>> Not to divert this thread, but the question of  'how important is the
>> visitor' and the responsibility of  "having stewardship over collections"
>> (as described below in the posting on which this is a comment) is the
crux
>> of  the difference between the public and the museum professional.
>
>The "museum profession" being, what, 50 years old, 60?, 75?,
>redefinition, or modification of the profession's credos is (at least)
>allowed.  So, I might be a museum professional who's principal interest
>is in how the public uses the museum.


OK, and I've spent twenty years trying to build audience, and been
successful much of the time. What I think is creating problems now is that
funding needs have created a crisis, resulting in a desperate pursuit of
sheer audience numbers  What I meant about TYPE of visitor (what does this
mean? you say) is that the what we lump together as the "museum
profession"--people representing different specialties who work in
museums--often seems now to seek to increase the audience by going after any
and all the public.  This can and often does result in what is known in
magazine publishing as "junk subscribers." That is, people who subscribe to
the magazine who cost more to get and maintain than they are worth.
Translating this concept to museums, my point is that trying to build
audience by mis-representing what a museum does, or trying to make a museum
into something it in not, may or may not plump gross visitation. But what
the larger audience gets out of it, and what they give back in support (of
the museum's mission) may not be worth the changes the museum has to make.
I mean by that--dumbing down, pap, expensive promotion, and a whole lot of
other aspects of attracting a mass audience. In a symphony orchestra this
would be the equivalent of a symphony trying to attract more patrons by
becoming a pops outfit. The justification advanced is that if one "exposes"
a mass audience to quality, those exposed can be grown into appreciators of
the "good stuff." Having witnessed, participated, and developed such museum
ventures I would say the effort and cost seldom delivers the
audience--alright, the target market, sought.  Counterproductivity.  By TYPE
of visitor I mean we need to walk a line between avoiding what is mistakenly
called elitism--museums people essentially presenting programming that is a
dialogue with themselves--and seeking a wider audience. I say this is
"mistakenly called elitism" because elitism implies a quality program aimed
at a small group of cognoscenti. Often these "elitist" museum programs are
not high quality, they are merely self absorbed.  I think museums spend too
little time analyzing who they should be reaching in terms of doing good,
and doing the research and devising the truly creative methods of giving
that audience a fine museum experience.  It isn't that we're being willful.
It is that defining that audience is very hard, and teaching in a museum
environment is very, very hard to do.  But then creativity that has a
productive, educative, inspiring result is always hard.
The good news for me is always that the public is surprisingly willing, in
large numbers, to appreciate sophisticated offerings if we offer it in the
right way. You CAN have your cake and eat it too.
>On the other hand, I can understand your frustration, because clearly
>the marketers, fundraisers, administrators, and even educators have been
>on the ascendant.  But the collections-oriented rationale for this is
>that the place has got to stay open and gather public support or the
>collections will be sitting quietly in a dark room with a leaky roof (cf
>the New York Historical Society pre-Betsy Gotbaum; the Barnes
>collection). Of course there are other rationales (to which I subscribe)
>such as one of the visitors that we are trying to reach might really get
>a thrill from those precious objects.

We agree. The audience we should be after is the one that agrees what we are
doing is important--and the museums that are inherently collecting
institutions--and the ones with the most funding problems--have, IMHO, done
a poor job of explaining why they collect--in art, the museums have trouble
differentiating themselves from galleries, in history, the museums have
difficulty differentiating themselves from schools. The problem isn't
universal. Science and technology centers are less collection-intensive, and
tend to use collections more as props, so they have less to explain in terms
of collecting ethos. Ditto children's museums.And natural history museums
are still research-driven and artifact centered, as far as I can see,
although that seems to be changing too. Justifying collecting to a populance
that seems to collect everything shouldn't be that hard to do.
I argue that there IS a serious value to collecting with a future,
documentary purpose in mind, and the art and especially the history museums
should try to explain it better.  Because if they don't they won't get the
support to do it, and they will end up like the New-York Historical
Society--whose survival is by no means ensured by Betsey Gotbaum's advent,
either. (I would also say that one way to avoid the situation of N-YHS is to
be damned analytical about what you take on as feasible to collect, and be
willing as a matter of course to re-examine your collecting rationale and
then deaccession out of something more than a crisis-driven need.)

>>The museum professional, on the other hand, (if they are still trained the
way I was in
>> a simpler time) are "objects people"
>
>Just like that?
Of course not.  The way you continue shows that you you understand my point
here.

> Even curators, I would assume, are interested in specific types of
objects, as opposed to generic >objects.  But if I understand your point,
your museum professionals respond to actual
>things with actualy physical and historical properties, as opposed to
>pictures of things or computer representations of things.
  YES
>If you are finding, after dealing with literally hundreds of board members,
that they ALL place >visitors at a higher priority than you do, and boards
constitute the legal corpus of the institution, >then I thinkone can fairly
say that the definition of museum has officially changed.  You can fight a
>rear-guard action, but boards define institutions as much now as they did
in the heyday of the rich
>collectors' museum.

I think you mean 'de-facto changed', not '"officially." Nothing "official"
to it. But you may be right. But what I think is that it is in microcosm the
same problem discussed above. We don't explain the collecting end of mission
well enough to board members and imply that all that counts is the numbers
through the door, partially because that is supposed to improve funding
prospects.  But there is a real problem when you have a board that cannot
for the life of them understand that the collection has intrinsic value and
is a public trust, not just another asset to liquidate when the museum gets
into funding trouble. The AAM went to the wall with the CPA's on just this
issue, and various attorney general in several states hold on to this line.
If board members don't understand why, then we are either getting the wrong
kind of board members, we are orienting them improperly, or the definition
of "museum" has, as you say, changed. And changed irrevocably.

>>Too often we fail to ask how important is the TYPE of visitor is that we
get
>
>What it the WORLD does this mean? What TYPE of visitor should we be
>getting? Maybe one of the wrong TYPE will get something out of the
>museum that s/he wouldn't have gotten if we hadn't worked hard on
>finding ways to get them there.
See my comments above, please.  "What TYPE of visitor should we be getting"
is precisely what we don't think about enough. Yep. A target market more
than fuzzily defined.