Museums
Future Challenges
A central issue facing museums in the early twenty-first century is to find ways to use their collections as a means of entertaining and educating a wide public, while developing their role as a resource for research. The felicitous atmosphere of the Enlightenment, when research and public interest coincided, has passed. Museum collections no longer represent, as they did then, the horizon of human understanding. The frontiers of science extend beyond the visible world collectable by museums, and it adds little to the sum of knowledge for museums to go on building up their collections, as most continue to do, according to categories laid down two centuries ago. But objects will still need to be preserved for future study and to make past experiences vividly meaningful to subsequent generations. Museums tend to go on doing what they have always done—adding another Carracci, crustacean, or car—and yet there is no museum about the history of communism (apart from a few remaining Soviet propaganda museums, which only tell one side of the story), or of marketing. Both are manifestations of ideas and practices that have vastly shaped the lives of people living in the early 2000s, and both have vivid material pasts, ideal for museum display. The challenge for museums is to decide what is important for them to collect in the present—because it is on these collections that their future will be built.
See also Arts; City, The: The City as a Cultural Center; Cultural History; Encyclopedism; Enlightenment; Visual Order to Organizing Collections.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Asma, Stephen T. Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads: The Culture and Evolution of Natural History Museums. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.
Coombes, Annie E. Reinventing Africa: Museums, Material Culture, and Popular Imagination in Late Victorian and Edwardian England. New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 1994.
Dubin, Steven C. Displays of Power: Controversy in the American Museum from the Enola Gay to Sensation! New York: New York University Press, 2000.
Glaser, Jane R., and Artemis A. Zenetou, eds. Gender Perspectives: Essays on Women in Museums. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994.
Holo, Selma. Beyond the Prado: Museums and Identity in Democratic Spain. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1999.
Holst, Niels von. Creators, Collectors, and Connoisseurs: The Anatomy of Public Taste from Antiquity to the Present Day. London: Thames and Hudson, 1967. Deals only with art collections.
Hudson, Kenneth. Museums of Influence. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1987.
Malraux, André. Musée imaginaire. Paris: Gallimard, 1965. Translated as Museum Without Walls by Stuart Gilbert and Francis Price. London: Secker and Warburg, 1967.
McClellan, Andrew. Inventing the Louvre: Art, Politics, and the Origin of the Modern Museum in Eighteenth-Century Paris. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
McLoughlin, Moira. Museums and the Interpretation of Native Canadians: Negotiating the Borders of Culture. New York: Garland, 1999.
Norman, Geraldine. The Hermitage: The Biography of a Great Museum. London: Pimlico, 1999.
Schneider, Andrea Kupfer. Creating the Musée d'Orsay: The Politics of Culture in France. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998.
Spalding, Julian. The Poetic Museum: Reviving Historic Collections. Munich: Prestel, 2002.
Staniszewski, Mary Anne. The Power of Display: A History of Exhibition Installation at the Museum of Modern Art. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1998.
Weil, Stephen E. A Cabinet of Curiosities: Inquiries into Museums and their Prospects. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995.
Wilson, David M. The British Museum: A History. London: British Museum Press, 2002.
Julian Spalding
Additional topics
Science EncyclopediaScience & Philosophy: Molecular distillation to My station and its duties:Museums - Origins, Early Development, Growth, Agencies Of Influence, Future Challenges, Bibliography