Thanks to Eugene Dillenburg for your comments: nice try.  I agree with you up
to this point: If I had to make a choice between saving a single human life
vs. saving the Constitution or the Liberty Bell from destruction, the human
life would win, hands down.  Luckily, such stark choices are seldom
necessary.  But that does not mean that the preservation of historical
artifacts is unimportant.  The symbolic value and the "aura" of artifacts and
documents is not so easily discounted.  History IS important.  Your old
museum hand gave you some bad advice.  Somebody should have come upside his
head with an accession book or something.  Terri McNichol beat me to the
punch in saying that maybe he was in the wrong profession--and perhaps you
are too.

"What we museum people do is interesting; it is not, however, important."
It's hard not to snipe at such an eminently snipable sentiment, but I'll try
to be civil.  I think you and your mentor are just plain wrong.  What museum
people do (perhaps I should say what some museum people do) is fundamental to
the understanding of human culture(s); I don't need to reiterate what others
have said more eloquently than I could hope to.  Anyone who thinks history
and museum work are merely "interesting" should opt out and take up something
really useful to humanity, such as manufacturing latrines, embalming, or
making mickeyburgers (people gotta eat to survive, so that's important,
right?) and leave history to those with a real passion for it.  If you don't
have such passion, you're in the way.  A lot of people who think museums ARE
important are waiting to get a job in one, and it's a shame to see folks who
don't think museums are important hogging the jobs.

The very fact that the looting and vandalism of the Baghdad museum was page 1
news and the subject of a Nightline program demonstrates that a lot of people
do think museums are important.  This catastrophe resonated deeply with many
people all around the world.  No one is upset merely because some nice
exhibitions were disrupted and exhibit cases were smashed--they grieve for
the loss of irreplaceable artifacts, all with tremendous symbolic and emotive
value because of their antiquity, many of which also contained scientific and
historical information which had not been tapped.  Now much of that
information is lost forever and we are all impoverished by it.

By coincidence, Eugene, I have wanted to write to you for a long time about
your statement in your "shameful and inexcusable" letter to Museum News
(Jan./Feb. 2002, pp. 7-8), insisting that exhibition defines museums rather
than collections.  Lest anyone think I'm characterizing your letter as
shameful & inexcusable, I hasten to add that this was simply the title Museum
News put on it, based on a phrase in the letter.  Now I suspect that your
opinion about the relative unimportance of museums relates to your statement
that since collectionless organizations are "embraced" as museums, exhibition
must be the defining feature.  But this embrace is not universally accepted,
as you know from past Museum-L arguments.  For a time collections did define
museums, until the waters were muddied by the indiscriminate conflating of
alternative venues for educational exhibitions with museum exhibitions.  To
me, it's a question of practicality and consistency to facilitate
communication.  The utility of reserving museum as the name for institutions
with permanent collections, in accordance with the standard dictionary
definition, is precisely to emphasize the collection feature to avoid
comparing apples and oranges; to emphasize the exhibition function is to
invite confusion in terminology and the frequent futile debates on the matter
in this forum.  In the letter you said that children's museums, science
centers, and certain art galleries should be classified as museums even
though they have little or nothing in the way of collections, because they do
exhibitions.  Yet schools, shopping malls, airports, banks, bars, coffee
houses, and restaurants also host exhibitions, and it seems pointless to call
them museums.  (One of our Museum-L colleagues years ago even insisted on
calling airshows museums.)  In this contemporary rush to emphasize the value
of exhibitions--which museums themselves promoted with the advent of the
blockbuster exhibit--there seems to be a corresponding de-emphasis on the
significance of permanent collections.  Because exhibitions are more or less
ephemeral events--even "permanent" installations--it becomes easy to consider
the work of museums as rather insignificant in the grand scheme of
things--just a kind of show business, after all, even if it has an
educational impetus.

But museums do more than stage shows.  They, along with archives and
libraries, preserve the evidence of the past--for whatever temporary uses
they may have in terms of exhibition, private study, scientific analysis,
scholarship, and interpretation, but also to make them continuously available
for future scholarship and interpretation.  A sense (and knowledge) of its
history is of paramount importance to any civilization or culture.
Historical artifacts and documents are the linchpins of that history.  Some
of these documents and objects have primarily symbolic value, while others
contain or embody solid information.  The Liberty Bell is a kind of
pseudo-artifact, created self-consciously as a patriotic symbol with
comparatively little utility. The original document of the Constitution is a
physical proof of what was written to guide the newly formed United States.
Both of these objects have been replicated in photographs which would serve
as a reliable simulacra if the originals were lost, but the aura of the
originals has tremendous emotive value or people wouldn't travel miles to
view them.  On the other hand, older artifacts, such as those lost in the
plundering of Iraq, often have much more than symbolic value: they embody
mysteries, as yet incompletely analyzed and deciphered, untapped information.


As much as I love doing exhibitions, I am inclined to think that in and of
themselves they sometimes obscure the more important, fundamental work of
museums--preserving the past and the present for the future.  Exhibitions
highlight collections and that's good, but they're simply the most visible
manifestation of a museum's work.  Maintaining the archive--the permanent
collection--for exhibition as well as other purposes--is a noble endeavor
which is, as you say, not to be sneezed at.  But it is very important.  No,
no one dies when a museum artifact is stolen or destroyed, but our
civilization dies a little when one of its material guideposts is lost.  When
you consider the fact that every human will eventually die, it actually
becomes quite important to preserve the physical evidence of those lost
lives.  Maintaining our collections of artifacts associated with human
existences--the tools they used, the clothing they wore, the objects they
created--is one way we honor the memory of our dead across the ages.

David Haberstich

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