It surprises me that people always show a great interest when they found out I am studying/interning/working at a museum.
“What a awesome major/working place!”
Lucky for me, I’ve had a plenty of great conversations and made a lot of friends due to my connection with museums, and, it seems like museum become one of the “coolest” places in America nowadays. But, the more I talked with people, the more unexpected questions I got, such as
– What is a museum?
Well, frankly, no one actually asked me this question, but this is the first question I want to discuss here today.
If you type this question into the Google search bar, 88,000,000 results would show up in 0.52 seconds (thanks technology!) and the top answer is
Also Wikipedia tells us “A museum is an institution that cares for (conserves) a collection of artifacts and other objects of artistic, cultural, historical, or scientific importance and some public museums make them available for public viewing through exhibits that may be permanent or temporary.”
The AAM, the International Council on Museums, and the Museum and Library Services Act all hold different definitions, but we could definitely find some common points, like
- public
- cultural
- collection
- exhibition
Firstly, no matter it is nonprofit or for-profit (there’re several great for-profit museums you have to check out, like the Newsum and the Spy Museum), I think a museum must be a public place at first. Through exhibitions, special programs and events, museums provide lots of opportunities to the PUBLIC PEOPLE to visit, learn, and enjoy. Also, as a PUBLIC PLACE, the ability of gathering people together and bridging audiences with art and knowledge as well as with each other is another big reason of museums being popular nowadays.
I mean, we’ve already had too many methods to “connect with each other online,” but being public and getting physical touch are still the basic needs for most human beings. A museum is the ideal place (at least for me) to hang out – could walk, sit, even lay down (remember the WONDER show in Renwick Gallery? ); could watch, listen, smell, and touch (the smell of Acadia National Park from the Museum of Science in Boston is still in my mind); could talk (with friends, companies, gallery guides, museum professions, and artists) or not talk for a whole day – there are so many things could do and so many topics could explore!
Second, a museum is usually a cultural place with collections and exhibitions. Started as the temple for Muses, museums are always a place to hold and display products. However, not every collection could support a museum and NOT every museum MUST have the collection. Preserving and cataloging collection is a huge work and used to be the most important part of museums’ work in the past (still important nowaday though). But we can see there are a large number of museums may not have a permanent collection (like a lot of children’s museum do) but they are still doing well. The traditional definition of museum is not suitable anymore.
Also, as the web and technology is developing, more and more museums became focusing on digital collection storage and spreading, as well as digital-visual exhibits exploring. A scholar from Egypt could request an object’s information from the MET for his research and a student from Japan could appreciate Yayoi Kusama’s exhibit from 2012’s Tate. Technology magnified the museum feature of being “public” – it could provide more exhibits and activities and reach SO MUCH MORE people, even for these permanent classic exhibition, museums have found out multiple ways to engage audiences more. Through social media, people would enjoy these high quality image of museum objects and their information all the time, or post photos and participate in discussion with museum lovers all over the world. Technology increased the museum’s covering radius into 6357 km and decreased the boundaries between the museum and its audience.
However, as a museum student focusing on exhibitions and social media, I could not stop wondering what this the bottom line of being a museum? After “permanent” and “collection” being out of date, what about “exhibition”? Is “showing curated exhibits” still essential as a museum? What about a “everyone-could-participate” & “audience-based-self-curated” exhibition? Is there any possible that a museum would allow “unprofessionals” to curate and set up a exhibition for 100%? How could that happen and how would the general public react? Also, what about a VR exhibition? Is that possible if a whole exhibition been made in VR? Will that also be considered as appropriate for a history museum? Would people still come to visit the museum if they could do that at home, and why? And, what’s the #NEXT?
(This is my first attempt of blogging. Honestly it’s much harder than I thought. But I’ll keep trying to continue this series – “Wassup, Museum!”)
(Comments would be lovely appreciated!)
Wassup, Museum! 