Museums Flashcards
1st purpose-built museum
Ashmolean
1677 Ashmole donated collection of curiosities to the University of Oxford
Grand tour etc, strange objects collected from around world as part of distinction of being upper m-c gentleman
British Museum
Sir Hans Sloane collected curiosities throughout his lifetime and bequeathed them to King George II. Included books, manuscripts, national history specimens from around the wrld. Act of Parliament est British Museum 1753, opened 1759
Roots of museums in Early Modern period
Gentlemen acquiring objects 4 status and bequeathing
Victoria and Albert Museum
- School of Design, Somerset House, 1837. Body which would become Victoria and Albert Museum. Collection of study objects to help apprentices improve quality of their design
- 1852 - Henry Cole became director of this school of design. Realisedobjects cld have a greater remit
- Not just about collecting antiquities: about collecting best manufactured goods to help improve quality
- Mission: to educate general public and show the best design and craftsmanship
- Imperial objects key part of collections and display
- South Kensington Museum
- Foundation stone of V&A Museum laid by Victoria 1899. Renamed to V&A
- Confirmed as most important collection of material objects in Br emp
Pitt-Rivers Museum:
- Colonel Augustus Pitt-Rivers. Educated at Sandhurst. Long hist in army. More interested in objects
- 1867 went on half pay and devoted rest of life to anthropology
- 1881 head of
- 1882 1st inspector of
- Involved in attempts to update and improve Br objects
- Interested in how objects evolve and how we improve them from model to model
- Interest in material evolution
- Collected weapons
- Collection expanded to modes of navigation, religious implements, clothing etc
- From collection began to develop theory of material culture
- Housed in Oxford and museum of anthropology and agriculture in Oxford
- Way these organised import for understanding Victorian mentalities
- Objects groups by form and function not geographical location
- From simplest to most complex
- P-R thought was showing devel of groups from more simple to more sophisticated society
- P-R basically ranking objects and societies from more simple to more complex
- P-R’s view, all cultures on unitary path to progress
- In this schema, most advanced place = Victorian Britain
- In P’R’s words: in ed museum specimins selected to show sequence and how one form led to other. Arrangement according to dates when poss but when not poss must organise by type - typology. Classification of objects from most to least developed
- Today no longer arranged in these series
- Sets of objects altered and intellectual purpose altered
- Displays show variety of cultural solutions to common problems
- Designed to show diversity of human cultures and belief systems rather than cultural hierarchies
Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery:
- London museums import in form of imperial capital and mark of prestige
- But Victorian period also period of burgeoning of provincial capitals’ prosperity
- Museums in provinces to serve community but also add to civic pride
- Current Br City Museum opened 1905
- Origins lie in 1823 foundation of Br’s institution for the advancement of science and art
- Merge w Br library soc
- Struggled financially, transferred to Br city corporation
- 1899 site of current building bought
- Tobacco baron, William Henry Wills, financed much of building - paid £10 000 for construction
- Museum construct started 1901 and completed 1905
- Featured antiquities and manufactured goods from across empire
- Also busts of local Bristolians and local anthropological goods
- Situating Bristol within empire and civic pride
- Lots going on here that we can deconstruct - acquisition, display, narration of knowledge
Aspects of museum curation
Museums are selective:
* Present highly selective and partial view of the world * Reinforce objects' status by putting objects in glass and do not touch labels. Display to us the care and expertise of the curators * Objects labelled w a very small selection of information * Take object w many interps and give single unified meaning * Items in V&A museum. Could be told as story of violence of Br colonialism. Instead, items labelled as examples of the craftsmanship of manufacturing techniques * Process by which objects selected tend not to be discussed
Museums as secular shrines:
* Br Museum explicitly designed w ref to Greek Temple * Secular temples to knowledge. To nation * Focus oft not on social hist of object but of visitor's personal relationship with objects they see * Museums seeing selves as theraputic function * Individual having spiritual and transcendant relationship with objects * Talked about lots in museum theory * Kenneth Clark - only reason for bringing together works of art in pub place - brings to us happiness. We are refreshed * Setting imbuing objects with meaning. Quasi-religious, separate from cities around them
Museums and colonialism:
* Role of museums in formation of Eur colonialism * Richards - fixation w central collection characteristic of imperial archive. Fantasy of objects turned into power * Removal from colonial periphery to imperial centre profoundly alters how objects understood * Putting objects behind class reinforce idea that world can be brought to Br in mini and made noble * Othering * Museums always about construction, reinforcement of ideas of Orientalism, strange, different * Procession of objects from periphery to centre symbollically enacts ideas of Britain at the heart of empire * Important link between knowledge and power * Ordering and display and categorising of objects from colonial locations * Another way that colonialism became cultural as well as military phenomenom
Transformation in museum culture 20th C
Mid-20th C
* Now uncomfortable * Little changed * Museums persisted mid-20th C * Mid-20th C v v little interest in marketing to broader public * Most ppl who go to museums m-c * Footfall low
Museums from 1980s particularly:
* Crises * Forced to rethink purpose and function * Intellectual disturbance of postmodernism, throwing into doubt established beliefs, categorisations and aesthetic values fundamental to museums * Crisis of funding * Museums have evolved rapidly from quasi-cathedrals to nation, fusty and old
New Labour and Free Museums:
- Ipsos Mori key source - see transformation taking place
- New way of thinking of museums largely driven by funding cuts
- Shift from objects to museum as visitor experience and focus on disseminating knowl to widest possible constituency
- This in many ways cld be seen in context of wider changes - e.g. to unis, no longer ivory towers, and National Trust, landowner protection to mass membership
- New Labour invested in almost utopian idea of democratisation of knowledge
- New Labour Manifesto 1997 - all museums should be free
- Transformation of museums led by fact entry now free
- Mori report - can see enormous growth taking place in museum sector. Millions more people
- In many ways vindicated free museums. Opened up to wider proportion of public
- Rise in socially excluded going to museums
- But largely incr from same people going more. Much much lower incr in ppl from ethnic minority backgrounds going
- New Labour effort to democratise knowl more problematic than realised
- Impacts of making museum free - primarily, once again gave museums access to funding. In so doing, brought museums into pact w politicians and citizens. Funding allocated p/p through the door. For more funding must attract more visitors
- This evolution must be understood in context of New Labour
- NL - Citizens have duty to understand past better. Citizens as stakeholders in idealised myth of Br past. Br people have right to access their part but also duty of citizenship, to be historically and politically literate
- Museums transformed to become part of competitive leisure market. Had to brand, market, aggressively
- Demand-driven models have empowered customer and emph choice, value and experience
- Visit quality etc imperative to museum experience
- Invention of blockbuster exhibition - funded by corporate sponsorship etc, interactive display
- Centre of museum collections tilted to visitors. Objects w appeal to non-specialists
- Vistor at centre of museum rather than conservation etc
Changes:
- Rise of postmodernism and funding concerns have transformed ways museums viewed
- Since 1980 - more self-conscious approach to museology
- Trying to make museums less elite-feeling
- Emphasis on decolonizing the collections
- P-R museum has reorganised collection to remove ideas of Eur supremacy
- Constroversies around knowl, pwr, colonialism still ongoing
- E.g. Elgin marbles. Taken by Elgin early 19th C supposedly to protect from damage but really to display Br as heir to Greek democratic legacy. Greece has demanded back. Have space and tools to hold them but Br museum refuses to give back
- Banksy and Bristol Museum - more self-referential attitude to collection. His works put in among authentic original exhibits. Interrogated form and function of museum by placing original Banskies among trad displays forced viewer into confrontation of nature of museum and to question role as spectators
- Forced to face up to embedded knowledge views
- Have oft ended up normalising multinational capitalism
- Curators can arrange documents into a combo of media
Pitt Rivers, ‘Typological Museums, as Exemplified by the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford and His Provincial Museum inFarnham,Dorset’,Journal of the Society of Arts40 (1981)
Pitt-Rivers:
- Military and imperial background
- Enlightenment ideas
- Typology:
o Baroque periodà no museums but ‘cabinets of curiosities’
§ But by the enlightenment à idea that knowledge could be categorised and organised
§ Classification of objects
- Meant to be able to see the development of technologies over time
- Museums should be an educational journey
- Museum as an experience
o Sets up bands and has cream teas
- Very class bound
- Importance of audience
- Upper-class, military trained male à writing for the Royal Society which was a group of upper class experts
o Makes a lot of comments about class and how museums were to educate them
§ Rotunda would facilitate this learning
- 1890s: already thinking about the visitor experience at this point
o Band playing popular tunes
- Making the case of quite a modern museum, though of a museum in the way we do now (more than others of his time)
o Expected to entertain and educate as well as display interesting things
o Very much of its time (savage race)
But displayed things as a sequence of development
W. R. Baker,Bristol Museum and Art Gallery: The Development of the Institution during a Hundred and Thirty Four Years(1906)
- Outline behind the thinking behind their collecting
- The layout is very similar still today, retains a lot of the sense of c19th collection
- Outlines the layout
- Quite a random selection when it opened à everything has been manufactured, but still an odd mixture of things
- Mostly just a description of what the museum contained
- Good example of what the provincial museum was trying to do in c19th
Issue of how old something can be? à Death exhibit
Mori,The Impact of Free Entry to Museums(2003)[onlinehere]
Impact of free entry to museums:
- 2003 published
- Key points:
o Make a statement at the <3 of new labour’s museum policy
o Free so marketers and managers were aware of public demand
o Scholars thought this meant dumbing down museums and that museums were losing scholastic purpose
o Making them free meant that museum visitor numbers shot up
o Became one of the most popular leisure activity
o Statistics don’t tell us if it was the same people going back
o Knock on effect: the special exhibitions can be very expensive
o Free entry didn’t change the type of people who were going
§ Mostly people with degrees, middle class
§ Didn’t open the doors to the socially excluded, ethnic minorities or the poor
§ Didn’t re-direct or expand the audience as much
o Increasing numbers brings a very different sort of challenge
§ For example à More people à more people breathing à actually affects the conservation of paintings and artefacts as the air is more moist
§ Challenges about who the museums are for, who they are aimed at
- How long can museums stay free?
o Cuts
o Debates probably in the next few years over if they should stay free
o Should tourists have to pay?
§ Taxpayers shouldn’t?
o Museums and conservation expensive to maintain
o Numbers have continued to grow
Tim Benton and NicolaWatso, ‘Museum Practice and Heritage’ in Susie West (ed.),Understanding Heritage in Practice(Manchester, 2010),
The Museum is an aggregation of people and things that stretches beyond its immediate physical confines and involves a variety of events, negotiations, and technologies
What the visitor, staff mem, or researcher picks out as significant about the Museum varies enormously
Pitt Rivers Museum = attempt to reproduce salient material aspects of human history in a relatively small space
Diff types of objects arranged in groups according to form or function rather than geographical provenance
Displays no longer arranged in series showing cultural development. Today, displays show different cultural solutions to common problems, and the diversity of human creativity and belief systems, without recourse to outdated theories of cultural hierarchy.
Still typological arrangement
Two Jews’ Harps acquired by Museum’s curator, Henry Balfour, in the Naga Hills of India, 1922. Staying with his friend, James Mills, Sub-divisional Officer with the Indian Civil Service
Museums emerge through thousands of relationships like these
Museums have multipe authors
All of the relationships cohere around things. It is objects that have drawn people together, helped to define their interactions, made them relevant to the museum
Objects can be obstinate - they do not always conform to people’s expectations of them
Our research project The Relational Museum project
Entities take on values and histories given to them through their relations to others, a concept which plays down any notion of inherent or unalterable characteristics
In Museum, big ideas about the world held together by sets of small things
Pitt Rivers Museum collections at least 15x the size they were in 1885, and continue to grow. Museum designed to display 20,000 objects across three floors now contains over 32,000 on the ground floor alone
Pitt Rivers Museum founded, in 1884, as centre for anthropological and archaeological research at the University of Oxford
Pitt Rivers collected and classified objects bc believed they provided unambiguous, scientific evd for the workings of the human mind
Historians now emphasizing blurred boundaries between what is supposedly ‘natural’ and what is ‘cultural’
Shorn of progressivist notions, similar thoughts are being played with again today, so that the material world is seen to be intimately involved in people’s thoughts, feelings and actions
Objects were at the forefront of anthropological research
Material culture in museums has become fetishized. Now museums have special ‘handling collections’
Signs of another shift in 21st C - museum staff finding ways to encourage a more multi-sensory engagement w the objects in their collections
By taking individual motivations, actions, events, and negotiations seriously, the Museum itself seems to disappear. No longer an entity at all
JeromedeGroot,Consuming History(Oxford, 2009)
Lammy presented museum as transcendent humanist sanctuary from the cares of the world
DCMS Secretary of State Tessa Jowell - museums and past as sources of citizenship
For Jowell and Lammy, museums = part of the fight against terror, important in national self-definition, Enlightenment treasure houses
One of the key reasons the museum has been reclaimed during the past 10 yrs is bc of tourism
Jowell and Byers, 2001 - internationally, the imprint of history on our environment is a powerful aspect of our image as a nation
History is lost in a flurry of economic terms: we must ‘manage’ heritage properly
Particularization of national history the materials for robust tribal independence, and therefore their presentations of the past feed into discourses of proud difference
VisitScotland’s website has section of ‘Uniquely Scottish’ things from Whiskey to Gaelic
tourist boards mixing heritage w newness - past alive and vital rather than ossifying baggage
Identity, collective memory. Past to bind together the present
Digitisation of archives and artefacts to create an online museum has profoundly changed the way that their collections are experienced. Museum shops have inserted these institutions into a marketing discourse of competition and branding
Need to support the institution financially originally due to funding cuts but the more successful museums took the opportunity to compete aggressively for market share and brand recognition and to make increasingly confident inroads into the commercial sector
Museums found themselves in a competitive leisure market and had to define themselves accordingly through aggressive branding and marketing
Demand-driven models have empowered the customer and emphasized choice, value and experience
Museums have been forced to commercialise
concept of ‘visit quality’ is now an imperative issue
Professionalisation of the museum institution has demanded a corporate identity and structure
This experience is consonant w that of other public professions and institutions (such as universities or hospitals) during the 1990s and early 21st C under the New Labour drive to market-led modernisation
consumption of the artefact or historic site is increasingly structured
Visitors are profiled, institutions seek brand recognition and loyalty
Massive growth in non-collection specific activities: picture libraries, publishing projects, and, most importantly of all, the gift shop
Heritage has become something that can be owned.
Increasingly important ‘friend’ organisations which have a symbiotic relationship with the museum, providing financial support in return for increased access and discounts
The shop presents heritage as something to be replicated, made iconic and consumed. Visitors can ‘own’ history
Rhetoric of the museum is that of individuality and uniqueness, but the reality of the commercialisation of the museum space is the increasing homogenisation of the heritage/ historical experience
Increasingly common for organisations to have outreach or satellite shops. e.g. British Museum shop as well as site at 22 Bloomsbury Street and store in Heathrow Airport
Museums have become part of wider branding issues - for instance, those relating to local, city-level (European capitals of culture, for instance), regional or national tourism
Commercial wings of museums can have beneficial qulities. Museum café in the American Indian Museum serves authentic Native American food themed around the five geographic areas covered by the museum’s exhibition
Democratisation of the artefact might be read as a move towards inclusion
Concept of ‘access’. Visitor/ user now at the centre of the museum, rather than education or conservation
Tension - on the one hand, drive to individuation, on the other, need to engage w the market and not just be another service provider clamouring for audience share
Theories of interactivity oft draw upon ‘participatory’ social model of museums which drive towards empowerment
Emphasis on the individual’s engagement with history rather than an imposed narrative
The citizenship and stakeholder rhetoric of the UK govt enables its subjects to engage with the past, but the digitisation practice of museums is opening up new, global markets instead
Virtual architecture imacts upon the visitor experience and this has benefits ranging from easier language conversion to faster access for the disabled
Recent virtual revolution is the biggest conceptual change to the museum since the late 18th C
Destroys the Eurocentricity of the museum structure and the authority of the institution
Museums have embraced much faster than many other historical media the virtual turn, understanding history as increasingly a technologically mediated experience
Physical consumption of the historical - economic or otherwise - has been revolutionised
