A contribution to understanding of museums

Or: why would the museums count?

The experts should know how to anticipate the questions that the users of museums, be it present ones or the future ones, might pose. One should bear in mind that non-users are often in the situation to decide upon the future of museum profession and priorities among its aims. They can do it as taxpayers id different functions in the society, or they can do it as the consumers of our products. Museums fail to explain their role in the contemporary society to their respective communities and, one might claim, have difficulty themselves to understand it. In the situation of the speeding change and implosion of value systems, museums are rarely successful to prove their "rentability".

As the part of an established culture, museums are rarely the object of public questioning which allows them in their functioning to rely upon (conservative) traditional public or on the rather arbitrary estimates of what is needed from them. Of course, "the needs" would refer to how they perceive their role in serving their community. The feedback is often lacking or ignored. More often than is thought, museum professionals are inapt to deliver the usable product. That is the consequence of low understanding and motivation in their own profession. Approaching relative autonomy that comprises market logic and competition, museums find themselves in a vulnerable and delicate position. The almighty state administration is a retreating boss.

1. The usual misconceptions of the professionals

  

Museums are scientific institutions

The best, the biggest and the greatest by their collections, experts and funds – are. The rest are not. But those have, nevertheless, an obligation to follow the scientific standards and be faithful to the unbiased truth. With the dynamic fluctuation of experts and easy communication due to the new technologies and new channels of collaboration, - the sole obstacle to museum scientific activity remains usual lack of finances. But, to be very clear, museums as majority are communicational institutions founded upon scientific standards.

  

Museums are about past

Yes, but only to bring it into the present and future, with some sound reason.

In fact, they are always about present and how the present sees the past. The advanced museums speak about present using the past.

Museums should stay away from the problems and dilemma of today

Just the contrary. The world of today is burdened with problems, which are extremely dramatic and deal with the issues of survival of human kind. There is no "historical distance as the luxury of past functioning of museums. We take risks by getting insight into the present and by comparing it to the inherited experience. But we do not give in museums final answers nor we judge options: we only honestly talk about them. One may apply to their position the modern saying: if you are not part of the solution, you must be part of the problem (which indeed is the case, if the museums affirm by their attitude the political and social passivity).

  

Museums are not political institutions

Yes they are, if understood properly. The role of social and political outsiders cannot be the position of good (which is inherent in their invention) nor can it help their flourishing. Excluded from social, cultural, economical and environmental strategies, museums become irrelevant therefore unnecessary. The long-lived servitude of museums to the dominant forces of any society is to be blamed for their relatively low profile in the life of community where they exist.

Museums are about positive values

If they want to be educational or even be regarded as a source of relevant wisdom, they better be able to speak about the dark side of their objects and themes too. Ignoring the existence of evil, they deny it, and join those institutions and individuals in the society whose main aim is manipulation of people's mind.

Museums are there to tell the scientific truth

What is meant, usually, is to tell the final and indisputable truth. Well, the name of the one is the Absolute, and whatever that is, it does not live either in the museum or in school and, almost as surely, not in the temples. To be more precise: museums are there to pose questions disregarding whether they would endanger any power structure or position.

Museums are the institutions of knowledge

Of course, the knowledge is an ingredient of their rich complexity, but far from being their substance. Knowing facts, truths and principles is an obligation of museums. Transferring it is another business that of educating, whereas doing something with the knowledge is still further from the passive knowledge producer. As to the knowledge, museums cannot stand the comparison to any institution from the knowledge industry. But, correctly understood, museums are, although knowledge relevant, something else: the active knowledge. The abundance of knowledge does no teach men to be wise, whereas the later should be the ultimate (however seemingly imprecise) purpose of museums.

  

2.  The misconceptions of the laymen

  

Museums are money spenders

The truth is that they earn it. Of course, we talk about correctly conceived and well-run museum. Museums are non-profit institutions which now means that any direct profit they make in some of their activities must return to the museum working process itself, i.e. must serve the quality of the museum output. Museums for the majority must depend on the public money, as they contribute to the public well being and prosperity. The are like any similar service industry: social and health security, public transportation, obligatory education etc. In some cases of very effective museums, the new econometric methods show that revenue they indirectly create in the community exceeds the usual business effects. Some measurements show that museums create almost double number of jobs around them as the consequence of their activity. This public image of money spenders costs museums dearly. The rising neo-liberalism sees tem as burden to the respective society.

Museums are there for old things

To be "for museum" means in any western inspired culture to be outdated, outmoded, obsolete, unnecessary, in brief, - useless. Therefore, in popular mind, museums are full of things, which we keep out of nostalgia for the past times. The scientific interest there is taken as a sort of curiosity of eccentric experts. The next layer is the superlativist: because the things there are rare, the biggest, the best, the most expensive, the most elaborated, the most beautiful, the exceptional in any possible sense and so on.  Belonging to the past, all of them are old, i.e. the older the better. But that notion is now lost in the best museums because "old" for them is literally yesterday. We want to document our cultures and civilisation so that at any moment we can study it for the different purposes. Marking the change makes the future more obvious and less frightening, and, besides, enables us to adapt and correct when we believe it does not correspond with what we need. Of course, museums are learning the lesson, with difficulties though, but they are becoming the institutions for today and about today, including its reflections: one in the past and one in the future. 

Museums are temples of national pride

All too often they are, and not much more than that. Pride is legitimate ingredient of self-esteem and knowing one's own identity: pride of being different, rich of inherited experiences and cultural practices; pride of quality. But, museums should have been able to impose the realistic picture of the history, and explain it as experience upon which one can learn how to improve human state and its natural dispositions. This was rarely the case, so we have national museums, especially those of so called big nations, as temples of vanity: only domination and superiority over others and over nature: roughly speaking, - an illustrated 3-D encyclopaedia of conquests. All too often, they are not only national but also nationalistic. That is not the way to pave the secure path to national identity; right in front of their museums the very national identity is crumbling under the globalising processes. They watch scrupulously and do nothing and yet, almost any member of the public would understand that museums are there to protect and present the identity they stand for. Those museums jealously dust the picture of past, but the majority of there employed curators know poorly the present.

What is good in past should direct us today by its values. There is nothing wrong in having the dead as guides if their messages are interpreted correctly and according to our specific circumstances.

The true nature of museums

Museum is many things and will become still many more. For the moment being, the profession functions upon a definition, which for a long time satisfies the majority of museum people.

It is an important social function.This is why we have so  many mediators and interpreters of the inherited human experience: historians, archaeologists, ethnologists, anthropologists, art historians, curators (all of them and still others if working in a museum), philosophers, scientific researchers, clergymen, politicians, oppinion-makers...

Museums have an advantage of being all of it at one time and in one place, a sort of easy-to-recognize post-podern invention (if we forget their two odd centuries of institutional experience). The truth is that not many have recognized this potential, but those who have demonstrate an institutional success. They have a major specific difference to all others by the fact of their collections of original artefacts and not less original documentation that accompanies them. We talk, obviously, about litteraly immense storages of objects. It is a pure guess of experienced professional but I would say that world's museums keep, care and, very partly, expose  up to u billion of objects. That is the materialized memory: a curious invention of our civilisation. The more we shall ruin the balance by the virtualisation of our world, the more there would be the same old need to keep the solid material traces behind. Collection of fetishes? Yes, to quite an extent, but also the collection of encoded meanings we like to keep for another mind to come to wonder, experience and research with some new knowledge, some new technique, some new mind and some new needs to guide their interests.

The knowledge being available in such quantities from so many resources and at such an ease (www), makes museums freer to recognize ther true nature: that of communication.They are social institutions with multiple tasks so communication should mean many things:

• social space;
• information and orientation in past and present values;
• direct role in promotion and (scrupulous) revival of identities they stand for;
• developmental agency;

As a wise social device working to the  advatage of its community, it adapts the community to the changing conditions in its surroundings and in itself, creating thus viable preconditions for its prosperity. Envisaged as a cybernetic mechanism attached to the community or society it is supposed to serve, it corrects what may be judged as misleading and wrong helping thus harmony and the common well being. It goes without saying that these functions so described are for the most practical circumstances a mere wishful thinking. It would be also wrong to think that museums are supernatural force able to solve the problems of the society that finances it. Nearer to the truth would be to say that museums so conceived are one of the institutions in modern societies which help them survive in the circumstances of threat. What is at stake is not some nostalgic feature that might disappear under the wheels of the globalisation. It is the variety that makes the substance of the entire richness, active and inherited, that may dramatically dissappear in front of our bewildered eyes. So, museums today have the role to play which is very demanding. That role means participation in the destiny of their community, but the participation of an elder which means responsibility and moral commitment. Correctly understood, this role would also give them new importance. The rich world we still know is in peril. Hence the pressure to found ever new museums. (Part of the push comes from tourist industry  driven arguments and ever present local chauvinism). The true impetus is the widespread feeling that we live in a managed world where the viable balance must also be an outcome of our own action. That might be evident in the man-made part of reality. But, that is also true in the natural environment that is unable to re-gain balance without serious effort of institutions we devise for the purpose. To illustrate the point, natural parks and nature conservation policies are just one emanation of the museum idea. Their numbers rise proportionally to the evidence of degradation of the ienvironment.

Evidently, museums  are expected to offer usable product that public mind is not able to decribe, but instinctively feels that museums are important means of protecting the dissapearing values (by which communities continue to be spiritually or even physically alive). Dramatic tones forgotten, - there stays however enough arguments to claim that museums were never different in their role of securing, augmenting, or returning the dying quality of living only now their tasks became dramatically evident and practical at the same time.

That, of course, does not mean that museums should forget about collecting, research, care for collections, presentation and education. Their role is only expanding and being in their public part of functions enveloped by the communicational capacity.

To be continued by describing more precisely the role of the cybernetic museum.