The real relics in our museums may be the ways we think and work.
By Lois H. Silverman and Mark O’Neill
This article was published in Museum News November/December 2004.
Since the 19th century, the museum world has been characterized by simplistic oppositions in which everything is either one thing or another—a masterpiece or a minor work, an original or a reproduction, a great artist or an apprentice, this species or that. Such shorthand, colored by the tasks of taxonomy, made the world manageable 100 years ago. But while in the 20th century many fields moved from classification to analysis, museums remain dominated by 19th-century concepts of human nature.
For example, the Victorian theory that human beings are born “blank slates” on which the world imprints its meanings is the basis for many views of communication in museums, though that approach underestimates the complexity of human psychology and genetics. It isn’t difficult to understand why this is so. After all, a reduction to the fundamental is handy; a sense of control of the complex is empowering. Yet it also is easy to see that this long-time approach no longer applies in the contemporary world. Professions that aim to benefit society must take the complexity of people and experience into account.
Like other fields, the museum profession seeks graspable explanations and clear theories to support and guide its practice. Over the years, many of us have flocked to lectures by such museum-friendly scholars as Howard Gardner, Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi, Bernice McCarthy, and others for useful typologies and concepts. While the work of these writers has enlightened and informed museum practice, our demanding daily schedules leave little time for deep, critical, and sustained discussion and analysis of theory. All too often, we quickly adopt a seemingly useful academic concept, bringing about minor adaptation that avoids significant change. Those professionals whose responsibilities include evaluation are able to gather informative data from and about visitors. But for most museum staff, the workday holds little opportunity for engaging in the development of a deeper and more complex understanding of the museum experience.
Small steps are taken in our yearly conferences, special projects, and other professional development forums; in the uncommon workplace that commits time for reading and discussion groups; and through the growing number of people writing for the professional literature. Yet despite many museum workers’ enthusiastic reception of education scholar Donald Schoen’s “reflective practitioner” concept—introduced and advocated in the United States in the 1980s by Mary Ellen Munley—too many museums remain noticeably uncommitted to the development of a deeper understanding of the field as a cornerstone of practice.
The stresses of sustaininga fantasy of simplicity in the 21st century have led to a rigidity in museums. Despite great strides by some institutions, much of the field still operates amid simplistic oppositions that seem more reflective of a fear of change than of a faith in tradition. In each case, two valid concepts are pitted against each other, which both denies the complexity of the underlying issue and stalls real progress. Though this approach seems to provide safety and an illusion of control, in reality the divisions it creates help foster an inaccurate, unproductive, and stifling atmosphere.
We do not advocate complexity for its own sake, but in the belief that embracing complexity might allow museums to do their best possible work. We also do not claim to know the best way to richer, deeper, more accurate understandings—that project will require the engagement of many. We do hope that spotlighting the simplistic oppositions that persist in some institutions will be a useful step toward transcending them and embracing complexity in the 21st-century museum.
Our Messages versus Their Meanings
Just as other fields struggle to understand human behavior, museums seek to explain how and why visitors experience our institutions the way they do. The key to this understanding—and to developing the most effective exhibits and programs—may well be the concept of “visitor” in the minds of those responsible for creating the museum product.
The concept may be simplistic or too subjective. It may narrowly assume that visitors are idealized versions of staff—desiring only an aesthetic experience or to learn a historical narrative. Or museum staff may have a deep intuitive empathy with visitors, which exhibition planners often do. Yet one’s own subjective responses are not a reliable yardstick for the responses of all visitors—only, perhaps, those with a similar cultural background, cognitive style, and/or emotional disposition.
Visitor studies provide a perspective that can reveal the blind spots of even the most empathetic staff member. They show that the visitor is a complex being, actively experiencing and seeking a range of meaningful museum experiences. Yet our field continues to divide visitors into two categories: either they are dependent, seeking out meanings and interpretations created by museum staff, or they are autonomous, valuing their own views above all else. In short, we pit our messages against their meanings. The recent popularity of “meaning-making” and the confusion about its application to exhibits indicates that the rift is still alive and well. Accepting the notion that visitors make their own meanings, many museums attempt to link their staff’s aims to visitors’ experiences or cater to a wider range of cognitive styles. This often leads to a more sophisticated version of the Victorian model in which the museum transmits and the visitor receives, rather than in any real difference in approach. We fail to account for the depth of visitors’ capacities for making meaning or the role that museum objects play in that effort.
Frequently, this is expressed through misunderstandings and conflict between curators and educators. Some of the most public debates in museums have revolved around this issue. Experiments with exhibition teams, audience advocates, and exhibit developers, and the removal of entire cadres of senior curatorial staff all have been attempts to break down this polarization. While there have been some successes, the division still exists, with either curators or educators winning or the two sides maintaining an uneasy truce.
In fact, there are at least two possible outcomes to a visitor’s experience—seeing a topic from a new perspective and experiencing something on personal terms. Both are respectable goals for any museum, and they may occur simultaneously or at different times. When we embrace the complexity of visitors as human beings, it soon becomes clear that people can and do welcome both expert interpretation and their own meanings. Insisting that there is a consensus in the field about the best outcome of a museum experience avoids real debate and discounts both human intelligence and the nature of human experience.
Theory versus Practice
Many museum staff are wary of abstract ideas and concepts that appear to threaten institutional traditions. Their hostility is compounded and, in part, justified by the fact that a great deal of theory is jargon-ridden, pretentious, and difficult to understand. On the other hand, some see the museum world as lacking in theoretical underpinning. But what traditionalists see as common sense is, in fact, just old theory that has beenfully absorbed. Unfortunately for museums, much of that theory is now static and does not reflect a society that has changed vastly over the last 150 years. As a result, museum leaders sometimes find it difficult to articulate the value of museums or even to explain what museums are.
The museum profession is not the only field that separates theory from practice; journalism, education, and a host of other fields cast their “practitioners” and “scholars” as two distinct groups. Though practitioners often contribute field-changing concepts and scholars develop innovative exhibitions and programs, we still place them in different camps. Usually university and independent researchers develop theory, conduct research, reflect on philosophy—that is the “work” of scholarship. And it is the “work” of museum staff members to collect and preserve artifacts, design exhibitions, develop programs, raise funds, manage personnel and resources, and otherwise operate the institution. Yet adherence to this separation of tasks keeps our knowledge about museums less sophisticated and, ultimately, less useful. No theory will suffice unless it is grounded in practice, and no practice will sustain itself unless it can be understood and explained. The future health of museums requires the continued sharing of knowledge and the bridging of these boundaries.
Museum staff with practical experience and those with scholarship experience must confront each others’ stereotypes and insecurities. Training programs, exchange opportunities, and sabbaticals can encourage professional development in both scholarship and practice. Each museum must think about how to become a better institution for the advancement of knowledge about the field—theory, practice, and the connections between the two.
Keepers of Culture versus Makers of Culture
Because most museums collect, preserve, and interpret artifacts, they have long defined themselves as “keepers” of culture. But the decisions museums make over what and how to collect, display, and interpret shape the very culture they profess to guard.
Implied in this opposition between “keeping” and “making” is another pervasive and powerful one: objectivity versus subjectivity. In the “keeping culture” view, museums are seen as objective recorders, gathering accurate and well-researched information and delivering it faithfully. In the “making culture” view, every choice and product made in the museum is a subjective creation of one or more people.
Even in the function of keeping culture, which aims to present only the best research and the verifiable truth, the choices of museum staff alter the product in small or large ways, and the exhibitions that result contribute to the making of culture. Hence, the museum is both a keeper and a maker of culture, a fluid interchange of two crucial purposes. As such, we should strive to recognize the subtle and not-so-subtle implications of our daily decisions; how decisions affect different groups; and what our inclusions, exclusions, and emphases communicate. By blurring the distinction between keeping and making, more compelling questions will arise, such as, why do we select some artifacts for preservation and not others? And how can we use the knowledge we have to help foster a more humane culture? Answers to such questions will make it easier to define and defend museums as cultural institutions.
Depicting Cultures:Art versus Anthropology
Objects from non-Western cultures or minority ethnic groups in Western societies usually are displayed in one of two ways. They are shown either as decontextualized works of art, displayed against as blank a background as possible, or as representative of diverse cultures, visually celebrating the life of a people through photographs and other contextual material. The aesthetic approach assimilates objects to the point of blandness, minimizing the profound differences in cultures in general and in their idea of beauty in particular. And cultural relativism—the practice of not judging other cultures and assuming their values shouldbe respected, no matter what they are—can lead museums toportray cultures as happy families, without conflict or negative heritage.
One of the challenges facing Western museums is to display objects in ways that communicate both their visual power and their meanings to the society that produced them. But if museums move away from aesthetic or ethnographic approaches they will have to become much more critical of both Western and non-Western cultures. As world events challenge us to tackle and interpret the complexities of culture, we must examine societies’ positive and negative aspects in museum displays. Such issues as contemporary slavery, female circumcision, infanticide, capital punishment, torture, and the glorification of war—often connected to objects in collections, but seldom discussed—must be addressed. To help museum professionals in this effort, a set of humanistic values should be articulated and maintained by the worldwide museum community. Perhaps the Universal Declaration of Human Rights would be a good place to start. Established after the horrors of World War II, this document—which recognizes “the inherent dignity and the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family”—is still a powerful challenge to both intolerance and indifference.
Dealing with the negative aspects of heritage can be dangerous—as the Royal Ontario Museum learned during its 1989 exhibition, “Into the Heart of Africa,” in which the institution’s ironic portrayal of cultural imperialism was read literally. Visitors thought the museum agreed with the imperialistic attitudes discussed in the show. But if museums are serious about promoting the values of “civilized” societies and exploring the issues inherent in their collections—while retaining respect for their authoritative knowledge and serving as safe places for social gathering—they must develop the expertise to manage the risks.
The Collections versus the Public
In the summer 1999 issue of Daedalus, Stephen E. Weil characterized a fundamental change in museums since World War II as the shift “from being about something to being for somebody.” Many experienced museum staff have gone through this change, often feeling that their institutions were being taken away from them.
Most discussions of the shift from an inward focus on collections to an extroverted focus on the public obscure the very essence of museums: the interaction between people and objects. With doors open, collections out, and interpretation provided, museums are about something and for somebody at the same time. They uniquely provide a variety of spaces and contexts and invite people to encounter and contemplate the tangible artifacts of life. It is from such interactions between people and objects that a multitude of meanings emerge.
The denial of the complex interaction of visitors and objects also can be found in another ongoing and futile opposition between objects speaking for themselves and objects requiring interpretation. Proponents of the former often seem to be unaware that visitors must have a vast cultural background before objects can appear to speak for themselves. On the other hand, museums dominated by graphics, text, and computers can obscure the resonance of objects. There is no easy rule for balancing both sides. If the objects cannot convey a significant part of the exhibition’s story, then perhaps the museum is not a suitable medium for the topic. But if the objects can help to tell a story, they should be supported in ways that enable communication with a range of audiences. Every piece of communicative apparatus—from exhibit labels to computer terminals—should foster interaction between people and objects and direct attention to the resonance of the objects.
Learning versus Aesthetic Contemplation
A classic argument in museums often occurs between staff who think visitors want to look at uncluttered objects of beauty and staff who think visitors want to learn and need various kinds of support in that task. In fact, neither side does justice to the variety of experiences museum visitors seek. Increasing numbers of writers are documenting the many other types of visitor experiences and outcomes—such as those that are introspective (Pekarik, Doering, and Karns, 1999) or therapeutic (Silverman, 2002)—which don’t fit comfortably under the rubric of learning or appreciation. Exploring, understanding, and, above all, facilitating these experiences is vital for the next stage of museum development.
Museums always have served a range of societal and cultural functions, including preservation, collection, interpretation, social bonding, memorializing elite groups, and expressing civic pride. And visitors use museums for a range of purposes, including leisure, education, socializing, relaxation, and renewal. In recent years, museums, in collaboration with other organizations and communities, have realized additional roles for themselves, in such areas as economic regeneration, mediation, civic dialogue, entertainment, and therapy.
There is no consensus about the validity of many of these new roles, even though many have precedents in the missions of early museums. For example, the Victoria and Albert Museum, one of the world’s great decorative art museums, was founded to promote design education to help Britain’s economy—far from a purely aesthetic aim. It is essential to the future of the field that we clearly articulate, illustrate, and advocate the full spectrum of museum roles to government agencies, potential funders, and diverse publics.
In practical terms, some of these new roles will require radical changes in how museums use objects to present ideas, concepts, and stories. Other roles, such as making it possible for visitors to have a spiritual experience, will require only that that the display allow it to happen. For example, on the surface, the National Gallery in London’s “Seeing Salvation: Images of Christ in Art” (February to May 2000) was thematic art history, but many visitors had a primarily spiritual or emotional experience. Exhibitions and programs often support a multitude of museum roles; how best to do so is a ripe area for further exploration and development.
Traditional Disciplines versus an Interdisciplinary Approach
That 19th-century taxonomic enterprise on which traditional museum categories are based has created boundaries that have little significance in the contemporary world. Yet many museums remain structured around history, archaeology, ethnography, art, and natural history as separate categories. As a result, museums of all types often are subject to what historian David Hackett Fischer calls “the fallacy of tunnel history.” Art often is assumed only to be influenced by other art; designed objects are thought to arise only from genetic mutations of earlier objects, untouched by societal changes; and many history and technology museums depict a myth of unrelenting progress. Strict adherence to disciplinary boundaries yields interpretation and exhibitions that are far from multidimensional.
The range of stories told in museums too often is limited to narrow collection categories. For example, even broadly focused museums such as the National Museum of American History and its counterparts in Scotland and Australia do not exhibit the country’s greatest art, thus excluding an important form of the nation’s creativity from the national repository. Instead, each country has another national museum devoted exclusively to art; the focus, arguably, allows for great depth in interpretation. However, the separateness of these institutions precludes the broader perspectives and holistic understandings that could be gained by combining historical analysis and high aesthetics.
There are certainly technical challenges to creating museum exhibitions that are truly interdisciplinary in nature. Disciplines have noticeable differences in interpretive approach—lengthier labels in history exhibits; “hands-on” activities in children’s museums and science centers; an emphasis on aesthetics in art museums. Yet some of the most engaging, refreshing, and educational exhibitions are those that merge and blend disciplinary approaches. Permanent collections such as the Newark Museum’s “Picturing America,” which opened in May 2001, and the Brooklyn Museum’s “American Identities: A New Look,” which opened in September 2001, are intriguing examples, as is “Spectrum of Life” in the American Museum of Natural History’s Hall of Biodiversity—an aesthetically spectacular science display.
Restricting content and interpretive techniques to traditional categories is crippling to museums seeking to facilitate a wide range of possible outcomes. Categories imposed to make phenomena understandable also can compartmentalize and confine experience. By transcending these boundaries, museums will create many more opportunities for engaging visitors, staff, and volunteers with the more complex interconnections of life.
Museums as Learning Institutions: Best Practices versus Innovation
Museums may be sites of expert knowledge, but they often seem to have difficulty adopting new ways of working and communicating. When experts learn, they usually are focused on adding incrementally to their existing stock of knowledge, assimilating changes in matters of detail. An individual expert will not necessarily find learning as a member of an organization easy or even possible. But lest we be a hypocritical profession, museums must be learning institutions—for staff as well as visitors. Learning new ways of thinking is both more difficult and more meaningful than learning information.
All museums have room for improvement. Even major museums sometimes make basic technical errors. (For example, the labels in the Africa galleries in the British Museum fail to meet commonly accepted standards of legibility.) The popularity of “standards” documents in various areas of museum practice and the identification and dissemination of “best practices” are two ways in which the field is responding to its own learning needs. Showcasing effectiveness and establishing standards are clearly hallmarks of professionalization. Knowing what works is essential for success.
At the same time, reliance on best practices alone is not sufficient for a changing world; such models should be considered only steps on the way and must not become the field’s new orthodoxies. The potential of museums to develop new means of expression and reach new audiences requires an openness to experimentation and risk taking. The personal and institutional commitment to trying new ideas, innovative approaches, and seemingly risky ventures is as important as the canonization of best practices.
Courage for the Future
Learning new ways of thinking, particularly those that seem to devalue staff members’ stock of knowledge, can be very threatening. Preserving hard-won expertise in such circumstances requires a different kind of emotional attachment to knowledge—an ability to reconfigure it creatively and accommodate new perspectives—and doing more than converting the complex and paradoxical into simplistic oppositions. Releasing creativity and energy requires not so much intellect or insight as courage.
References
Fischer, D. H. (1970). Historians’ Fallacies: Towards a Logic of Historical Thought. New York: Harper and Row.
O’Neill, M. (2002). The good enough visitor. In Museums, Society, and Inequality, ed. R. Sandell. London: Routledge.
Pekarik, A., Doering, Z., and Karns, D.(1999). Exploring satisfying experiences in museums. Curator: The Museum Journal 42 (2), 152-173.
Silverman, L. (1990). Of us and other things: The content and functions of talk by adult visitor pairs in an art and a history museum. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.
———. (2002). The therapeutic potential of museums as pathways to inclusion. In Museums, Society, and Inequality, ed. R. Sandell. London: Routledge.
Universal Declaration of Human Rights: www.unhchr.ch/udhr.
Weil, S. (1999). From being about something to being for somebody: the ongoing transformation of the American museum. Daedalus, 128 (3): 229-258.
Lois H. Silverman, Ph.D., is a museum interpretation and research consultant based in Bloomington, Ind. Mark O’Neill is head ofmuseums and galleries, Glasgow City Council, Scotland.
