see if I still like the place.

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04:24 / 28.03.06

If you do go, do me a favor and pay special attention to how the ethnographic material is represented. One of my areas of special focus is how to improve the ethnographic museum. Whether Horniman does well or poorly by the cultures they strive to represent, I'd love to hear about it.

All Acting Regiment

22:26 / 29.03.06

As well as having large and dedicated Egyptian and Greek galleries, The Manchester Museum has a large collection of ethnic artefacts dating from about 300 to 50 years old from ex-colonial countries.

What they're doing with these is quite interesting: they'll have a section of the gallery devoted to, say, "Masks", and there'll be African ones, some from the south seas, some from Australia and some from Japan, say, so you get a cross section.

It's good, because as well as highlighting the distinctive style of each object set and culture the scheme also shows us that people all over the world and from different times have a lot of things in common. There's a risk, of course, of everything getting mushed into one generic "ethnic" bloc but they avoid this with maps, written information and photography.

There's also a case of items from our culture presented in the same context as the ones from others, and a text explaining people from other times and places might view us in the same way we view them. Which is good.

There's also a stall, where people can touch objects, like beetles and armadillo shells- a step forward, because museums are often seen as being inacessible/boring and actually being able to touch things might reverse this.

Will be back later to talk about the natural/prehistory rooms.

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04:11 / 30.03.06

There's also a case of items from our culture presented in the same context as the ones from others, and a text explaining people from other times and places might view us in the same way we view them. Which is good.

So my feeling is that this still presents this fictional "us"/"other cultures" dichotomy. It shows that the people who make museums and the people who use museums are still expected to be this monolithic "us"culture— white, the colonist and not the colonized, upper middle class, moderately well-educated according to a specific kind of education standard, financially secure, heterosexual, Christian or agnostic/humanist from a Christian background, cisgender, child-having. And the purpose of the museum— at least, the ethnographic collections in museums— is to show to "us" the "other." It's a great start to turn that around for people and say well, "us" could be viewed this way by "the other" too. But that doesn't break that fundamental divide.

I'm not sure how this should be changed, but I know it needs to be. Because there are people of the Bantu working in museums now who are stuck presenting a white perspective on material objects related to lifeways which have personal meaning to them, which belong to them, because the white perspective sounds "more objective" to the museum people. And it sounds that way because we (museum professionals) conditioned people to see it that way through centuries of curio cabinetry.

Okay, enough already, is what I think. Check out the Museum of the African Diaspora for starters. Are they making mistakes? Probably; I couldn't say. They're too new. But they'll be making new mistakes, which I think is good.

*pantpant* end of rant. Sorry about that.

07:22 / 30.03.06

Legba and id entity - I've just started a thread in the Head Shop about the role of museums in mdoern society, which sprung from an article I read yesterday about the sort of thing you've just been describing. Please come and take a look. Be warned though that the article may be rant-inducing.

13:37 / 30.03.06

The museum that struck me most is an art gallery in Denmark, The Louisiana Museum of Modern Art (so named after a woman who originally lived in the house, if I remember). It is a sublime assortment of meandering rooms and buildings, interlinked to one extent or another, ranging from a traditional wooden house, to a modern wooden house, to ultramodern underground chambers. It is in the countryside with a view over a lagoon, and its collection is not only stoopidly good, if you like modern art, but is also presented in a good educational manner. There also seemed to be plenty for kids to do, in order to help them understand what it was that they were seeing.

I am not sure how much this would help the project, but I found that having the gardens, having to wander through as in a Japanese strolling garden, having the range of environments and rooms and chambers and lawns, all added to the experience both in immediate terms and also in memory terms, while also being magical and-- so important in such things if possible or apt-- fun.