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Collecting, Exhibiting, and Interpreting: Museums as Mediators and Midwives of Meaning

emory university & museum of international folk art abstract A commentary on Paul Mullins's article "The Banality of Everyday Consumption," this essay engages questions concerning domestic objects that might be collected in urban settings. It discusses challenges involved in documenting the complex meanings associated with such objects, what happens when objects are incorporated into museum collections and exhibitions, and how museum visitors interpret exhibitions in relation to their own expectations, assumptions, and narratives. [collecting, exhibitions, objects, narrative, visitor reception] museum anthropo lo gy

Museums: Promoting Cultural Awareness

Museum Anthropology, 1987

retired secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, has stated that museums are an enigma both to those who enter them as visitors and to those who work in them. They are enigmas because few people ever bother to think about what a museum is and what it does. Why do we have museums, what goes on behind the facade of halls and galleries? Even if most people do not know what a museum is, our society feels they are a necessary part of our lives. Millions of people visit our over 5,000 museums each year. Every six days in this country a new museum is founded. In view of this, it is especially fitting to think about what anthropology museums are and their special role in American society.

Understanding Museums and Art Galleries: Commonalities and Differences

What’s the first thing that comes to your mind when you think of a place that acts as a repository of mankind’s material culture? A museum of course! And where would you head for a dose of post-modernist, post-structuralist object d’art? Well, an art gallery without doubt. There’s no two ways about this. Museums and art galleries - through the vagaries of their development and evolution - are talked about in different context, serve different purposes on the whole and even have varied audience sets. However, it’s not hard to see where the point of commonality lies between the two – both fulfill the essential task of ‘exhibiting’ an object. This implies two things – firstly, there’s a special space where cultural objects are appropriated, and secondly, the space is also the entry-point for the audience to appropriate the objects. At once, a nexus of objectification, exhibitionism and spectatorship is created.

The Eye of the Beholder Museology, Museums and Contemporary Presentation

2010

Too many museums are floundering under decreasing attendance and increasing commercialization. One very important way to address these ills is to reconsider museum presentation, specifically exhibitions and the visitor experience therein. Central to this reworking of museum presentation is the acceptance of the primacy of the visitor and her community: museums mount exhibitions to educate and entertain the visitor, to enrich and enlarge the person, even to change society. To fire the imagination and stimulate social change, museums must reconsider the nature of the architecture of their galleries; they must engage much more fully with their communities; they must transform the content of their exhibitions; they must rethink exhibition design and they must pay attention to learning systems. If these demanding modifications are made, I believe museums will become much more relevant and pleasurable. _________________________________________________________________ What do museum visitors want and how can museums give it to them? i What are museums for? What is the museum"s role in society? The rather ugly term edutainment has been coined to describe a blend of education and entertainment that many museums around the world serve up to their loyal visitors. The term underlines the dual nature of much museum presentation, a somewhat schizophrenic mixture of informal education and attempted fun. But how is each done and is it successful? This paper will argue that museums have great potential to educate their visitors in a relaxed social setting, but to do so a number of changes must be made, including establishing a new link with community, developing a greater understanding of what are important issues, concentrating on collaboration and undertaking a serious study of learning systems. We are all too familiar with museums where there seems to be more staff than visitors, where the halls echo with the isolated footsteps of quiet patrons peering into dark cases exhibiting the permanent collection. With the exception of the very major international museums, small attendance seems to be all too common. Many museums only come alive when the blockbuster arrives in town, that highly commercial, touring show accompanied by merchandise for sale in the museum shop, merchandise which some visitors consider as important and as interesting as the artifacts in the galleries. Add this to the glitzy opening and the fancy restaurant, and we see the commercialization of museums in full swing where it can seem that substance is outweighed by style. There is a trap here: the sad reality is that often the blockbuster and the commercialism are needed to fund all the other programming.

Objects and the Museum

Isis, 2005

This survey outlines a history of museums written through biographies of objects in their collections. First, the mechanics of the movement of things and the accompanying shifts in status are considered, from manufacture or growth through collecting and exchange to the museum. Objects gathered meanings through associations with people they encountered on their way to the collection, thus linking the history of museums to broader scientific and civic cultures. Next, the essay addresses the use of items once they joined a collection, whether classificatory, analytical, or in display. By thus embedding the study of scientific practice in material culture, this approach contributes to constructivist histories of science. The final section addresses the role of objects in the experience of the visitors, emphasizing how fruitful the history of museum objects can be in the study of the public engagement with science.

The Object Matter of Museums: designing otherwise

DESIGN OBJECTS: MUSEALIZATION, DOCUMENTATION AND INTERPRETATION, 2023

The theoretical and ethical debate fostered by the reflexive turn of the last decades is increasingly guided by the concern to recover a sphere of political action of the museum: activist and decolonial in nature, deeply entangled in the world and built from an intraactive engagement with it. As a consequence, the museum tends to address the emergent and the urgent through situated practices that collectively analyse and respond to circumstances in the world. In doing so, the contemporary museum seeks to create conditions for visitor engagement by empowering their unmediated voices to be heard. This text aims to explore the critical space between the apparent decolonial vitality of the museum and how diffractive practices may be designed in a postcritical and postrepresentational context, arguing that approaches based on artistic and design processes of speculative fabulation (as Design Culture) are helpful for thinking and acting in these spaces of experience, acting as a tool of philosophical enquiry, which promotes responsiveness to «know» and «do» differently in the present. Pragmatically, it highlights three modes of speculative (moderated) design engagement with the present and the future to help museums to break out of their ontological blindness and fulfil their critical and transformative potential.