The Role of Today's Museum

Clive Gray, Vikki McCall

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367265045
• eBook ISBN: 9781000059328
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Museum Studies

The Role of Today's Museum provides a thorough investigation of what museums do and why. Arguing that museums are multifunctional institutions, the book examines the consequences of this for the services that museums provide, the publics to whom they are provided and the providers themselves.

Adopting a wide perspective on understandings of the roles of museums and considering the different environments within which museums operate, Gray and McCall provide a new perspective on how transformations, as well as the gaps between intended policies and the actual work that is undertaken within museums, can be both identified and understood. By differentiating between social, economic and political visions and expectations of museums, the analysis in this book allows for a fuller understanding of what these organisations do and provide for their societies and the struggles and negotiations that surround their existence.

The Role of Today's Museum takes a critical, interdisciplinary approach to studying museums and museum policy. As a result, the book will be of interest to academics and students engaged in the study of museums, cultural policy, social policy, cultural sociology, public policy and cultural and political economy. Highlighting the gaps that exist between policy ideals and museum practices, the book also provides valuable insights to policy-makers and practitioners.

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INTRODUCTION

Introduction

Museums can be described in many different ways, with museums being labelled as engaging, relevant, professional, adaptive, community, people’s, children’s, scientific, natural history, labour, virtual, symbolic, connected, trust, charitable, engaging, local, national, universal, independent, private, company, digital and public, amongst many other labels, depending upon which one is being looked at, by whom, and for what purposes. One consequence of what we have previously described as the growth of the adjectival museum (Gray & McCall, 2018) is that there has equally been a proliferation of understandings of what it is that people expect museums to provide, how they are expected to provide it, the intentions that they expect museums to fulfil, and what sets of outputs, outcomes, consequences and results they expect museums to produce. The recent developments in how museums are understood and what it is that they are expected to do, continue, however, to co-exist alongside much older ideas about museums that conceive of them as being places of contemplation and ritual (Duncan, 1995) that provide an alternative to the pressures and demands of the present through the consideration of the past, and which provide a neutral public arena (Barrett, 2011) that will produce better human beings through their simple existence.

In the present case we use ‘museums’ in a general sense to cover all of the versions of the term that are covered by our label of the ‘adjectival museum’ (Gray & McCall, 2018). We include in this usage all material and immaterial collections of ‘things’ that have been gathered together to fulfil some purpose for the individuals, communities, groups and societies who have undertaken the process of collecting, whatever that purpose may be. Thus we do not distinguish between art galleries that were created to establish some essentialist nature of what ‘beauty’ is (Sheehan, 2000, 13); heritage collections of physical material that was unearthed at an individual site; archives of written material that were intended to establish property rights; or those organisations labelled as ‘museums’ that store, conserve, curate, exhibit and display particular sets of material artefacts.

The tensions that are generated by these seemingly irreconcilable visions of the roles of museums – between those that view them as instruments for the attainment of a variety of social, cultural, political, technological and policy goals, and those that view them simply as institutions that provide spaces for reflection and learning – have existed throughout the history of museums (as can be seen in Alexander & Alexander, 2008, for example). These tensions have created a situation where museums are, on the one hand, seen as being sites for the pursuit of a wide variety of communal objectives, and, on the other hand, as sites for the development of the individual citizen, untrammelled by externally set objectives, including those of the communities within which they reside. While this is a major generalisation of the perceptions of museums that can be found in most societies, such a dichotomous division between the societal and the individual roles of museums is frequently found in the host of normative advocacy claims and counter-claims about them that are commonly to be found in public debate.

While none of these claims are essentially wrong they are more frequently simply partial or misleading as to the real effects that museums can, and do, actually have – that is, when they are not simply self-contradictory. The purpose of this book is to examine the host of arguments that have been put forward about what the point of museums actually is. The way in which this is approached is through an examination of the justifications that are used to identify what objectives, both social and individual, museums could, and should, be expected to reach through undertaking their functional roles within communities. As a result of this museums are not considered in terms of the precise ways in which they do things but, instead, are examined in terms of their status as a particular set of social, economic and political institutions alongside their museal status in terms of their collections. Such an approach that emphasises the contexts within which museums operate rather than the detail of their daily activities requires some justification and it is this that this first chapter in the book provides. Later chapters will investigate in depth the changing expectations and understandings of museums within societies but here we are concerned with explaining our own contexts that have led us to this point.

Understanding museums

It is not our intention in this book to provide yet another version of an absolute and definitive statement about exactly how museums should, and must, be thought about. Instead, we are concerned with contextualising the sorts of claims about these that are frequently made by their supporters, through linking them to the underlying sets of assumptions, beliefs and ideological predispositions that they rest upon. As a consequence of the fact that we both agree and disagree with parts of all of the claims that have previously been made about the importance and significance of museums for individuals, groups, nations and the entirety of humanity it would be presumptuous of us to think that our own positions are absolutely the right ones to adopt when thinking about museums as either individual establishments or as an institutional category. Indeed, given the sheer mutability of the claims that have been made about museums it would be unrealistic to expect that a claim made in 2019 would remain in force as the best, or only, way to think about museums in 2029, let alone in 3019 (provided that humanity has not succeeded in wiping itself out in the fallout from climate change by then). Indeed one of the motivations for writing this book was our recognition that the validity of the arguments that are put forward to explain, justify, account for, or understand social phenomena never stay either valid or remain in the same form for very long. Thus, while the arguments of Aristotle about democracy still carry an argumentative weight, they simply do not mean the same today as they did when they were first promulgated, and the effect of the arguments of later writers on the same subject from Mill and Marx in the nineteenth century to writers on direct and discursive democracy in the twenty-first century (let alone much earlier writers on the subject) have necessitated a continuing reappraisal of the Aristotelian arguments, with this changing their meaning altogether in terms of current concerns, problems and issues. The consequence of this is that there is something of a partial nature to present interests and concerns that will not necessarily remain the same into the future. This may be a truism but, unfortunately, this is not something that particularly seems to bother polemicists or advocates, both of whom tend to assume that there is something not only inherently sensible about what they are saying but also that it is inescapably correct in the present, and will continue to be both sensible and correct into the future, if not for all time.

A key thread throughout this book includes a constructivist approach to thinking about museums. This follows an ongoing tradition in the cultural and arts sectors around the social construction of reality, questioning how things are framed and reframed, and the narratives surrounding that. This book will highlight that the museum is a social construction on many levels. We investigate the social, political and economic roles that have been and are connected to museums from the lens that ‘truth’ and ‘reality’ are constructed depending on the ‘norms’, understandings and discourses that are employed by certain social groups (Heylighen, 1993). That the museum as an organisation, and museum functions as sets of activities, have been seen to change over time and place thus allows social constructionism to be adopted as a key approach as it allows us to challenge of the ‘taken-for-granted’ assumptions and realities (Andrews, 2012) that are commonly made use of when the nature of museums is discussed. Berger and Luckmann (1991, 15) ultimately contended that this approach is about the ‘analysis of the social construction of reality’ and this book throughout the different chapters analyses the construction of the reality around the concepts, roles, functions and policies that are applied to ‘the museum’.

As will be seen in later chapters there is a strong tendency amongst writers about museums to implicitly assume that their own position may be questioned, but rarely that it can be entirely discounted. It is not our intention to undertake a wholesale assault on the ideas and claims that we investigate – each of them can be supported to a certain extent (usually as long as their underlying premises are accepted as being valid). Recognising that, however, does not mean that the conclusions that are derived from such claims must be accepted at face value. There are many reasons to support museums, individually and en masse, but these reasons require adequate, and appropriate, forms of support – both argumentative and evidential – to make them both acceptable and valid. At the very least this requires an explicit justification to be given for each reason to support museums that may be put forward. Alongside such justification from argument, however, it is also necessary to establish some form of justification from evidence: as was reportedly said by Thomas Huxley, ‘a beautiful theory destroyed by a nasty, ugly little fact’,¹ apart from being a tragedy of science, is an important element in establishing the validity of claims. For such generally well-accepted institutions as museums this becomes even more important: if the arguments that are put forward in support of claims that museums are important for societies are demonstrably untrue then why should societies continue to make use of them? And, in the present context, why do societies continue to open them in such large numbers? The explosion in museum numbers around the world in recent years – most noticeably in China (Lu, 2014; Varutti, 2014) – is predicated on a large number of assumptions about the growth in local employment, the attraction of tourists and the expression of local identities (amongst many others), each of which is, at the very least, open to question in theoretical and argumentative terms, and can be either misleading or simply wrong in empirical terms. For museums there are also increasing sets of expectations, requests and demands that they provide ‘evidence’ to demonstrate their value for their societies and funders. In this context, if there is either an absence or simply a lack of adequate empirical support to justify their activities then the case for museums becomes at least weakened, if not terminally damaged.

The stress on empirical evidence that we give in the following chapters derives from our own perspectives as empirical social scientists (one with a background in sociology and social policy, and one with a background in political science, public administration and policy). We have applied ourselves to the investigation of museums over a number of years and have published widely on how policy-making, social inclusion, the ‘new museology’ and citizenship are embodied in museums, and on the political and social nature of museums as institutions. In our research, rather than impose our own views on what museums are doing, we have, instead, let museum staff tell us what they are doing, why they are doing it, how they evaluate it, and what the consequences of doing it have been for their own organisations and for the communities that they serve. The largely qualitative nature of our research has allowed us to identify the importance of professional values and ideologies, organisational power distributions and hierarchies, and the meanings that museum staff give to their activities as being of great importance for understanding the ways in which museums function, and this extends far beyond unsubstantiated, non-empirical, claims about what museums are and do.

The dominance of normative advocacy arguments about museums, and the relative lack of detailed empirical analysis about them, can be simply explained as an academic disciplinary effect, where the tendency within much of the literature about museums rests upon disciplines such as art history and cultural studies. While there is some international divergence in this disciplinary basis – museum studies in the United States, for example, has a tendency to be more closely aligned with archaeology and anthropology than art history – there is little doubt that the dominant ways of thinking and talking about museums within academia have a great reliance upon the types of qualitative argumentation and logic that are based in the humanities in general, and which have become increasingly concerned with ‘reading the text’ of the museum rather than with detailed empirical contextualisation in many cases. There are clearly developed examples of more empirically orientated and some quantitative forms of research within the humanities, such as the example of cliometric economic history (Diebolt & Haupert, 2016), but as will be seen throughout this book such approaches are far more noticeable by their absence than their presence in developing arguments about the value of museums for societies. Even in the case of the large number of visitor surveys and analyses that rely upon quantification (as in Falk & Dierking, 2013) there is no certainty that the statistical evidence that is made use of is actually valid in methodological terms, being dependent more on the assumptions that are made about models and evidential validity than anything else. The assertive certainties that exist in many of these arguments is thus as much a case of how disciplines organise what are seen to be valid ways of thinking and writing about subjects as it is to do with anything else. Alternative disciplinary approaches establish other criteria as being appropriate for the formulation of valid arguments and claims about museums, and it is the difference between these approaches that have a significant effect on the whole topic of what museums are for.

The recognition of differences in how arguments and claims are constructed and validated within disciplinary settings makes no judgement whatsoever about whether these approaches are in some sense ‘superior’ or ‘inferior’ to one another: they are simply different. As noted above there is something of value in all of the arguments and claims that have been put forward about the place of museums in societies: our intention is to examine them, not as arguments and claims, but as justificatory mechanisms. If museums create employment then how could that actually be demonstrated? What causal mechanisms would need to exist for the presence of a museum, or the building of a new museum, to demonstrate its effectiveness in this role? Museums may well be a source of valuable employment opportunities (although who the beneficiaries of these opportunities are is another matter altogether), but if that is a major justification for their existence then it must be expected that questions about their success in doing the job of job creation will be asked. At the very least the question of whether the jobs that are created could have been created more effectively through other means (as Frey & Meier, 2006, argue) can become an important concern in times of econo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 What do museums do? What are museums for?
• 3 The multifunctional museum
• 4 Museums, policy, practice and the ‘struggle over space’
• 5 Museums and societies
• 6 Museums and economies
• 7 Museums and politics
• 8 Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index