What are Museums?
What do you think a museum is? What is it supposed to do?
These seem like straightforward easy questions, but they are questions that even museum professionals have a hard time answering.
Generally there are some things that a lot of people think about when they think of museums:
-
Usually they’re for the public
-
Sometimes museums have collections
-
Often they have displays or something to see
-
Displays or “exhibits” are often made up of “artifacts” or “art”
-
They are often in large or otherwise grand buildings
-
Generally museums are associated with history and culture
-
Museums can be serious, quiet, and contemplative spaces
Do these sound right to you? I’d like to address each one of these broad ideas about museums and explain a bit of what I know about them.
Public Spaces
​
Most museums are public spaces. This means they are responsible to the public, they may get money from the government to operate, or they may be caretakers for collections that are owned by the public. When museums are public, they should be delivering a service to the community that is useful or meaningful. Some public services, are only useful to specific people (like education for children) or at specific times (like health care when you’re not well), but all should have something they do that is helpful.
Some museums feel it is helpful enough to “take care” of objects; they might think that these objects will be useful in the future, or that they have a value inside of them that should be preserved for its own sake. Other museums feel that the best way to be helpful is to provide opportunities to see objects, to be educated, or to have an enjoyable experience. Many museums try to do both these things.
Museums that are public get their operating funds from government (and/or donations and entry fees). If museums stop being seen as helpful, they won’t have funding to continue to operate. People who live in a community can impact what a museum is and does by expressing how they feel about the museum as a public service. Many Indigenous people did this at the Glenbow in 1988. They protested an exhibit called “The Sprit Sings” and it changed the way museums interact with Indigenous people all across Canada.
Not all museums are public. Did you know there
is a large private museum near Morley?
It’s called the Canadian Museum of Making.
Displays & Exhibits
Many museums have displays to look at. These are often called exhibits. Sometimes exhibits are permanent (meaning they’re intended to stay in the museum for a longer period of time, but not that they’ll be up forever), and sometimes they’re temporary (usually this means they’re up for a few weeks or months only. An exhibit is like a story that a museum is telling; it has a narrative or idea that it wants to convey to the public by sharing specifically chosen pieces, displayed in specifically chosen ways.
There are some conventions or expectations of exhibits. For example, natural history exhibits usually try to convey a natural setting (sometimes called a diorama), art exhibits often use large blank white walls. Each different setting for an exhibit conveys an intended idea about the subject or story (just like a hardcover book conveys something different than a story printed on a single sheet of paper). Making exhibits is one way that museums create representations.
Art & Artifacts
The things or objects in museums are usually called artifacts. This word can have a lot of different meanings. When I speak to students I explain that an artifact is something that isn’t used for it’s original purpose anymore, and that it’s usually something that shows human evidence (even if it’s a rock, it’s been separated from the earth and collected by a person). I also tell them all artifacts have stories inside.
I don’t know if artifact is a good word for the objects in museums. It’s a useful word for me because most museums have a lot of artifacts, and it’s difficult to talk about a lot of something without at least some words that group those things together. But maybe the groupings are wrong. Adding a label like “artifact” makes a thing into something that belongs in a museum. I wonder if some other words like, belongings, or beings, might be more appropriate in some cases. I know that the people who made some museum artifacts see their creations as alive, or they see them in different ways than I might as a museum worker. I am trying to understand how to talk about “artifacts” in ways that are more respectful and maybe more useful too.
One way that some people have tried this, is to call all artifacts “art.” Usually when people think of art they imagine a painting or a sculpture on a wall. But art is a word that has a lot of room inside it for different interpretations. Some museums have tried to say that everything they collect is artistic in some way, so maybe everything should be called art. But art is a word that comes from western culture. So it might not be useful for talking about things that come from other communities and traditions.
Collections
Museums group their artifacts into collections to help keep track of them, but also as a way to categorize and arrange them. If each artifact has stories inside, collections arrange the stories in particular ways. Arranging artifacts into collections is another way museums engage in representation.
Some people feel that collections are the root of museums. When people trace the history of museums as organizations they often start with “curio cabinets” or collections of strange objects that were owned by rich and powerful people. These people collected things to show how important they were, or how much wealth they had, because they could own things that cost a lot to acquire. These collections were arranged in ways that the owner thought made sense. As time went on, people grew to like different methods of arranging; sometimes collections were arranged by object (all kinds of clubs together, all kinds of eggs together) or by community (all things made by south American Indigenous peoples together) or by ideas (all things arranged in order from most “civilized” to least). The ways that things are categorized impacts the stories we feel we can tell with artifacts.
An author named Jorge Luis Borges noticed how the categories we make for collections seem “scientific” but are really more about decisions that individuals with power (who can amass a collection, or institutions like museums) make. He wrote this list of a different way to categorize animals. Many people use this to show that collections frame the ways we think.
Buildings
Museums are often housed in large, impressive, or otherwise important buildings. This practice could be rooted in the museum history that stems from collections. Early collectors used big fancy cabinets and buildings to hold their collections. These showed people who wanted to see them how important and impressive the collection was.
Today grand buildings are used for the same purpose. When you walk into a space like the Metropolitan Museum of Art, you are supposed to feel quite small. This makes the art and artifacts seem grander and more important. This also might make you feel like the collector is important. Although many museum are public spaces, the “collector” today is usually the nation or state. Most provinces across Canada have their own collections, and we have several national Canadian collections as well. When you walk into a space like the Studio Bell National Music Center you are supposed to feel small, but also you are supposed to feel like Canada is big and important and grand because the space that holds its national music collection is all those things.
Museum buildings are intended to be safe spaces for important collections to be held; some are designed that way with attention to keeping optimal temperature humidity and light levels, keeping pests out, and preventing damage to artifacts. Museum buildings often use artificial rather than natural light, because natural light can cause damage to artifacts. Yet many museums do not have the capacity to take “good” care of their artifacts, and many buildings do not have protections that museum research identifies as important. For example the national collection in Brazil was destroyed by fire in 2018. Museums also have different ideas about what “good” care looks like than maybe the people who made the artifact might. The National Museum of the American Indian (which is part of the Smithsonian family of museums) has a special facility that community members can use for ceremony with artifacts, and is trying to use guidance from community members in display and storage plans.
History & Culture
When I ask a group of students what a museum is usually the first thing they say is that it’s a place to learn about the past. Some museums are very focused on the past, but others have different areas of focus. For example, the Museum of Math doesn’t really look to the past, it uses the museum model to help people understand how math works in the world all around us. The Color Factory tries to inspire joy and allow people to think about the role that color plays in our lives.
We generally think of museums as places of either history or culture. In the case of museums, culture is used to mean anything that might have value because it means something, rather than does something; other things that get called “culture” in this sense include dance, performing arts, theatre, music, and arts. Just like museum categories impact the kinds of stories we can tell with artifacts, categories like “culture” impact what we think museums are for, and what we do with them.
Serious Study
Museums can feel like places that are serious. This is because we have a code of behaviour that is expected in museums. Usually these rules are unwritten. They are not often enforced but they’re expected, and everyone else is following them, so we do too. Sometimes museums do have signs or guards (often called docents) to impact and guide behaviour in museums, but they’re not everywhere, yet people still mostly follow expectations. This is partly because of the building (it feels important, so we are more likely to be on “good” behaviour when we are inside), and partly because of our expectations of what we think a museum is supposed to be.
I think there could be a big difference between what people expect a museum to be, and what a museum could be. There are lots of museums that do things that may seem outside of what a museum is traditionally, and that do things that may seem radical or strange. I’m interested to think about what a museum can be, and ways that different people might design a museum if they had the chance. I wonder how our different identities might impact the type of space we would design. The Newseum does a very interesting job of designing a museum for people with disabilities. I’ve seen museums that put a lot of consideration into gender and the needs of people outside the gender binary. The Ziibiwing Centre has thought a lot about what a museum means to the Anishinabe people. The Gopher Hole Museum mostly thinks about making people smile…
I’m interested to hear what folks have to say about museums, and always happy to talk with anyone. As a researcher, I need to be very clear about what happens to the things people say to me. If you want to be part of the research or not, I'm always open to chat, and we will start our conversation with consideration for what you want me to do with what you have to share.
I think there is a lot of room for museums to grow and change, so that they can be useful and respectful.