Museums and the Future of Collecting

Simon J. Knell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351916424
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Collecting is a key function of museums. Its apparent simplicity belies a complexity of questions and issues which make all collecting imprecise and unrepresentative. This book exposes the many meanings of collections, the different perspectives taken by different cultures, and the institutional response to the collecting problem. One major concern is omission, whether this be determined by politics, professional ethics, the law or social agenda. How did curators collect during the war in Croatia? What were the problems of trying to collect the 'old' South Africa when the new one was born? Can museums collect from groups which seem to 'deviate' from society's norms? How has the function of museums affected the practices of international trade? Can museums collect successfully if collecting agenda are being set externally? Museums and the Future of Collecting encourages museums to move away from the collecting of isolated tokens; to move beyond the collecting policy and to understand more clearly the intellectual function of what they do. Here examples are given from Australia, Sweden, Canada, Spain, Britain and Croatia which provide this intellectual understanding and many practical tools for evaluating a future collecting strategy.

1 Altered values: searching for a new collecting

Simon Knell

The collecting problem facing museums has many facets. Many believe it is simply a matter of locating an answer to the questions ‘What and how should a museum collect?’ But the problem is also one of aspirations and implications: unsatisfied desires mingle with full stores and overcommitted budgets. And while it is possible to locate many aspects of museum context and provision that explain why museums are never entirely successful collectors, and about which museums have much to complain, those of us who undertake the collecting also cherish beliefs, philosophies and practices which contribute to our undoing. We also undertake our collecting in a changing world and it this changing world which both provides the motivation to collect and yet, as I shall explain, also questions its validity.

Were our ancestors here now, they would have no difficulty recognising this modem collecting problem, for they too had faced it, often within a few years of the establishment of their institutions. But when they began the modem phase of institutional collecting, almost two centuries ago, they felt they were, in many ways, dealing with a finite world. They were primarily collecting objects from nature, in a world designed by a God, where the meaning of the object was set almost unquestioningly in the context of scientific realism. Indeed, within 50 years, some felt they had achieved their primary collecting goal.¹ What they did not foresee, initially, was that collecting would continue as knowledge, education, entertainment, social politics, fashion and so on demanded, and as the museums’ disciplinary interests diversified. Cultural change thus added to the diversity of collectables while the emergence of a pervasive museum culture instilled in society a new need for public giving. Any finitude in the collecting project was surely an illusion.

Theirs was a world of discovery. Modem disciplines were formed and ways of knowing took on an empirical rigour which was made concrete in the new museum. However, by the late twentieth century this disciplinary framework had matured to a point of postmodernist deconstruction, and was now set in a world of digitisation and information networking. The ‘hard fact’ concept of knowledge gathering, which had underpinned earlier collecting, now became situated in a complex interconnected and overlapping jumble of media, methods and philosophies, which contributed to individual ways of knowing. Here, belief, personal meaning making and politics conflicted with, if not superseded, an earlier philosophy (however realistic in actuality) of disinterested and rational objectivity. In this new world, legitimacy and authority were manoeuvred into the arguments of one group to question the collecting and interpretive rights of another.² Having sensed the power relations inherent in cultural representation, museums sought preferred viewpoints determined by morality and ethics. Institutional collecting, which could now be seen as a power-ridden act of authoring social memory, called for fundamental review.

This increased disciplinary reflection has reconfigured the object in knowledge creation and representation. Even in rational science, which has for the most part been unaltered by postmodernism, the collectable object is no longer at the heart of most of its ambitions. The nineteenth-century preoccupation with order disappeared long ago. Thus, however we might wish to view it, the collected object seems no longer to be as central to knowledge creation as it was. This is not to suggest that all intellectual pursuits are now devoid of the need for objects. Some, like art history, palaeontology and archaeology rely upon them, and many other disciplines still retain a taxonomic corner where the object remains key. But whereas once the object was accepted as a source of ‘evidence’ leading to absolute truth, now its claims are not beyond doubt.

This, however, is just one side of the interpretive equation: the readings that are possible from the object. The other side of this equation concerns the use of the object in the interpretation of knowledge to an audience; the role of the object in communication. Even here the ‘real thing’ may seem less essential. Many activities, which once relied upon its presence, are now achieved using other media: media in which the dynamism of the living event gives an even greater sense of witnessing a ‘truth’ or in which levels of interactivity and interrogation permit doubts to be removed. One wonders what would have happened if the early Victorians had had access to the movie camera or Internet. Would we have had a museum culture? But then the early twentieth-first-century Web, with its free access, encyclopaedic qualities, and failing curation, is perhaps more like the museum than we realise.

If, then, museums – defined as they are by the possession of these, now often altered, objects – are to exist into the future, how should they confront collecting? How do the efforts of the collecting institution fit into the modem way of knowing? Are museums moving beyond the object and beyond disciplinary knowledge? Are they destined to become centres solely for personal meaning making, the solution of contemporary social issues, and for educational experiences? Certainly many recent changes have suggested this kind of a future, but there are others which seem to suggest a return to the core values of curatorship.

One possible future, being much discussed at this time, lies in the world of digitisation. Across Europe, for example, there are grand plans for a pervasive ‘Ambient Intelligence Landscape’ (AmIL) which is to be built around networked ‘digital libraries’ (repositories of digital material), which grow from, and echo, our physical museums and libraries. Information will come to us through our environment and via wearable technologies which are intimately linked to personal context and need.³ With AmIL comes a plan for digital collecting which makes the encyclopaedic desires of our museum founders appear insignificant. However, the architects of this AmIL world are developing a knowledge infrastructure exactly like that created by museum builders in countries like Britain in the early nineteenth century. They too were constructing a pervasively networked new technology offering previously unknown access to knowledge. And just as in modem Europe, they too hoped to satisfy ‘inclusionist’ social agendas.⁴ To this emerging world, then, the lessons of 200 years of museum collecting provide both a model and a warning.

A full review of digital ‘collecting’ is beyond the scope of this book, but I am mindful that much contemporary collecting will be replaced by activity focused on digital capture, which will be undertaken without the survival of a physical counterpart. With this will come changes in fundamental beliefs about the required physicality of evidence and the associated characteristics of authenticity, but I have already suggested that we have the capacity to accept more dynamic forms of evidence. Clearly the authority and credibility of the digitising institution will play a critical role in validating digital data just as it does in preserving and relaying data associated with material objects. In this new world, the relationship between public and expert remains the same: the expert distils a ‘truth’ and the public decides whether to trust in it.

What is interesting about these developments is that the fundamental drive to collect and engage with ‘real things’ (even if digitised) remains. The computer scientists who now lead the ‘digital heritage’ revolution, like many museum practitioners and the early founders of our museums, retain a firm belief in both the inherent factuality of the object and the ease with which it can be gathered up. It is social change of the kind suggested by this AmIL world which raises doubts and questions about the future of collecting but yet also suggests that in one form or another its future is assured.

Context and change

Change of the kind being predicted by the new technological visionary has been a constant companion to museum development. It was only in the last four decades of the twentieth century, for example, that a new professionalism transformed the museum’s relationship with its collections. One key moment of realisation in this transformation came just a quarter century ago with the publication of Philip Doughty’s report on the state and status of geology collections in UK museums. His rhetoric against a failing profession, then personified in the membership of the UK’s ninety-year-old Museums Association, proved sensational and stimulated others to stand up and say ‘We too have been abused!’⁵ Professional standards of care and a workable system of museum accreditation were an almost immediate response.⁶ But what had caused this moment of realisation? The implication was that the profession had been living a lie. Professions are, amongst other things, identified by standards, but there seemed to be none. This was, however, not the modem manifestation it appeared to be. Subsequent research revealed that collection abuse had been the norm for 160 years.⁷ While academics had revelled in glorious histories, they had skirted around the realities and consequences of past amateurism, monument building and an irrationality of provision, preferring instead to document the nobler qualities of unfunded dedication, the pursuit of natural knowledge and so forth. Rather than revealing a modem failure, Doughty and his contemporaries were, instead, seeing the mirror-like reflection of their own professional expectations. As part of a large influx of fresh and idealistic graduates into museums in the 1960s and early 1970s, they, like everyone who joins long-established institutions, discovered a past disguised by myth and rumour. What they saw was real enough and did indeed speak of failure and neglect. A glorious past had, it seemed, been betrayed: Britain has a substantial claim to founding modem geology, a founding which also stimulated the emergence of a pervasive provincial museum culture in England. It was rather unexpectedly, then, that later research revealed that the betrayal had been initiated by the very actors who had contributed to the founding of the science and museums in the first place.

‘Betrayal’, however, is the wrong word. Throughout their existence museums have suffered from gross underfunding. Perhaps they had had golden moments of prosperity, but for most these really were momentary. In Britain, we like to blame the government for such things as underfunding, but the fact is that most of our museums were invented by private individuals who then sought public support; most public museums began with private ideas, private collections or private societies. One cannot escape the fact that these museums were founded on the borderline between Victorian patronage and charity. ‘Here are my children, please look after them!’, the founders said to those public bodies which took them on, and at once the museum became an orphan under the care of stepparents. That local and national governments supported these orphans was a reflection of other evolving Victorian values: national and civic rivalry, charity, the démocratisation of education, the reform of taxation and the adoption of a political philosophy in favour of public funding. At the time it was felt that these unwanted offspring could be patronised for public (and therefore political) benefit. Museums continue to be invented by the same means: a personal vision followed by the public purse. But there is a fine line here between this kind of public patronage and simple charity, and the cyclical fortunes of museums suggest that this line is often crossed. Thus the annual budget round frequently appears like a scene from Oliver Twist.⁸

Like most countries, Britain has lacked a strategic rationale for museums, and consequently there has always been a disparity between actual and required levels of funding. Every old plough poking its rusty metal above the roadside stinging nettles seems to be asking to become the founding piece for yet another museum. But while the desire to found museums is undiminished, the available funding for the traditional type will inevitably grow smaller as all funding bodies have available to them an increasing diversity of potential recipients for support under those worthy banners of ‘science and education’, ‘social and community services’ or ‘identity and citizenship’ or ‘the Arts’. External competition of this kind is just one factor which suggests that museums need to confront the resource implications of collections. There has also been much internal turmoil resulting from professionalisation of practices, and economic and political change. These, too, suggest a need for review.

Recent professionalisation, in the context of social change, provides useful insights into the world in which museums operate and within which we aim to develop collections. The process of professionalising practice can be traced back to the birth of museums when many curatorial benchmarks were established. The latter decades of nineteenth century added further innovative practices in thematic display and education. Although it is easy for museums to believe theirs are inherited problems, we should not fool ourselves into thinking that our predecessors, of even 180 years ago, were any less sophisticated when they came to consider their actions. They too, for example, had to deal with relativist philosophies which suggested that the reality of objects was an illusion. Their museums, like ours, were a key mechanism for accommodating and facilitating social change. They too had to deal, in their museums, with the interaction of secular society and religious belief, as has again become important in the setting of twenty-first-century multiculturalism, immigration and terrorism. They too had the know-how but not the funding. Theirs was, however, still a museum world dominated by the natural sciences, which from the outset gave an underlying intellectual drive and clear parameters for evaluating the worth of objects. What they did not have is modem levels of resource, and when that resource came along these disciplines were no longer at the height of museum fashion. By then archaeology had already risen to prominence, public art galleries were a civic expectation, and collecting activity in folk life (social history) was well advanced. From the 1960s, museums in Britain entered an entirely new world: museum communication became increasingly studied and incorporated into ever more sophisticated exhibition design; informal education programmes expanded; the conservation profession grew from its tiny foothold; collection management was transformed and the contents of registers and index cards were soon flowing into computers, while emerging documentation specialists struggled to keep up with rapid technological change and horrendous backlogs. More widely, specialist groups (a formalisation of ‘communities of practice’, now a key management concept)⁹ and agencies (like the UK’s area museum councils) began to provide support of a kind that overcame local deficiencies. Many of these innovations were homegrown but they were set in a world undergoing what was at first called ‘Americanisation’, and unsurprisingly many museum practices also came to the UK from across the Atlantic.

These late twentieth-century changes represented a concerted effort to put things right, to make a leap in professionalisation after a 150-year creep. The 1970s and 1980s were important decades in this regard but are light years away from the mobile, networked and information-ridden world of the present: relatively few families had cars in early 1960s Britain, let alone telephones; 1970s documentation efforts centred on filling in cards; and in the 1980s computer interactives in museums were still a rarity. Clearly mus...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Preface
• 1 Altered values: searching for a new collecting
• 2 Collections and collecting
• 3 Museums without collections: museum philosophy in West Africa
• 4 The future of collecting: lessons from the past
• 5 The Ashmolean Museum: a case study of eighteenth-century collecting
• 6 The cartographies of collecting
• 7 From curio to cultural document
• 8 Contemporary popular collecting
• 9 Collecting from the era of memory, myth and delusion
• 10 Collecting in time of war
• 11 The politics of museum collecting in the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ South Africa
• 12 Folk devils in our midst? Collecting from ‘deviant’ groups
• 13 All legal and ethical? Museums and the international market in fossils
• 14 What is in a ‘national’ museum? The challenges of collecting policies at the National Museums of Scotland
• 15 Who is steering the ship? Museums and archaeological fieldwork
• 16 Collecting: reclaiming the art, systematising the technique
• 17 Samdok: tools to make the world visible
• 18 Professionalising collecting
• 19 Developing a collecting strategy for smaller museums
• 20 Towards a national collection strategy: reviewing existing holdings
• 21 Ranking collections
• 22 Deaccessioning as a collections management tool
• 23 Collecting live performance
• 24 Redefining collecting
• Index