Although my Marxist credentials are impeccable, I believe that David
Haberstich's comment is apt.  The social purposes of American museums
have changed quite substantially since World War II, as have the focus
and manner of presentations.  I once wrote a paper on the history of
museums that linked their development to the evolution of American
sports.  After WW II, an interest in participatory sports and fitness,
generated out of the widespread training of GIs, led to the invention of
the "teaching pro" in skiing, tennis, golf, etc.  In the same sense,
American museums came to be more involved in attending to the needs of
members, often suburban families, and the style of teaching in museums
came to emulate this ideal of the teaching pro.  Like the pro who tries
to reduce the difference between his skill at the backhand volley and
yours, the museum educator tries to link her ability to make meaning out
of an ethnographic object with the visitor's.  Contrast the authoritative
pro of prewar years (many still survive, of course), who always worked to
emphasize the difference between his skill and yours.

While museums do communicate many classbound notions, they don't do so quite
so crudely as many commentators here have suggested.  And the audience
for museums has wildly expanded, despite the even greater expansion of
the public's engagement with popular and mass cultural media.  The  point
is that successful museum interpretive programs will create a scenario
for the specific learning process of particular kinds of visitors --
THERE ARE NO GENERAL VISITORS -- and aim their attention at assisting
visitors in their preparation, welcome, orientation, focus, relaxation,
and culmination of their learning/enjoyment within the museum.  Museums,
unlike movie theaters, are complex environments, made more complex by the
introduction of innovative teaching devices which actually invite
visitors to cross the barrier between themselves and the art/historical
idea/scientific specimen, to "make history come alive," for example, and
otherwise to engage in multisensory experiences.

Zooming in on the misbehavior of visitors at one point in the course of
their passage is surely not an adequate way of understanding what they
are doing (how they are being) in the museum.

<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><>
Richard Rabinowitz              <> American History Workshop
[log in to unmask]                  <> 588 Seventh Street
718/499-6500 fax: 718/499-6575  <> Brooklyn, New York 11215-3707



On Wed, 28 Feb 1996, David Haberstich wrote:

> But I digress! What bothers me is all this rhetoric about museums as the
> province of the upper classes. One person says museums are the
> playgrounds of the rich, another says museums were created to show the
> masses how grand it is to be upper class, or even to "educate" the
> masses to upper class values, which is supposed to be terribly arrogant.
> Nowadays it is increasingly fashionable for museums to concern
> themselves with preserving and celebrating both mass culture and
> minority culture, which is fine. But I think it is no less arrogant for
> someone in the "lower" social strata to be prejudiced against "upper
> class" culture than vice versa. I think the whole museum enterprise is
> getting a bad rap, some of it from within. --David Haberstich
>