Museums

‘A museum is a non-profit, permanent institution in the service of society and its development, open to the public, which acquires, conserves, researches, communicates and exhibits the tangible and intangible heritage of humanity and its environment for the purposes of education, study and enjoyment.’

International council of museums

(first definition 1947, this version 2007)

museum as an institution: It explores the museum through several themes:

• historical origins of the institution.
• The way in which ideas about objects and what they mean changes over time.
• a short social history of visiting museums. Who was allowed to go and how were you supposed to behave?
• The ways in which museums have been critiqued by artists
• museums today

‘The construction of material things is not perceived as problematic. Things are what they are...

...it is not understood that the ways in which museums ‘manipulate’ material things  also set up relationships and associations, and in fact create identities’

Barthes (1977)

Key Ideas

•  Museums have existed for centuries, but ideas about what they are and how they operate in society have changed radically over time.

• The shift from religion as the source of meaning in the medieval world, to science and study providing answers about the world during the humanist  Renaissance, had a major impact on the ways in which people start collecting and displaying objects.

• During the 17th early 20th centuries, the meaning of an object was seen to be  inherent in the object itself, and it was the job of the curator simply to identify  this meaning, organize the objects in a rational order, and communicate these  meanings to the audience.

• The museums we are all most familiar with have their origin in the 19th Century industrial revolution with mass migration to towns and cities. There was a real fear of ‘the mob’. Museums were just one of the ‘disciplinary institutions’ that were set up to shape and control how people behaved.

Today, postructuralist, communication, education and literary theories all posit 

that meaning is socially constructed; so our museum object doesn't have it’s own 

meaning, but meaning is created through the process of selecting, cataloguing 

and displaying and looking at objects. Museums are in the business of ‘creating’ 

history rather than reflecting it.

 ‘Only when the cultural power of the museum is acknowledged will museums truly understand and develop their role’

Eileen Hooper-Greenhill