Well, I'm going to try a troglodyte approach, just out of
sheer contrariness.
As an overall nostrum, I would suggest:"Beware popular
ideas". Two popular ideas that have gained currency among
museum people are: 1) Museums are "authoritarian" or
"pater/maternalistic" (a wonderfully careful neologism) in
the way information is presented. A recent posting compares
that to the issue of authorial omniscience in literature,
and I would add the issue of illusion in art altogether. In
both literature and visual arts (not in such a pronounced
fashion in music, interestingly enough) artists and
critics have tried to dethrone the creator, associating that
demotion with a democratic spirit. This is a tremendously
untested idea among the people who are to participate in
this democracy. People in general notoriously prefer
narrative stories and representational pictures. So as
admirable as the concept may be, it serves the artists and
the critics, not the audiences, by and large. (We're museum
people, how do you think that the public would respond to
carefully framed questions about narrative and
representation?)
I would extrapolate this to the latest thinking in museology
that is being expressed in this thread. Do *visitors*
experience curatorship as condescension? Or do they relish a
good narrative thread running through an exhibition,
explaining context and craft from an expert point of view? I
have no doubt that museums have been improved by a greater
attention to the meanings that their visitors invest in
objects, but I would also suggest that expertise is what
museums have to offer, and it should not be slighted as
anti-democratic, or disparaged as paternalistic.
The second popular notion that I think bears careful
questioning is the use of computers in exhibition. I am
*very* computer literate, and have used computers to compose
music professionally, and use them all the time at work, and
frequently at home. Here we descend into the strictly
personal. I have yet to see exhibition information presented
on a computer that is not flat, dimensionless, limited by
poor resolution graphics, small screens and tinny sound.
Isn't one of the great things about a museum the aura around
a real object? The aura of authenticity, the aesthetics of
the thing itself? I'm not just questioning the quality of
museum computer graphics, I'm questioning the use of
computers as exhibit displays altogether. For me, they have
the quality of going to a museum to see paintings and seeing
reproductions instead.
I am certainly being extreme here, and verging on flaming.
But whenever I read opinions that are so clearly shaped by a
particular period's prejudices, my mind immediately goes
into contrarian overdrive. There is no doubt that computers
are beautiful devices for retrieving information. But they
are a *terrible* replacement for the personal encounters
with objects that have made museums such attractions for
centuries.
Eric
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