In a message dated 4/22/2003 1:45:47 AM Eastern Daylight Time,
[log in to unmask] writes:

<< The argument over what is a museum, what makes a museum, is probably
 intractable, and I have no desire to resurrect it here.  My point is that
 simply having a collection does not make an institution a museum.  I have a
 large collection of Hawaiian shirts, ugly ties, and baseball caps from
 around the world.  Does that make my closet a museum?  I don't think so. >>

Gene, OF COURSE having a private collection doesn't make you a museum, but
neither does having your collection on public exhibition make you a museum.
Opening your closet to the public will not make it a museum.  Neither will
removing your closet artifacts and placing them in exhibit cases and framing
some of them to put on the wall, then adding interpretive labels, make a
museum.  ("This is the ugly tie which Eugene insisted on wearing to his
senior prom, leading to the breach with his parents which drove him to join
the French Foreign Legion," etc.')  Not even if you add an interactive
computer setup, book school tours, and run Cub Scout camp-ins in your home on
Saturday nights will you have a museum!

As I've said before, anyone can organize a public exhibition.  A school
science fair is an exhibition, yet the school does not become a museum simply
because it hosts an exhibition.  Banks, shopping malls, airports have
exhibitions, often of museum quality--that doesn't make them museums, even
temporarily.  Birds do it, bees do it, even educated fleas--all right, I'm
getting carried away.

Joseph Hirshhorn had a fabulous art collection with museum-quality art, in
his home and stashed who knows where else.  So did David Lloyd Kreeger.  They
weren't museums, just private collectors.  But their collections became
museums with the stroke of a pen.  A museum isn't even necessarily a
building, it's a permanent institution established to preserve a collection.
That's essentially 2/3 of the definition in my dictionary.  The other third
concerns public access.  (Yes, I know, it says "display," but I argue that
exhibition of the museum's simply follows logically from the first two.)

A personal or corporate collection does not constitute a museum, even if it
is placed on public exhibition, if it is not linked to a permanent
institution which cares for the collection.  A private collection which can
be dispersed to heirs at the death of the owner, or which can be auctioned
off to pay the decedent's debts, cannot be a museum.  But the mere act of
public exhibition certainly cannot in itself qualify the exhibitor as a
museum.

So I think a museum is basically a permanent institution with a permanent
collection.  Despite the implicit tradition of public display of (portions
of) that collection, I don't think exhibition defines a museum.  The
Smithsonian's new Museum of the American Indian (building) is currently under
construction and most of the collection is in storage (although some is on
display elsewhere).  I don't think it's any less a museum now just because
the building is not yet open with its public exhibitions, nor do I think it
magically becomes a museum only when the completed building is open for
public viewing.

I don't think it's useful to define museums as institutions which have
exhibitions because, as I've said, anyone can sponsor an exhibition.  A movie
is an exhibition (and businesses which show movies are called exhibitors),
but that doesn't make a movie theater a museum.  I think it makes more sense
to retain the word "museum" for institutions with collections, and to coin
another term for "collectionless" institutions which do exhibitions.  This is
not a value judgment, just a plea for precision in language.  Museums--with
permanent collections--have different issues to deal with than organizations
which host exhibitions not based on collections.

The tragedy of the Iraq museum was not that its exhibitions were mussed up,
but that its permanent collection was looted and vandalized.  All those
broken pots...  I agree that loss of life was the greater tragedy.  But a
museum which was dedicated to the preservation of historic
artifacts--historic evidence--for the ages has been despoiled, and that also
remains a grievous loss, one which might have been avoidable.  I can't help
but think that it throws into stark relief the importance of institutions
which preserve historical collections, which are very different from
"collectionless" institutions, and it seems to me that there is value in
preserving a semantic distinction between them.  "Exhibitions" are produced
by a very wide range of institutions and organizations, and they are not the
best gauge for making distinctions.

David Haberstich

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