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Museums and their Paradoxes

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 October 2016

Mark O'Neill
Mark O'Neill*
Affiliation:
Director, Policy & Research, Glasgow Life
*
mark.o'neill@glasgow.gov.uk
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Abstract

This chapter is written from the perspective of a practitioner and explores a range of paradoxes in museums and in the museological literature which may serve as starting points for conversations with philosophers. These include questions of definition and mission, intrinsic versus instrumental value, whether museums actively shape society or serve as a passive reflection, whether their main function is to produce liberating knowledge or express communal identities, whether traditional or progressive museums are the most ‘traditional’, whether museums are trying to serve idealized or real visitors and, ultimately, whether museums are rational or ritual institutions.

Type
Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 79: Philosophy and Museums: Essays in the Philosophy of Museums , October 2016 , pp. 13 - 34
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2016 

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References

1 Fiammetta Rocco, ‘Museums: Temples of Delight’, The Economist (December 2013). http://www.economist.com/news/special-report/21591707-museums-world-over-are-doing-amazingly-well-says-fiammetta-rocco-can-they-keep.

2 Ibid.

3 Ibid.

4 Ibid.

5 Most of the large Anglophone academic publishers include Museums Studies on their lists, with that of Routledge/Taylor and Francis being the largest and most influential, with Ashgate, Wiley-Blackwell, Altamira, Berg, the Smithsonian Institution, Intellect, Maney, West Coast Press and many university presses also entering the field. The range of disciplines reflecting on or analysing museums is also extensive, including sociology (e.g. Sharon MacDonald and Gordon Fyffe (1996)), economics (e.g. Bruno Frey and Stephen Meier (2006)), anthropology (e.g. James Clifford (1988), Michael Ames (1993), Mary Bouquet (1999), Anthony Shelton (2006)), health (e.g. Helen Chatterjee and Gary Noble (2013)), memory (e.g. Susan Crane (2004), Silke Arnold-de Simine (2013)), property (e.g. Jordanna Bailkin (2004)), cultural policy (e.g. Clive Gray (2007), Oliver Bennett and Elenora Belfiore (2008)), community studies (e.g. Sheila Watson (2007)) and social work (e.g. Lois Silverman (2010)).

6 MacDonald, Sharon (ed), The Companion to Museum Studies (London: Blackwell, 2006), 167 Google Scholar. For reviews of three of these readers, including the two largest – Bettina Carbonell's, which runs to 655 pages, and Donald Preziosi and Claire Farrago's, which holds the record for length at 779 – see Sharon Macdonald, ‘Review Article: reviewing museum studies in the age of the reader’, Museum and Society, November (2006), 166–172.

7 The most influential are three anthologies arising out of Smithsonian conferences: Karp, Ivan and Lavine, Steven D. (eds), Museums and Communities: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991)Google Scholar; Karp, Ivan, Kreamer, Christine and Lavine, Steven D. (eds), Museums and Communities: The Politics of Public Culture (Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992)Google Scholar; Karp, Ivan, Kratz, Corrine, Szwaja, Lynn and Ybarra-Frausto, (eds), Museum Frictions, Public Cultures, Global Transformations (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Other anthologies have been devoted to everything from ethics ( Marstine, Janet, (ed), The Routledge Companion to Museum Ethics (London: Routledge, 2011)Google Scholar) to pedagogy ( Paris, Scott G. (ed), Perspectives on Object-Centred Learning in Museums (New Jersey and London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2002)Google Scholar) and from philosophy to origins ( Genoways, Hugh H. (ed), Museum Philosophy for the Twenty-first Century (Lanham and Oxford: Altamira Press, 2006)Google Scholar and Genoways, Hugh H. and Andrei, Mary Anne (eds), Museum Origins: Readings in Early Museum History and Philosophy (California: Left Coast Press, 2008)Google Scholar).

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9 ICOM Statutes, 2007. http://icom.museum/who-we-are/the-vision/museum-definition.html. To provide more precision, ICOM also provides definitions of the key words involved it its definition. See http://icom.museum/fileadmin/user_upload/pdf/Key_Concepts_of_Museology/Museologie_Anglais_BD.pdf.

10 http://www.museumsassociation.org/about/frequently-asked-questions.

11 See Hudson, Kenneth, Museums of Influence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987)Google Scholar.

12 http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/v/v-and-a-mission-and-objectives/.

13 http://www.collectionslink.org.uk/discover/new-perspectives/1380-what-are-museums-for. For the US see the guidance provided by the American Alliance of Museums to its members at http://www.aam-us.org/docs/continuum/developing-a-mission-statement-final.pdf?sfvrsn=2.

14 http://www.museumsassociation.org/museums-change-lives.

15 A vigorous strand of museological literature argues that museums have a responsibility to contribute to ‘the combating of social as well as cultural inequality’. Sandell, Richard (ed), Museums, Society, Inequality (London: Routledge, 2002), xvii Google Scholar. See also Sandell, Richard and Nightingale, Eithne (eds), Museums, Equality and Social Justice (London: Routledge, 2012)Google Scholar. For practitioners' views, see, for example: Casey, Dawn, ‘Museums as Agents for Social and Political Change’, Curator 44/3 (2001), 230–236 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Fleming, David, ‘Positioning the Museum for Social Inclusion’, in Sandell, Richard (ed), Museums, Society, Inequality (London: Routledge, 2002), 203–212 Google Scholar; O'Neill, Mark, ‘Essentialism, Adaptation and Justice: Towards a New Epistemology of Museums’, Museum Management and Curatorship 21 (2006), 95–115 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Janes, Robert, Museums in a Troubled World (London: Routledge, 2009)Google Scholar.

16 See Upchurch, Anna, ‘John Maynard Keynes, The Bloomsbury Group and the Origins of the Arts Council Movement’, International Journal of Cultural Policy 10/2 (2004), 203–217 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; see also Minihan, Janet, The Nationalization of Culture: The Development of State Subsidies to the Arts in Great Britain (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1977)Google Scholar.

17 See Leahy, Helen Rees, ‘New Labour, Old Masters’, Cultural Studies 21/4–5 (2007), 695–717 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; see also West, Celine and Smith, Charlotte H.F., ‘“We are not a government poodle”: Museums and social inclusion under New Labour’, International Journal of Cultural Policy 11/3 (2005), 275–288 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 See Holden, John (ed), Valuing Culture – Event Speeches (London: Demos, 2003)Google Scholar and Holden, John, Capturing Cultural Value (London: Demos, 2004)Google Scholar.

19 For example, Alexander, Victoria, Museums and Money: the Impact of Funding on Exhibitions, Scholarship, and Management (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996)Google Scholar; Cuno, James, ‘Whose Money? Whose Power? Whose Art History?’, in ‘Money, Power, and the History of Art’ The Art Bulletin 79/1 (1997), 6–27 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Cuno, James (ed), Whose Muse? Art Museums and the Public Trust (Princeton and London: Princeton University Press, 2004)Google Scholar.

20 See O'Neill, Mark, ‘Museums and the Search for Meaning in the “Necessary Context” of the Market’, in Belfiore, Eleonora and Upchurch, Anna (eds), Humanities in the Twenty First Century: Beyond Utility and Markets (Basingstonke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013)Google Scholar.

21 Preziosi, Donald and Farrago, Claire, Grasping the World: The Idea of the Museum (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 1 Google Scholar.

22 Ibid., 2.

23 Black, Barbara, On Exhibit, Victorians and Their Museums (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 2000), 1 Google Scholar.

24 Adorno, Theodor W., ‘Valéry Proust Museum’, in Adorno, Theodor W., Prisms, translated by Samuel, and Weber, Sherry (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996), 175–185 Google Scholar.

25 For example, there are no references to museums in Matthew Arnold's Culture and Anarchy (1869). Even though Charles Dickens was very aware of museums, championing Sunday opening, David Copperfield is the only one of his characters to visit a museum and none of the – more educated – characters of Anthony Trollope appear to do so.

26 See Bennett, Tony, The Birth of the Museum, History, Theory, Politics (London: Routledge, 1995)Google Scholar.

27 Fiammetta Rocco, ‘Museums: Temples of Delight’, op. cit.

28 See Impey, Oliver and MacGregor, Arthur, The Origins of Museums: The Cabinets of Curiosities in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Europe (Cornwall, UK: House of Stratus, 2001)Google Scholar.

29 See Burke, Peter, A Social History of Knowledge (Cambridge: Polity, 2007)Google Scholar.

30 Despite its criticism of the Enlightenment, critical theory shares its belief that knowledge is liberating. Daniel Sherman and Irit Rogoff argue that critical theory's questions, problems and strategies ‘have a significance, and an urgency, that go far beyond the museum; they are, we believe, essential to an understanding of our culture that is itself a prerequisite to changing it’. Sherman, Daniel and Rogoff, Irit, Museum Culture, Histories, Discourses, Spectacles (London: Routledge, 1994), xix Google Scholar.

31 See Hoock, Holger, Empires of the Imagination: Politics, War, and the Arts in the British World, 1750–1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010)Google Scholar.

32 For example, Coombs, A. E., Reinventing Africa: Museums, Material Culture and Popular Imagination (London Yale University Press, 1997)Google Scholar; and Bennett, Tony, Pasts Beyond Memory: Evolution, Museums, Colonialism (London: Routledge, 2004)Google Scholar.

33 Bourdieu, Pierre and Darbel, Alain, The Love of Art: European Art Museums and their Public, translated by Beattie, Caroline and Merriman, Nick (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007)Google Scholar. First published 1969.

34 See Duncan, Carol, Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums (London: Routledge, 1995)Google Scholar.

35 Ibid., 8. For another account of museums as ritual space see Fraser, Jem, ‘Museums, Drama, Ritual and Power’, in Knell, Simon, MacLeod, Suzanne and Watson, Sheila (eds), Museum Revolutions (London: Routledge, 2007)Google Scholar.

36 Duncan, Civilizing Rituals, op. cit., 4.

37 Rice, Danielle, ‘Museums: Theory, Practice, and Illusion’, in McClellan, Andrew (ed), Art and its Publics: Museum Studies at the Millennium (London: Wiley Blackwell, 2003), 78 Google Scholar.

38 Henning, Michelle, Museums, Media and Cultural Theory (Maidenhead: Open University Press, 2006), 2 Google Scholar and see 17–18.

39 See Haxthausen, Charles W., The Two Art Histories: The Museum and the University (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2003)Google Scholar. See also Anthony Shelton, ‘Museum and Anthropologies: Practices and Narratives’, in MacDonald (ed), The Companion to Museum Studies, op. cit., 64–80.

40 Witcom, Andrea, Re-imagining the Museum: Beyond the Mausoleum (London: Routledge, 2003), 3 Google Scholar and 90.

41 Ibid., 168.

42 Ibid., 3, 168, 169.

43 Ibid., 12.

44 See Vergo, Peter, The New Museology (London: Reaktion Books, 1989)Google Scholar.

45 McClellan, Andrew, The Art Museum from Boullee to Bilbao (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 192 Google Scholar.

46 Charlotte Higgins, ‘Behind the Scenes at the Museum, forget marches and part politics. If you really want to change the world, become a museum director’, The Guardian 27/11/2003.

47 O'Neill, Mark, ‘Cultural attendance and public mental health - from research to practice’, Journal of Public Mental Health 9/4 December (2010), 22–29 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

48 For an overview see Fforde, Cressida, Hubert, Jane and Turnbull, Paul, The Dead and Their Possessions: Repatriation in Principle, Policy and Practice (Abingdon: Routledge, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

49 See Nicholas, Lynne H., The Rape of Europa (London: Macmillan, 1994)Google Scholar. For the UK, see nationalmuseums.org.uk/spoliation.html. For the USA, see www.nepip.org and www.aam-us.org/museumresources/prov/index.cfm.

50 http://icom.museum/fileadmin/user_upload/pdf/ICOM_News/2004-1/ENG/p4_2004-1.pdf. For a discussion of the concept of the ‘Universal Museum’ see: O'Neill, Mark, ‘Enlightenment museums: universal or merely global?’, Museum and Society 2/3 (2004), 190–202 Google Scholar; Curtis, Neil, ‘Universal museums, museum objects and repatriation: the tangled stories of things’, Museum Management and Curatorship 21 (2006), 117–127 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Cuno, James, Who Owns Antiquity? Museums and the Battle over Our Ancient Heritage (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008)Google Scholar.

51 See MacGregor, Neil, ‘The British Museum’, ICOM News 1/ 7 (2004)Google Scholar, and Neil MacGregor, ‘The Whole World in our Hands’, The Guardian 24/7/2004. http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2004/jul/24/heritage.art.

52 Philippe de Montebello, ‘Art Museums, Inspiring Public Trust’, in Cuno (ed), Whose Muse?, op. cit., 19.

53 Museums have recently attracted the attention of professional historians, leading to excellent works such as those by Steven Conn (1998), Brandon Taylor (1999), Christopher Whitehead (2005), and David Cannadine (2007).

54 Stam, Deirdre, ‘The informed museum: the implications of “The New Museology” for museum practice’, Museum Management and Curatorship 12/3 (1993), 54 Google Scholar.

55 Ibid., 54.

56 Ibid., 58–9.

57 Starn, Randolph, ‘A Historian's Brief Guide to New Museum Studies’, The American Historical Review 110/1 (2005), 46 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. http://www.historycooperative.org.

58 The Economist, December 2013.

59 Jeffrey Abt, ‘The Origin of the Public Museum’, in MacDonald (ed), The Companion to Museum Studies, op. cit., 132.

60 September 12, 2000. http://www.metmuseum.org/en/about-the-museum/mission-statement.

61 See Woodson-Boulton, Amy, ‘“Industry without Art Is Brutality”: Aesthetic Ideology and Social Practice in Victorian Art Museums’, Journal of British Studies 46 (2007), 47–71 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

62 Cited in Message, Kylie, Museums and Social Activism: Engaged Protest (London: Routledge, 2014), 60–61 Google Scholar.

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64 Message, Museums and Social Activism, op. cit., 60–61.

65 Ibid., 23–24.

66 See O'Neill, Mark, ‘The Good Enough Visitor’, in Sandell, Richard (ed), Social Inclusion in Museums (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 2001)Google Scholar.

67 In a lecture at the Getty Institute in July 1994.

68 Eileen Hooper-Greenhill, ‘Studying Visitors’ in MacDonald (ed), The Companion to Museum Studies, op. cit., 367. See also Silverman, L. H., ‘Visitor Meaning-Making in Museums for a New Age’, Curator 38 (1995), 161–170 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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70 See ibid. 362 and 374.

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72 See Hein, George E., Learning in the Museum (London: Routledge, 1998)Google Scholar.

73 See Hein, Hilde S., The Museum in Transition: A Philosophical Perspective (Washington: Smithsonian Institute Press, 2000)Google Scholar.

74 See Csikszentmihalyi, Mihalyi and Robinson, Rick E., The Art of Seeing: An Interpretation of the Aesthetic Encounter (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1991)Google Scholar.

75 See James Cuno (ed), Whose Muse?, op. cit.

76 Ibid., 56.

77 McClellan, The Art Museum from Boullee to Bilbao, op. cit., 188.

78 Mieke Bal, ‘Exposing the Public’ in MacDonald (ed), The Companion to Museum Studies, op. cit.,  532.

79 Ibid., 525.

80 See Paine, Crispin, Godly Things: Museums Objects and Religion (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 2000)Google Scholar; Paine, Crispin, Religious Objects in Museums: Private Lives and Public Duties (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013)Google Scholar; Sullivan, Lawrence and Edwards, Alison, Stewards of the Sacred (Yale: American Association of Museums and Harvard University Press, 2005)Google Scholar; and O'Neill, Mark, ‘Museums and Mortality’, Material Religion, 8/1 (2012), 52–75 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

81 See Miller, Daniel (ed), Materialities (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Knell, Simon (ed), Museums in the Material World (London: Routledge, 2007)Google Scholar.