This week’s readings offer a dive into
the argument of museology. Randolph Starn’s paper, A Historian's Brief Guide to New Museum Studies, delineates a brief
history of the concept of a museum and its application: behind a language
sometimes cryptic and verbose[i]
the author explains the different forms that museums have assumed in the past,
recreating a context in which it is possible to analyze today’s interpretation
of a museum’s educative role in relation with the public and technology. The
last part of the article is particularly interesting in offering an examination
of today’s crisis of museums, opposed by two factors: a new appealing technology that is difficult
to integrate into the old-fashion mausoleum and a general research of easy
entertainment even in structure dedicated to education, which leads to the
sometimes horrifying infotainment or edutainment. However, the author does not
forget the new possibilities offered by a new interpretation of museums, more
democratic and inclusive of the public.
Another big problem lies in the tension between their innovating compulsion and the mainstream
perception of past. The strong educative role of museums tends to put under
scrutiny the exhibits, in the constant attempt to show to the public the
complexity of the past events, this often happens in ways that conflicts not only with the opinion
of the visitors ( a struggle that could bring good results in the visitors
themselves) but also with institutions. The case of the exhibit of the Enola
Gay (the bomber that released the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima in 1945), well
documented by Edward T. Linenthal in History
Wars: The Enola Gay and other Battles for the American Past, offers a very
clear example of how an honest depiction of the past can enter in dangerous
minefields of blind patriotism, national pride and fossilized representation of
past events. In the case in question the problem became even more acute because
of the national relevance of the Smithsonian Institute and its role of memorial
of national pride, role that can’t easily coexist with the one of educational
instrument if the argument is historically related.
Ken Yellis in his paper Fred Wilson, PTSD, and me: Reflection on the
History Wars understands the lesson from Enola Gay’s aborted takeoff but also acknowledges the success of another exhibit, Mining the Museum. While the first teaches
the errors to avoid, the second offers an interesting and effective interpretation
of the role of the museum as stage for a new interaction between public and
historical analysis. A new language seems to be needed, a dramatized and artistic
interpretation of the past able to feed the new appetite of a public in search for new stimulation.
Interesting for the analysis of
non-academic driven museums is the book Private
History in Public by Tammy S. Gordon. He explains the forces behind three
different kind of historically driven environments, which he defines as
Community, Entrepreneurial and Vernacular exhibitions.
The Community exhibit derives from a reappropriation
of the control over heritage from communities that others defined before. These exhibits are
often strongly related to folklore, religion, and ethnicity and sometime lack the high professionalism of the academic museums; however they miss also the “oversaturated
high polished [of] cultural products”, which often alienates the public.
The Entrepreneurial and the
Vernacular exhibits are interesting and borderline, because they offer an
interpretation of the past private and public at the same time. The first
category -- that defines a private organized and personally managed little
museum, often linked with an artisanal workplace – is easily deciphereable as
museum: these exhibits lack probably a deep interpretation of the past, but
offer a genuine representation of it. The second category, the Vernacular,
groups private collections in public environment, such as the memorabilia in
bars and shops. Personally, I find difficult to imagine a bar full of
collectibles as a museums, because it misses totally the active cultural
interpretation of the past, but at the same time the insertion of this category
in the book offers an interesting perspective on the real meaning of museum, a
meaning that presently appears blurry while it waits a new definition.
[i] Language that offers
sometimes gems of sibylline splendor: “Objects are remarkably unobjective
subjects, if we mean by objective stable, self-sufficient, or self-explanatory”.
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