Hank Burchard's conception of museums as "showbiz" troubles me.  If he
means keeping audiences engaged and interested, then good.  But there's a
darker side to showbiz, the one that distorts history to keep people
engaged and interested (Oliver Stone's movies about presidents, TV
disasters based on Nathaniel Hawthorne's work, most of Disney's
products).  Do we want our museums to cater to the lowest common
denominator to get people in the door and to keep from challenging
comfortable ideas?  I don't.  Showbiz exists primarily to sell
products: is this what we want museums to do?  I say no.  Museums should
take a more serious tack in illuminating culture than showbiz normally
does.  It would be great if a history museum t-shirt was as cool as a power
rangers lunchbox, but not if the price of such popularity is the loss of
historical integrity in favor of market share.

However, both Burchard and Nicholson make good points.  Communication and
intelligibility are paramount if any learning is to take place.  Might it
be possible to be provocative, scholarly, honest, engaging, and interesting
AND to communicate themes effectively to a general audience at the same
time?  Striving for this ideal, of course, assumes that the primary goal
of a museum exhibit is to educate.

I suppose curators could learn a good deal from commercial TV, movies,
advertising, and theme parks in terms of mass communication -- but as far as
content goes, those modes seem, for the most part, to be antithetical to
historical interpretation based in fact, rather than in sales gimmicks.

People will go to see what they want to see, of course.  Museums should
help make people want to see good exhibits -- not emulate showbiz so that
people will "buy" the product.  As they say on public TV, "If we don't,
who will?"

........................
Doug Lantry
University of Delaware
[log in to unmask]