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The Role of the Museum

  
 
Loomis
07:18 / 30.03.06
I read this article yesterday and it got me thinking as to the role of the museum in modern society and how it has changed over the years, and whether it should change more. Particularly in light of Legba’s and id entity’s comments in this thread on favourite museums.

Besides a bit of “pc nazis have ruined museums” running through the piece, I do sympathise with some of his points, such as this one, which reminded me of how much I hated the childishness of the Natural History Museum in London when I visited it a few years ago:

I visited the Clore Natural History wing, a sort of state-of-the-art school biology lab with lots objects (silicified wood; ammonites; skulls; shells) for visitors to paw and molest. A microscope was focussed on a stinging nettle. "Ouch!" said the caption. An exhibit on sea spiders asked "Are the spiders in mum's bath going to get this big?" A class of seven-year olds milled about, opening and closing specimen drawers, pushing and prodding but without focussing on anything in particular.

The article boils down to two opposing (though do they need to be?) viewpoints on the role of the modern museum, which I thought might make for an interesting discussion. There is the view of the writer:

They exist today, just as they did 250 years ago, for the preservation, collection, display and study of precious objects. If in the process they also manage to create some kind of beneficial social change be it bolstering its visitors' education, self esteem or sense of community, then all to the good, but these are no more than side effects, not a museum's raison d'etre.

And the view of David Fleming, director of Liverpool Museums:

"I fully accept that a museum's job is to collect, preserve, record and pass on unimpaired to future generations things of value." But just as important, he argues, is that a museum should be used as a "powerful tool for learning", especially for the socially disadvantaged. The sort of person who stands most to gain from a museum, he reckons, would be a child with little interest in education, from a family background where parenting skills left something to be desired.

This sounds to me more like a job for a decent primary school teacher but perhaps - as I'm sure Fleming would see it - I am irredeemably out of touch. And maybe he has a point. Why, in heaven's name, should publicly-funded museums pander to an educated elite? And why shouldn't they be used to help pick up the poor and needy by the bootstraps and change society for the better?

I have far less sympathy for his complaints that “The pure search for knowledge and scientific truth has given way to relativism, postmodernism, post-colonialism, superstition, and the politics of victimhood,” but the article is a useful jumping off point to discuss museum culture in the twenty-first century.

So what do you think should be the role of the modern museum?
 
 
*
07:42 / 30.03.06
Ah. I see one problem.

In the US, the only way for a museum to get funding is to show that it is an educational institution. As a result, the museum's primary function in the US is to educate. There are museums here which do not collect at all, and MoAD is one.

I do feel sympathy for the author's point, because without the opportunity to see objects that you couldn't see anywhere else, what's the difference between a museum and a school, or a museum and an amusement park? What's the difference between the Met and the Metreon? That said, to put the objects before the people is really retrogressive. If museums are only for preserving objects, for whom are we preserving them and why?
 
 
sleazenation
07:56 / 30.03.06
It seems to me that this is largely about display.

Most museums have limited space and can only display a fraction of their collections at any given time and much of the stuff on display is squewed towards the kids/educational market. However, you can make use of the Museums other facilities by appointment, it just isn't quite as easy as bowling up and walking through the front doors, and, really, there is very little in life that is both easy and worthwhile...

For example, The Natural History Museum has a very good library full of important and useful natural history texts. All you have to do to get access to these books is book an appointment...

So, yes the museum has resources that are not actually on display, but they are still relatively easily acessible for people who are sufficiently motivated.
 
 
Woodsurfer
00:49 / 03.04.06
When I was growing up, the most frequent destination for day trips was a museum of some kind. We visited everything from the American Museum of Natural History in New York City to the tiny roadside museums of whaling artifacts found near my childhood home on the New England coast. My wife's history was similar and we both still enjoy going to museums of all kinds.

According to scholar Joscelyn Godwin, author of "The Pagan Dream of the Renaissance", museums as we know them today have their roots in the "studiolo" – a small private collection of objets d'art, curios, precious stones, etc. kept by nobles and the wealthy of Renaissance Italy, Austria and Germany. This was only a matter of 450 or so years ago so I think it's a bit early to harden our ideas for all time of what museums ought to be.

I’d have to say that the article the “Times” had some good points but I’m not ready to agree with it 100%. I concur that there is never an excuse for “dumbing down” anything intended to educate. A museum should present information in a way that engenders a sense of wonder, certainly, but it should never abandon the context of the object on display. Sometimes it requires a greater level of understanding to appreciate that context and if an individual wishes to grasp it, they and their teachers carry the responsibility for coming up to that level.

The part of the article that I vehemently disagree with is the author’s contention that returning the bones of ancestors to indigenous people is product of “sloppy, touchy-feely, post- colonial-guilt-induced thinking”. Ye gods – we ought to feel some shame for the graves that were desecrated in the name of science, at best; crass profiteering or delusions of racial superiority at worst. Even if the author would feel no compunctions about allowing the bones of old Uncle Al to be un-earthed and packed in a filing cabinet for a few generations, there are people for whom this is the greatest outrage imaginable. Some compassion and a broader understanding of other cultures is required here.

To come back to the original question: What are museums for? For the most part, they are to show us the world outside of our caves. Television and the internet have supplanted this function to a certain extent but the former’s motives are highly suspect while the latter is still too untamed to be of much use unless taken with a large grain of salt. Museums of art, science and other areas of human endeavor should preserve the best we are capable of and inspire each generation to carry that divine gift into the future.
 
 
*
01:07 / 03.04.06
Stephen Weil has been, IMO, one of the most influential contemporary thinkers about the place of museums in modern society. Making Museums Matter is a good book to start with, if this is a subject which interests people. If that's too much like research, some googling turned up a keynote of his which might be of interest here.
 
 
astrojax69
19:27 / 04.04.06
For the most part, they are to show us the world outside of our caves. Television and the internet have supplanted this function to a certain extent

yes but the artefacts themselves need to be determined and maintained. and stored. hence physical palces where they can be seen. even touched, if necessary. explored more fully, appreciated.

one thing strikes me in this discussion is that, yes, woodsurfer is quite right that they show us the world ouside the cave, as it were. but what they really show is the cultural perspective of what can be experienced outside the cave.

and moreso, in doing so, the very presentation of a museum in itself is a statement of that culture. the museum of cairo, for instance, is pretty well solely concerned with egypt's ancient history and the very housing and display in this place is something like the soul of the city itself. fascinating, vibrant, dusty and worm-eaten all at once. egyptian artefacts in the museum in rome and london and sydney do not look or feel anything like the cairo museum, even though the artefacts are basically similar. the place itself is a statement of culture, as much as the displays inside and the style of presentation and marketing are its collection.

cool, i enjoyed recalling my day in cairo museum. what a fabulous trove!
 
 
Our Lady Has Left the Building
07:59 / 06.04.06
I have to say that the Natural History Museum is in a terrible state. I visited there recently for the first time in about 15 years and I'm sure most of the exhibits were the same. The only new bits were the dinosaur room and the cafe, what should have been the impressive gallery with the whale model had peeling paint, burnt out light bulbs and broken exhibits.

I must admit I would be hard-pressed to say why we should still have museums although I definitely think we should. It's the same with public libraries atm, we all have conflicting ideas of what we are for.
 
 
*
16:24 / 06.04.06
I think there's definitely this conflict in the public eye, a lot of the time: Museums are "storehouses," "treasure troves," for objects which, as much as it's killing me to say this as someone nominally trained as a classicist with archaeology leanings, have absolutely no inherent value. Their significance is only what we give them. And then there are people who are beginning to feel that we don't need such storehouses and treasure troves anymore— This is not the Chicago World's Fair, and the measure of our success as societies is no longer considered to be how much loot we have amassed from pilfering other people's material heritage. Museums don't have room for all the stuff we've got, and even if there were an absolutely outstanding find tomorrow which was generously donated by the people who had the clear rights to it, you'd be hard-pressed to find a cultural storeroom with the room to store it in.

It's obvious to me that museums have an enormous responsibility to safeguard the objects under their protection for the public good. The objects are valued because they are examples of human creativity, human curiosity about nature, human history, and human diversity. In my opinion this is the sole sane and humane reason for collecting these objects— to learn. This is why I am glad that the museums I know are shifting their focus to be more oriented toward education than collecting; in this way museums more directly get at what the objects are there for. This is why I think people who feel, as the author of the above-linked article does, that museums should focus on protecting the objects and largely ignore the very principles of human diversity and human understanding about which these objects are supposed to teach us are making a grave error in judgment and perhaps even missing the point altogether.

This shift also helps museums continue to be relevant. I think as centers for learning, museums are more relevant now than ever. In the US almost no public schools (by which I mean the free ones that anyone can attend) can teach anything other than the basic reading, writing, and math which meet the criteria set for testing. Art education, any history viewpoint more complex than "In the Year 1492 Columbus Sailed the Ocean Blue," and science more interesting than memorizing formulae— These are gaps that have to be filled somehow, and for some of the people some of the time, museums are doing an admirable job, and we're getting better at serving a broader segment of the public. I learned more about physics in one day at the Exploratorium than I ever did in high school or even college, and in the Bay Area the Exploratorium is benefitting not only the families who visit but also the kids from underfunded schools who come on school trips and the high-schoolers who massively benefit from the training and experience they receive as participants in the explainer program. The Exploratorium, by the way, is not a collecting museum but a creating one.

In addition, as cultural centers, museums have a unique opportunity to become centers for community activism. Groups of people who are seeing their cultures subsumed by a dominant society which largely marginalizes and oppresses them can benefit from using museums to understand and represent their own histories. Until recently, museums weren't doing this very well— we have been, unfortunately, largely places where the dominant culture represents its ideas about other people's cultures to itself. Increasingly, though, museums are becoming multivocal. Cultural groups are creating their own museums, like the Japanese American National Museum, through which they can represent their own history, culture, and understanding of the world. Check out some of their past exhibits— the exhibition titled "America's Concentration Camps" was hugely controversial, extremely sensitively handled, and very successful at raising awareness of the experience of Japanese Americans during WWII. People who were affected by JANM's portrayal of the Japanese American experience in the concentration camps wrote that their perception of US history was changed forever.
 
 
Woodsurfer
11:13 / 07.04.06
Museums are "storehouses," "treasure troves," for objects which, as much as it's killing me to say this as someone nominally trained as a classicist with archaeology leanings, have absolutely no inherent value.

I think you're missing something -- what about a museum's capacity to inspire? I would argue that this is their greatest value. Our schools are content to turn out little automatonic drudges who will happily put all that "learning" behind them once they graduate. It is the rare teacher who can capture a child's imagination and set it ablaze. Turn a child loose in a museum, though, and there is a greater potential for them finding something utterly fascinating that they must learn more about. When the spark of curiosity catches, it can burn for a lifetime.

I am greatly heartened by the attendance I've witnessed at museums recently -- especially when they've mounted a major exhibit. For example: The Philadelphia Museum of Art hosted a huge Salvador Dali exhibit last year. It was sold out for every showing and they ended up extending it for a month (giving me a chance to see it a second time :-)) When we dropped by the Franklin Museum (also in Philly) a few weeks ago, there was a line easily a half a kilometer long, out the door and around block to see the Ben Franklin Tercentennial exhibit. For some it may have been "something to drag the kids to" but for others it could well have been their ticket into the world of Wonder.
 
 
*
16:50 / 07.04.06
I consider that a function of their educational mission, Wood. The line you quoted, as I'm afraid I didn't make very clear, is not my own opinion, but my perception of a position I disagree with.
 
 
Woodsurfer
20:54 / 07.04.06
Oh, okay -- I didn't catch that nuance.

As far as what I outlined being part of an educational mission: this would be in a more ideal world than the one I'm experiencing. Even when I was a kid in what was touted as "one of the best schools in the country" (Darien, CT) with plenty of resources and in an era ('50s and '60s) when things such as art classes were still considered a vital part of a child's education, it was still hit-or-miss whether a child would learn how to learn. Today, based on what I read and what friends and family with children tell me, it is a struggle just to teach the basics. I maintain that anything that can turn on that curiousity switch so that the kid is motivated to seek knowledge on their own is worthy of respect. Museums seem to be a good bet for this. Not a 100% solution -- no single thing could ever be -- but a proven system for inspiration for many, many years.
 
 
Rigettle
15:52 / 25.04.06
Hi

Woodsurfer said:
>>what about a museum's capacity to inspire?

I agree. My work takes me into a lot of museums. I think that museums should be providing an an inspiring educational experience that you can't get anywhere else. What is it that makes museums different from other institutions? The collected objects, whatever category of objects they may be.

Anyone could open up a new "Discovery Centre" with the interactive displays that so many museums favour these days. That wouldn't make it a museum to me, although it may be worthwhile.

Most museums are local or regional centres & still reflect that with interesting assemblages of objects. Each one I visit has it's own special ambience & unique collection. In order to compete they have to have some of the interactive display type stuff, but it's a case of getting the balance right. I know the NHM in Kensington very well & I have to say that I think it's kind of sad these days. At least it's free again. & as someone said, if you're persistent & serious enough you can gain admittance to the behind closed doors departmental collections.

Chrs

Rig
 
 
*
17:29 / 25.04.06
Welcome, Rigettle.

Anyone could open up a new "Discovery Centre" with the interactive displays that so many museums favour these days. That wouldn't make it a museum to me, although it may be worthwhile.

Your stance is a common one, and one I have some sympathy for even while disagreeing, as I said upthread a bit. Let's see if we can dig a little more.

The following are some official definitions of "museum":

The Museums Association (United Kingdom) definition, 2002

(Current version from Code of Ethics for Museums, 2002)

Museums enable people to explore collections for inspiration, learning and enjoyment.

They are institutions that collect, safeguard and make accessible artefacts and specimens, which they hold in trust for society.

Society can expect museums to:

* hold collections in trust on behalf of society
* focus on public service
* encourage people to explore collections for inspiration, learning and enjoyment
* consult and involve communities
* acquire items honestly and responsibly
* safeguard the long-term public interest in the collections
* recognise the interests of people who made, used, owned, collected or gave items in the collections
* support the protection of the natural and human environments
* research, share and interpret information related to collections, reflecting diverse views
* review performance to innovate and improve


Current Standard International Definition - International Council of Museums (ICOM)
ICOM Statutes of 2001, Article 2

1. A museum is a non-profit making, permanent institution in the service of society and of its development, and open to the public, which acquires, conserves, researches, communicates and exhibits, for purposes of study, education and enjoyment, material evidence of people and their environment.


(a) The above definition of a museum shall be applied without any limitation arising from the nature of the governing body, the territorial character, the functional structure or the orientation of the collections of the institution concerned.


(b) In addition to institutions designated as "museums" the following qualify as museums for the purposes of this definition:


(i) natural, archaeological and ethnographic monuments and sites and historical monuments and sites of a museum nature that acquire, conserve and communicate material evidence of people and their environment;

(ii) institutions holding collections of and displaying live specimens of plants and animals, such as botanical and zoological gardens, aquaria and vivaria;

(iii) science centres and planetaria;

(iv) non profit art exhibition galleries; conservation institutes and exhibition galleries permanently maintained by libraries and archives centres.

(v) nature reserves;

(vi) international or national or regional or local museum organizations, ministries or departments or public agencies responsible for museums as per the definition given under this article;

(vii) non-profit institutions or organizations undertaking conservation, research, education, training, documentation and other activities relating to museums and museology;

(viii) cultural centres and other entities that facilitate the preservation, continuation and management of tangible or intangible heritage resources (living heritage and digital creative activity)

(ix) such other institutions as the Executive Council, after seeking the advice of the Advisory Committee, considers as having some or all of the characteristics of a museum, or as supporting museums and professional museum personnel through museological research, education or training.

2. Professional museum workers include all the personnel of museums or institutions qualifying as museums in accordance with the definition in Article 2, para. 1, having received specialized training, or possessing an equivalent practical experience, in any field relevant to the management and operations of a museum, and independent persons respecting the ICOM Code of Professional Ethics and working for museums as defined above, either in a professional or advisory capacity, but not promoting or dealing with any commercial products and equipment required for museums and services.


American Association of Museums (AAM) Definition
Submitted by Jong-sok Kim, MA Museum and Gallery Management course member

A non-profit permanent, established institution, not existing primarily for the purpose of conducting temporary exhibitions, exempt from federal and state income taxes, open to the public and administered in the public interest, for the purpose of conserving and preserving, studying, interpreting, assembling, and exhibiting to the public for its instruction and enjoyment objects and specimens of educational and cultural value, including artistic, scientific (whether animate or inanimate), historical and technological material.

Museums thus defined shall include botanical gardens, zoological parks, aquaria, planetaria, historical societies, and historic houses and sites which meet the requirements set forth in the preceding sentence.

From here.

Now, the Exploratorium in San Francisco (which I keep referring to as an exemplar because it is, well, exemplary) is a creating rather than a collecting museum, and they make and "collect" the interactive displays you mention. These interactive objects could as easily be called art— in fact, many of them are made by artists and serve a primarily aesthetic function, while others are made by educational scientists and researchers in their laboratory of interactive exhibitions and serve primarily science education. So if there were a museum dedicated to the collection and preservation of large, interactive sculptural artworks by famous artists, and making them available to the public for their designed purpose (i.e. to be interacted with), I think no one would hesitate to call that an art museum. But add that the sculptures are not all by famous artists and many of them serve the purpose of teaching science, and some people now hesitate to call it a museum. This makes me curious. I wonder if we are just privileging art museums over other genres, in a way.
 
 
alejandrodelloco
22:54 / 02.05.06
Groups of people who are seeing their cultures subsumed by a dominant society which largely marginalizes and oppresses them can benefit from using museums to understand and represent their own histories.

The Smithsonian's rather new Museum of the American Indian is also a perfect example of this, and it is functions as a collection museum that also leverages this huge collection to really explain history and the current state of things in a very hard-hitting and real way. On the top floor, there is an exhibit cataloguing indian artifacts from the last four centuries, laid out in a manner to give the narrative of how their entire culture was desecrated. It was fascinating and it was a great way to show part of the huuuge collection they have there.
 
 
Tom Morris
14:52 / 03.05.06
One of the points of interest in the bone and remains repatriation is that critics argue that they are simply a factor of Western liberal intellectual guilt rather than an actual demand by native groups:
http://www.spiked-online.com/Printable/00000006DB8A.htm
 
 
*
16:50 / 03.05.06
I think critics might double-check to see that their own politics are not unduly implicated in use of the notion of 'Western' 'liberal' 'guilt' (are Native Americans "Eastern" especially? Isn't Europe east of California anymore? what's necessarily "liberal" about protecting people's property? what function does the value-laden word "guilt" server here?). In many cases, true, the museum must identify the object's provenance and seek out the tribe or tribes to whom it belongs, without the tribes having made a particular request. That is because it is very difficult for people who are not involved with museums to know offhand what is in a given museum's collection— particularly since only a fraction of most museums' collections are on display at any one time. Some tribes may not ask for certain items back, but that doesn't mean they don't want others. Some tribes may not feel able to store or rebury objects and may make the decision to leave them in the custody of the museum while retaining ownership, and that is also their right to decide.

If by "Western liberal guilt" critics mean "white people coming up with the right thing to do and then doing it, with less-than-usual prompting on the part of Native Americans" then okay, that might be fair.

Tribes with few resources may well be more focused on feeding their families and curing their sickness than flying out to Harvard to identify a pot, and that does not mean they shouldn't be able to do it if and when their immediate situation improves.

Dr Michael Pickering, the repatriation programme director at the National Museum of Australia, argues that 'repatriation should be seen by an institution as an asset in its own right'. He argues that the museum gains from returning human remains: 'Rather than losing a collection element, the institution is value adding to its resource base. The goodwill and participation of an Aboriginal community is a resource' (9).

Pickering says that the 'success' of a repatriation event should not be defined in terms of the physical return of materials, but 'the levels of "empowerment" of relevant indigenous stakeholders, and the development of closer relations between the repatriators and the custodians'.

Pickering has it exactly right here. But compare this idea of empowering people to interact with museums as equals and to take charge of their property themselves with the words of Mark O'Neill, quoted below:

In the late 1990s, Glasgow Museums brought about a high-profile repatriation of a Ghost Dance Shirt, taken off a body of a Sioux Indian after the Battle of Wounded Knee in 1890. Then director Mark O'Neill claimed that the loss of the shirt was outweighed by the museum 'bringing healing to a sad people'.

What are the assumptions behind O'Neill's words? What is their effect? It is to preserve the power imbalance between museum professionals and indigenous people. If it's my liberal intellectual guilt at work to see this power imbalance as harmful and in need of redress, then I'll just have to accept that label.
 
 
Disco is My Class War
16:24 / 04.05.06
On the role of museums in terms of colonisation: I think that museums are often way more implicated in colonisation than just holding onto indigenous artifacts. Australian museums used to count indigenous people as 'flora and fauna'. Within museums here there's a great tradition of storing human indigenous remains as specimens -- skulls, which were used for phrenology studies (you know, the theory that people's head shape dictates intelligence); bodies as specimens of burial practices; and so on. (Actually, not just in Australia -- people might recall the protetss in the UK a couple of years ago by Koori people who asked for their ancestors' bones back. (Some info here.)

At the Melbourne Museum, which is the only museum I've ever spent time in, they rebuilt ten years ago and used that problem to build a whole new relationship between Koori historians, Koori cultural workers and the museum itself. The project they did is a collection in the museum called Bunjilaka. Some of the exhibit uses previously stored artifacts to tell the story of white invasion as invasion. Ie, they've taken down the examples of 'indigenous traditional culture' that situate that as something past, historical, and ended; and trace a path through various important events: the first encounters; massacres and the frontier wars between white settlers and Kooris; forcing Koori people off the land and onto missions and reserves; the removal of entire generations of Koori children from their families; and so on. The other aspect of the exhibit uses photographs and film footage to complicate this story. There's a whole wall of photographs of Koori people in Victoria throughout the 20th century. My favourite photographs are of a community called Jackson's Track, which was one of the only independent and unpoliced communities of Kooris that existed in the 30's, 40's and 50's. Jackson's Track was where Koori people went to hide from the authorities, or take a 'break' from mission life if they could, and where many Victorian Koori people first trained as boxers. The photos aren't taken by white people intent on documenting 'the other' for the purposes of science or entertainment -- they're really candid, intimate, and they feature happy, non-fearful people. The best thing about Bunjilaka is that there are Koori curators always present with whom you can chat, or ask questions about the exhibit, so the past is palpably connected with the present. They aren't usually professional curators, either -- often it's someone who's in one of the photos, or whose family is featured somewhere. It's a confronting and emotionally dense experience, as it should be. And you learn HEAPS.

So what is the point, before I burble all night about Jackson's Track? I guess it's that museums can play a really active role to re-deploy 'history' in useful ways. I don't think that museums should just be about storage or education -- that seems incredibly limiting. The exhibit I'm tlaking about above is different because it changes the meaning of 'knowledge' -- the objects on display are no longer catalogued, categorised, 'artifacts' definable only in their singularity as examples of a 'this' or a 'that' (and also defined by their historicity or pastness as objects of knowledge). Instead, they're 'living': accessible in terms of story, in terms of conversation. Some of that work undoes the centuries of colonisation of indigenous people in terms of knowledge and science -- categorising them by skin colour or language group or head size, etc. History is not dead there, and I think that's really politically useful.
 
 
*
18:41 / 04.05.06
YES!

(ahem.)

Quite so, Mister Disco, and thank you for that insightful perspective. I'm pleased to learn about Bunjilaka, as I was not aware of it before. I wonder if I could be of use there as an intern for a winter.
 
 
Disco is My Class War
04:16 / 05.05.06
Wow, yeah, you should definitely come to Australia!
 
  
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