Museum and Gallery Studies

The Basics

Rhiannon Mason, Alistair Robinson, Emma Coffield

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351373081
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Library & Information Science
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Museum and Gallery Studies: The Basics is an accessible guide for the student approaching Museum and Gallery Studies for the first time. Taking a global view, it covers the key ideas, approaches and contentious issues in the field. Balancing theory and practice, the book address important questions such as:

• What are museums and galleries?

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• Who decides which kinds of objects are worthy of collection?

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• How are museums and galleries funded?

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• What ethical concerns do practitioners need to consider?

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• How is the field of Museum and Gallery Studies developing?

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This user-friendly text is an essential read for anyone wishing to work within museums and galleries, or seeking to understand academic debates in the field.

1

FIRST PRINCIPLES

WHAT IS A MUSEUM OR GALLERY?

Most of us will have a fairly clear idea in our heads of what a museum or gallery is and does. So it may come as a surprise to learn that these terms are the subject of regular scrutiny and debate by bodies such as the Museums Association (UK) and ICOM (International Council of Museums), by national governments, and those who study or teach museum and gallery studies. One reason for this ongoing debate is that there has been an enormous expansion in the numbers and types of museums around the world from the second half of the twentieth century. To take a deliberately extreme contrast: the same term ‘museum’ is used to refer to an institution like the British Museum (Figure 1.1), established in London in 1753, and which holds eight million objects, and the Pencil Museum in Cumbria, also in the UK, which has collected pencils since 1980. The latter is a real registered museum. Given the differences in scale, topic and focus we might ask what if anything they have in common as museums. Can we define any shared ‘core’ characteristics or purposes? As a starting point, the Oxford English Dictionary (2008) gives the definition that a museum is only “a building used for storage and exhibiting objects of historical, scientific, or cultural interest”.

Figure 1.1 The frontage of the British Museum.

© The Trustees of the British Museum.

Notice that the emphasis here is on the museum as a physical space, as a ‘container’ for its ‘contents’. There is very limited indication here beyond the idea of ‘interest’ as to why institutions collect, at whose expense, or for whose benefit. If we look instead to definitions produced by the museum sector itself, we can find more help in thinking through the roles and purposes of museums. The UK Museums Association’s definition (Boylan 1992: 11) takes “public benefit” as a prerequisite for providing accreditation to institutions: “A museum is an institution which collects, documents, prepares, exhibits and interprets material evidence and associated information for the public benefit”.

Such definitions are periodically revised. Looking at these changes can give some insight into debates and preoccupations in the sector and more widely. In 1998 the above definition was revised to be: “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” (Museums Association 2016). Notice how this latter definition reorders the idea of a museum by putting the visitor or user first in the definition. The ‘internal’ activities that museum staff undertake are not the first item mentioned. The museum’s role as a store-house or container preserving things for posterity has become secondary. Some have argued that those activities are now seen as means to other ends. “People”, understood here as the general public are repositioned as the centre of the museum’s actions and priorities. (It is worth noting that in some countries, like the UK, the general public are understood to own the objects both philosophically and legally; this is not the case in all countries.) This shift towards a more visitor-oriented role is indicative of changes in museum thinking and practice in many countries around the world. Kenneth Hudson describes this change of emphasis in the role of museums as a “revolution – the word is not an exaggeration – in museum philosophy and in its practical applications” (1998: 48) that has taken place since the 1970s.

This “revolution” entails a much greater awareness of the political and politicised nature of museums. It requires paying greater attention to questions of power relations that are central to museums. The idea of the museum as ‘neutral’ space which is simply for ‘everyone’ whatever it does, and of a so-called ‘general’ public undifferentiated by class, education, ethnicity or other criteria have all been challenged. Those who began this revolution insist that museums should pay attention to the effects they have on individuals and communities, and not simply care for their objects. This idea involves a shift away from the idea of museum as container, shrine or temple to the museum as forum, contact zone, platform or social activist (Sandell and Nightingale 2012). This is not to suggest that objects are not important, but that greater attention ought to be paid to representation of varied people’s histories and cultures; and indeed to people representing their own histories rather than being spoken about by others. As a consequence, terms such as ‘inclusion’, and ‘empowerment’, and ‘participation’ or ‘co-production’ have entered museums professionals’ vocabulary in many countries, although they may be interpreted or acted upon in many varied ways. Needless to say, different institutions in different places face varied demands on them. For example, the South African Museums Association (SAMA) created a definition in 1999 that places emphasis squarely on museums’ social and political roles:

Museums are dynamic and accountable public institutions which both shape and manifest the consciousness, identities and understandings of communities and individuals in relation to their natural, historical and cultural environments, through collection, documentation, conservation, research and communication programmes that are responsive to the needs of society.

(SAMA 2013)

This fundamental shift in thinking about museums has been widely discussed. It can be neatly summed up by the title of an article by Stephen Weil (1999): “From being about something to being for somebody: The on-going transformation of the American museum”. A number of the ideas described above are also associated with what has been termed the ‘new museology’.

‘NEW MUSEOLOGY’

The ‘new museology’ is often associated in Anglophone museum and gallery studies with Peter Vergo’s edited 1989 book of that name. He described “a state of widespread dissatisfaction with the ‘old museology’ … what is wrong with the ‘old’ museology is that it is too much about museum methods and too little about the role of museums within society” (Vergo 1989: 3; Marstine 2005). In fact, as museologist Peter Davis notes, the ideas around this ‘new’ museology had predecessors in many different parts of the world since as far back as the 1950s in the US. He notes similar debates in the UK and France in the 1980s, and in ICOM (International Council of Museums) conferences in the 1970s and 1980s. The ICOM debates led to the establishment of MINOM (the International Movement for a New Museology) in 1985 in Lisbon, Portugal, at the second International New Museology Workshop. This had been inspired by the Quebec Declaration of 1984 that set out the “Basic Principles of a New Museology” and that declaration, in turn, identified its origins in discussions about a new museology back in 1975 in Santiago, Chile (MINOM 2014). This long, convoluted history is retold to demonstrate that across the world, over the course of a generation, numerous professionals and academics desired changes: changes in how museums work and who they work for.

What is called ‘new museology’ in English has also been called ‘sociomuseology’, ‘critical museum theory’ or ‘new museum theory’, in other languages or contexts. The debates are also closely related to debates about ‘ecomuseology’ and ‘community museology’ (Davis 1999). While each is distinct, all these movements share similar concerns about the role of museums and galleries in society, and the power they have to influence understandings of the past and the future. A central critique of this movement has been that telling ‘official’ stories only really tells the dominant social group’s ideas and histories, and marginalises others. There is an old adage that ‘history is told by the victors’ but, in effect, new museology has argued that the stories of the present are also told by the ‘victors’ in the sense that they are typically the stories of those who are most powerful, or the biggest group in society. New museology argues that the cultures, histories and identities of the varied groups who make up each society tend to be less well accounted for.

For many concerned with the ideas of new museology another central question is whether museums and galleries can have a positive, social impact. Can museums foster productive debate, bring people together in their very differences, address prejudice, even improve wellbeing? Taken together, as Davis puts it, the ”new museology could be seen as shorthand for the radical reassessment of the roles of museums in society” (1999: 54).

Anthony Shelton (2013: 7) provides another framework for thinking about new museology when he argues there is “not one but three museologies”. “Operational museology”: Shelton uses this term to describe how things are done within museum teams, and the organisation of professional knowledge including protocols and codes of practice, as well as organisational structures, and regulatory systems. “Critical museology”: Shelton uses this to describe the critique of ‘operational’ museology, addressing why museum practice has the patterns it does. A ‘critical’ museology asks what agency museum practice has in the world, and what forms of power it enables or requires. Understood in this way, we see museums as producers of culture and as such, embedded in pre-existing power relations rather than ‘autonomous’ actors. “Praxiological museology”: is linked to artistic ideas of ‘institutional critique’ that challenge museums’ orthodoxies by revealing the implicit politics that have become invisible through repetition and seeming ‘normal’.

As Shelton makes clear there are many ways in which conventional understandings of museums, and what they do, have been challenged in recent years. The idea that museums and galleries preserve and work with material cultures – tangible, ownable, often unique and portable commodities, remains probably the single, strongest image of what defines a museum. However, even this has been complicated in recent years, as we will see. For example, the attention paid to ‘intangible cultural heritage’, to non-European indigenous heritage practices and to oral history and personal testimonies has diversified many people’s understanding of what museums can do. At the same time, the enormous increase in the use and potential of digital and social media has also begun to change how people engage with museums. Many museums now count online visits as well as ‘physical visits’. In order to really grasp these current debates about what museums do and are for, we need to go back in time to consider their origins and development.

ORIGINS OF MUSEUMS

The most common history told about the development of museums is that they are a European invention, and that they developed out of early, private, Renaissance collections (Hooper-Greenhill 1992). Royal and aristocratic ‘cabinets of curiosity’, ‘Wunderkammern’ and ‘Kunstkammern’ of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are usually seen as the distant antecedents of art and natural history museums. ‘Wunderkammern’ translates literally as ‘wonder-cabinet’, where ‘cabinet’ could describe a whole room as much as an individual display case, while ‘Kunstkammern’ means cabinet of art (Bennett 1995: 73). These rooms were mostly privately owned, although they could sometimes be visited by permission of the owner. The very ideas of both ‘the public’ and ‘public’ institutions in the way we would understand them today did not exist at this time. The purpose of these collections was to show the knowledge and wealth of the owner but also to inspire awe and amazement at the rarity and novelty of the assembled objects, both natural and made by humankind. In particular, collectors commissioned explorers to bring back such wonders from the ‘New World’ as European explorers were beginning at this time to travel further into parts of the globe previously unknown to them. This meant that early collections could include objects as diverse as shells, animals, birds, but also artefacts associated with humans – weapons, decorative objects and, later on, other humans themselves.

The creation of ‘public’ institutions as we would begin to recognise them, with collections ordered along ‘scientific’ and scholarly lines familiar to many contemporary societies effectively began in eighteenth-century Europe (Davis 1999). The classical museum is very broadly associated with ‘Enlightenment’ ideas of rationalisation and scientific forms of classification (although the ‘Enlightenment’ is itself a complex and contested term which scholars debate). For example, the introduction in the 1750s of ‘binomial nomenclature’ – a system for classifying and naming species and genus – by the Swedish botanist, Carl Linnaeus, transformed the way that the natural world was understood to be organised. It provided a whole new way of thinking about classificatory and taxonomic systems for organising, differentiating and relating specimens in museums which is still in operation today.

In terms of thinking about the public nature of these institutions, we cannot overstate how any use of the term ‘public’ needs to be historically specific. In eighteenth-century Europe, in practice the term did not mean much more than ‘the minority who owned property’: namely the wealthy and literate higher social groups. The British Museum, established by act of Parliament in 1753, was indeed the world’s first national, public museum and “granted free admission to all studious and curious persons” as the museum observes (British Museum 2016).

However, in practice, this meant primarily for use only by scholars and ‘gentlemen’ – and even then on request only. Gaining entrance originally required a letter of introduction from an authority figure (Crow 1985). According to the museum’s own account of its history, ‘Visitor numbers have grown from around 5,000 a year in the eighteenth century to nearly 6 million today’ (British Museum 2016). It was in the nineteenth century that access to this institution became more widely understood, as part of a broader shift which can be seen in a number of European countries, albeit with variations.

THE LOUVRE: A TURNING POINT

Central to thi...