International Conference
Museums and visitors: a question of identity
Strategies in educating and communicating culture in response to a growing and multifarious demand
Florence (Italy), Palazzo Vecchio-Museo Stibbert, October 26-27-28, 2001
Friday, October
26, 2001
Introductory
speech by
Daniela
Lastri, Chairman, Department of Public Education, Commune of
Florence
Bernard
Légé, Deputy for Museums and Science Sites, CNRS
Image/Média
Session
1:
The
Museum of the Third Millennium and Reconstructing Knowledge: dialogue between
art and science
Chairman:
Mariella
Zoppi, Chairman, Department of
Culture, Region of Tuscany
Papers:
Carlo Sisi, Artistic and Historical Heritage Supervisory Services, Florence
Paolo
Galluzzi, Director, Institute and Museum of Science History,
Florence
Session
2:
The
Museum of the Third Millennium and Reconstructing Knowledge: education and
museum systems
Chairman:
Stefano
Bruzzesi, Chairman, Department of Tourism and Civic Museums, Commune of
Florence,
Papers:
Chiara
Silla, Director, Civic Museums of Florence
Daniele
Jallà, Civic Museums of Turin
Anne
Konitz, Conservatoire du Littoral, Paris
Gian
Bruno Ravenni, Servizio Biblioteche, Musei e Attività Culturali, Region of
Tuscany
Session
3:
The
Museum of the Third Millennium and Reconstructing Knowledge: on-line
education
Chairman:
Andrea
Ceccarelli, Chairman, Department of Civic Websites and Informatics, Commune of
Florence
Papers:
Frédérique Leseur, Musée du Louvre, Paris
Massimo Marcolin, Museo dei Ragazzi di Firenze
Celia Moore, IBM Corporate Community Relations EMEA
Chris
MacLure, Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery, Glasgow
Saturday, October 27, 2001
Session
4:
Education
in the Museum of the Third Millennium: children’s museums or family
programmes?
Chairman:
Simone
Siliani, Chairman, Department of Culture, Commune of
Florence
Papers:
Francine Labrosse, Musée d’Archéologie et d’Histoire de Montréal
John Reeve, The British Museum, London
Daniel Soulier, Musée du Louvre, Paris
Beata
Maria Schneider, Museumsdienst, Köln
Session
5 :
Education
in the Museum of the Third Millennium: communication tools to make past and
present dialogue
Chairman:
Jean-Michel
Arnold, Chairman, International Council for Film Television and Audiovisual
Communication (CICT-IFTC) care of UNESCO, Paris
Papers:
Paola Pacetti, Museo dei Ragazzi di Firenze
Anne-Michèle Ulrich-Peressetchensky, Centre Pompidou, Paris
Lucie Amos, Museum of London, London
Bernard Gérard, Palais de la Découverte, Paris
Jorge
Wagensberg, Director, Museo de la Ciencia,
Barcelona
Sunday, October 28, 2001
Workshop:
Aiming to a Family Museum Network
Chairman:
Paola
Pacetti, Museo dei Ragazzi di Firenze
Discussion:Participating
museums draft a preliminary agreement to publish educational and communication
proposals on line for a family public:
family museums on line.
Conference
Premises
1 During the course of its long
history, the museum as an organism has several times modified (and often
radically so) the intellectual premises and finalities that determined the
reason for its existence. At the
end of the 1700s and in the course of the XIX century, the museum became
specialised, collections were separated, science and art made their final
break: the great shrine-museums
dedicated to various disciplines were born. The shrine-museum had a very precise
mission: a public structure dedicated to culturally elevating the country and
educating its citizens, also to the idea of nation.
2
To
get a picture of the public of this specialised shrine-museum, let us recall
that education and culture were the exclusive prerogative of an elite and it was
this small group of visitors that the museum addressed. In Writings on
Art, seventy years ago Paul Valéry described his impressions during a
visit to a museum in these terms …”I soon forgot why I had come to this waxen
solitude that smelled like a temple or drawing room.” As late as the 1930s, a visit to a
museum was not an experience shared by many, nor was cultural consumption
(though not yet known with this term):
A concert, a visit to an art city or archaeological site, a theatre
performance or enjoying a book were all occasions reserved to
few.
3
Since
the end of World War II and, in particular, since the 1970s, this situation has
changed profoundly in all industrialised countries. Generalised literacy campaigns, along
with an economic development extended to every social level, has favoured the
diffusion of cultural consumption among increasingly wider segments of
population, a process that is today commonly defined with the term “mass
culture.” Evident
symptoms of what is among the greatest novelties of this century include
phenomena such as the diffusion of so-called cultural tourism, the increase of
opportunities for cultural diffusion favoured by increasingly more sophisticated
communication technologies, the attention of producers of culture for the tastes
and interests of an increasingly more undifferentiated public. These factors today, among other things,
make it possible to move a consistent part of cultural consumption within
domestic walls.
4 Museums were also subjected to this
quickly paced dynamics that led to a general increase in the number of visitors
worldwide (Italy has recorded a 60% increase since the seventies). On the threshold of the third
millennium, the museum is one medium of a vaster and more aggressive
cultural consumption circuit on which it has to come to terms with brand-new
concepts. Productivity, capacity to
attract new visitors, increased autofinancing in its budget and the adoption of
the latest technologies in its exhibiting corpus, all come to bear on the museum
in performing its role in conservation and cultural distribution. A role that is also highlighted in the
ICOM definition of Museum that reads:
a
museum is a permanent, non-profit-making institution, serving society and for
its development and open to the public that purchases, conserves, studies,
communicates and exhibits in view of studying, educating, entertaining and
providing material testimony of man and his
environment.
5 No longer a shrine but still
heavily characterised by its specialised structure inherited from the XIX
century, today the museum of the Third Millennium must redefine its mission and,
consequently, its communication and education strategies, which is to say, the
means and forms of cultural production and distribution to a very wide,
supernational and extremely diversified public. This museum system, that for
brevity we have termed specialised, has been joined by new institutions
especially as of the sixties (without forgetting the Palais de la Découverte in
the thirties that was an anticipation).
Emblematically, some of these have abandoned the definition of museum to
take on that of Science Centre; while still termed museums, others exclusively
address one segment of the public, like the children’s museums or, more
recently, institutions with universal vocations have preferred the term of Cité,
like the Cité des Sciences et des Techniques and the Cité de la Musique. These new institutions are almost all
dedicated to science and technology that, even inside Children’s Museums, occupy
a particularly important role, but their peculiar feature is in the
communication modalities based on a hands-on interactive
approach.
6
Though
schematically, today’s museum panorama can be termed extremely variegated and
many are the contaminations in communication modalities
between even very dissimilar museums, as well as between museums and forms of
entertainment, especially theatre.
At the same time, the proposals that individual museums make to the
public have become more articulated and differentiated by target. Rarely, however, does international
debate and communication tools production confront the theme of reconstructing
knowledge and its fields, the only act that could enable moving beyond the
specialised museum, whether interactive or not. Yet the damage of a compartmentalised
fruition of knowledge by the public is frequent and often macroscopic: one need only recall the predominantly
emotional perception of individual works of art, the so-called masterpieces, that are totally
decontextualised and separated from the culture that produced them. This results in the public’s continued
unawareness of the blend of technical, theoretical, philosophical, political and
religious knowledge that lies behind every work of art. On the other hand, scientific culture
continues to be segregated and is often not even recognised as an essential
component of knowledge. These
distortions prove even more serious when referred to one of the museum’s
essential functions, that of educating, in which the museum directly addresses
schools of every kind and level.
Convention
target issues
a)
In
view of what we have schematically recalled, is it possible and feasible to
invite reflection on moving past specialisation in disciplinary fields of
knowledge, reclaiming for the museum – and this might seem a paradox – a more
thoroughly historic dimensionI, moving from its commonly accepted view of a
place that communicates vestiges of the past to a place where knowledge and its
branches are reconstructed? Is it possible to attractively reintroduce
scientific culture, with its historic dimension, as an essential component of
knowledge in art museum and, at the same time, bring back historic and artistic
culture to scientific museum, thus re-establishing a connection between the
different spheres of knowledge?
b)
In
the course of the 1900s, large museums have witnessed a development of their
services aimed at young people and, in particular, at the school world; ad hoc
museum structures to address the young and very young have been created. Does this important educational function
make the museum an extension of school activity and does it require the same
disciplinary articulation? In other
words, is the museum a place where one is stimulated to gain knowledge by means
of a different emotional and rational involvement and by the reconstruction of
knowledge, in the “social” dimension of the visit, undertaken in most cases in
groups, almost always accompanied by family member or friends?
Convention
objectives
a)
Is
it possible to create an Internet portal of different museum experiences on an
international level and aimed at a public of families – of both tourist and
citizen – in view of creating with the museum a valid alternative to amusement
parks?
b)
Comparing
the viewpoints and experiences of large international museums on these issues,
the conference intends to be the first of a series of meetings aimed at
developing reflection on the museum and stimulating European co-operation in the
production of multilingual modules (multimedia, workshops, ateliers,
dramatization, etc.), that can itinerate among the different partner
institution. The round table discussion that will close the conference will
indeed seek to lay the basis for a project of a European network of “family
museums
General
informations
Colloquium
languages are Italian, French and English, with a simultaneous interpreting
service. The up-to-date programme
will be published on line at the Museo dei Ragazzi site (www.museoragazzi.it) Conference minutes
will be published on line in the reserved area.
For information about organisation, please contact: [log in to unmask].