Photo © Eithne Owens
If you work in and with museums you will regularly hear people—usually, but not always, from outside the museum sector—questioning the use of ‘museum’ in titles, because they think it has connotations of being dry and dusty and, you know, kids don’t want to go to museums. I don’t think that’s really true, or if it’s true in some instances, it’s certainly more complicated. Because as many organisations are running away from the title of ‘museum’, there are many running towards it.
As part of my unpacking of What Are Museums For, Again? I’ve gathered many examples of often quite radical projects that use the word ‘museum’ as a way of framing and locating their programming. The ones where the word ‘museum’ can be seen as a prompt to make us things about the role of museums in society, and what happens when subjects that have been marginalised adopt the word ‘museum’: the Museum of Homelessness, the Museum of Empathy, the Museum of Transology.
There are the ones that seem to use the word ‘museum’ to ground a project that could also be understood as an experience, an art installation, a shop (ok, a ‘retail experience’, but essentially a shop). The Museum of Ice Cream, for example. Sometimes this seems to be about drawing attention through the supposed dichotomy between museum (sober, serious, academic) and something more frivolous (like ice cream, although I bet there are some people out there who’ll tell me ice cream is not frivolous). Sometimes it does seem to be about wanting to make the experience seem more worthy or worthwhile – more worthy of your time, more worthy of your money.
There are the ones that jumped on the acronym bandwagon (the big trend for this seems to have passed), inspired by MOMA. MUSE. MOCAA. MAAT. The museum is there in the ‘m’ at the beginning of the name, but it’s elided by something shorter and snappier.
You will hear that museums are a fundamentally colonial and imperial project. You will hear that museums are instruments of power wielded to enforce the status quo— that tell us what to value, whether that’s the art by white men, or things collected by white men, or ideas expressed by white men.
I’m not going to disagree with any of that—and yet. And yet, I don’t think anybody has come up with a better name for this kind of space. The kind of space where objects and ideas are brought together with the purpose of educating and inspiring. The kind of space where stories can be brought together, framed and shared, and through the framing, amplified and valued in new ways.
Yes, many museums fail either to educate or inspire. Yes, many museums present a very narrow, very privileged view of the world (and, even worse, seem to be blithely unaware of this) and give lip service, if that, to the idea of storytelling. Yes, many museums are, to my point last week, not the right response to a need.
It was about a year ago that I started this project, what I lightly referred to as my What Are Museums For, Again? project. It started as a personal thing; my own feelings not only a museum maker but as a museum visitor that resonance and wonder were increasingly absent when I visited museums. There were too many homogenous museums that didn’t seem to serve much purpose. And anyway, what should that purpose be?
While I was having this existential crisis, I happened to attend an event at the Oxo tower and I couldn’t find the entrance to the venue. I found myself in a courtyard, looking around for a sign—any sign—of where to go. Oh, I found a sign. Practically cartoonish, all it needed was a big neon arrow pointing at it: ‘sign here!’. Painted on the wall are the names of the nine muses, bringers of inspiration, daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne, the personification of memory. Calliope, the muse of epic poetry, the oldest of the daughters, is the muse Homer addresses at the beginning of The Odyssey.
Tell me, Muse, the story of that resourceful man who was driven to wander far and wide after he had sacked the holy citadel of Troy.
Tell us this story, goddess daughter of Zeus, beginning at whatever point you will.
And yes, you can see where this is going. The word museum (as we understand it) does come from the muses—literally from the word for a shrine dedicated to the muses. But its modern use is almost accidental. The reference to a place—a shrine to the muses, a place of contemplation or philosophical reflection—then morphed to mean a locus for philosophical discussion (so the Museum at Alexandria has been described as a prototype university more than a treasury for objects) and in the Renaissance began to refer to collections (not a place to hold them), encompassing the idea of a compendium of knowledge; and finally sometime in the 17th century and, definitively with the establishment of the British Museum in 1753, started to be used to name a place where objects of value were housed.
So despite the ways in which the word ‘museum’ has been wielded—for better and worse—over the centuries, for me the word museum is deeply and personally tied up with the original root.
Museums have, throughout my life, being places of inspiration (and lots of other things beside). And although I still profoundly believe we should be asking ‘what need does this museum meet?’, that doesn’t mean that ‘museums’ shouldn’t be a broad and diverse group. Because inspiration comes in many different forms. Sometimes you see it on the side of a building on a rainy night. Sometimes we find it in an almost three thousand year old poem. Sometimes we capture it and put it in a house, and call it a museum.
Food for Thought
The brilliant Crab Museum defines a museum on their website —and while I’m at it, I highly recommend a visit. Who wouldn’t want to see a crab dressed up as a trade unionist?
And a deeper dive into the sprinkle pool: Forbes’ take on The Museum of Ice Cream
Organizing all known ideas and artefacts under the rubric of museum, the collectors of the period imagined that they had indeed come to terms with the crisis of knowledge that the fabrication of the museum was designed to solve. Look, reading a scholarly essay about the etymology of ‘museum’ and its changing meaning might not be everybody’s idea of a good time, but I loved this paper by Paula Findlen about the changing meaning of museum in the 16th and 17th centuries.
A reminder (one of very many) of the problematic nature of museums: The Museum Will Not Be Decolonised