Analysis Of Steven Lubar´s Inside The Lost Museum

Upon entering the room, visitors’ eyes dart to that mysteriously empty frame centered on the opposite wall. In such a painstakingly designed museum, this frame looks out of place. On these walls hang the memoirs of revered artists, but the empty frames scattered throughout remember something more tragic: the largest property theft in world history (Menconi, 2012). Head of security at the Gardner, Anthony Amore, refers to these empty frames as “placeholders, not memorials” and urges visitors to see them as a “testament” to their belief that they will reacquire the stolen paintings someday (Menconi, 2012). Whether they do or not, the 1990 Gardner theft greatly impacted

Museums have long served a purpose as cultural staples. For every museum, big and small, careful consideration is used in selecting its contents. When securing new items for a museum, it is most important to consider public appeal, educational value, and cost-effectiveness.

Museums are information organizations, that is, they are about giving the most up-to-date information to their patrons. No matter how well their organization, commercially, is wrap it up that part of them remains the same. From the two museums that I visited, the Henry Ford Museum and the Museum of Natural History, are clearly about passing information to the patron. There are differences between them, however, it is the equivalences that I want to focus on as they are what bind them. The three areas of focus are community, academic outreach, and the stories they share.

Positioned alongside Central Park in the heart of New York City, The Metropolitan Museum of Art is one of the largest and most influential art museums in the world. The Met houses an extensive collection of curated works that spans throughout various time periods and different cultures. The context of museum, especially one as influential as the Met, inherently predisposes its visitors to a certain set of understandings that subtly influence how they interpret and ultimately construct meanings about each individual object within the museum. Brent Plate in Religion, Art, and Visual Culture argues that “objects obtain different meanings in different locations and historical settings.”An object placed on display behind a glass case inside a museum would hold a vastly different meaning if it was put on sale by a street vendor, like the ones who set up their tables in close proximity to the Met. The different meanings that objects are able to obtain is attributed to the relationships that are established between the object itself and the environment that surrounds it. These relationships often involve the kind of audience that a museum attracts, where the work is exhibited, and how the exhibits within a museum is planned out. Museums subsequently have the ability to control how these relationships are established which influences the way a viewer is able to construct meaning. When a visitor observes an object on display at the Met, they instinctively construct a certain set of

Countless art has been sought-after throughout history. Explorers, scientists, art collectors, politicians, and entrepreneurs from Western nations have sought out and removed art from the lands of great civilizations, often with the assistance and participation of local people and governments. Even as cultural property faces immediate danger today in conflict zones like Syria and Mali, there is circumstantial evidence that some nations are awakening to the political and foreign policy benefits that can flow from the repatriation of cultural patrimony. While on a different scale from World War II, historic structures, religious monuments, and other priceless ancient times continue to suffer collateral damage and manipulation in armed conflict. Relics have been stolen, smuggled and sold in what is a reported multibillion dollar underground market. They have become the illicit prizes of private collectors and the subject of legal claims against museums. Of the countless museums subject to legal claims, The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City happens to be one of them. “The Metropolitan Museum has acquired thousands of works and objects of art from the antiquities”. “For the past several years, the government of Turkey has warned U.S. and foreign museums (including The Metropolitan Museum of Art), that unless ancient objects from Turkish soil are given up on demand, Turkey will stop lending artworks” (The Committee for Cultural Policy, 2015). Turkey continues to up the

I hope to see museums make more concerted efforts to educate the public. Too many exhibits are of the “passive, didactic looking” than like the engaging Object Stories program (Dartt, Murawski). Exhibits should seek to tell untold narratives, and programs should be places of communication and cross-cultural encounters. For too long, difficult confrontations have been avoided, both inside the museum, and by dominant communities

In the Robyn Autry article, it mainly focuses on the national conflict of museums mainly focusing towards African American. The author travel to 15 museums around the United States that focuses towards African American. She mainly talks about how the African American were facing numerous hardships in the U.S and how the museum represents those issues to the general public. She believes the way to tell the hardship of African Americans is by exhibiting through a museum. When traveling through these museums she focused towards “centered on three traumatic episodes: capture and displacement from Africa, enslavement, and racial segregation” (Autry 64). The author of the articles wants to show that over time that museums meanings has changed over

This final observation brings me to my main question which my paper will address: with a collection as encyclopedic as the Metropolitan Museum of Art's, why would a curator want to bring 48 artistically and religiously significant artifacts from Hildesheim, Germany to New York for an exhibition? These objects all had to be shipped thousands of miles in order to be shown in a lesser exhibition for less than 5 months. The Metropolitan Museum of Art has one of the largest collections of Medieval art in the world, which is elaborated on at length in the director's forward from Thomas P. Campbell, and the untrained eye has a difficult time telling the difference between, for example, the two arm reliquaries owned by the museum

The author talks about how text that goes with objects in museums directs the reader towards the “preferred reading” or preferred meanings of the object.

Judith H. Dobrzynski’s article, “High Culture Goes Hands-On,” suggests that the museums current trend of providing visitors with “an experience” threatens the current model of providing “solace and inspiration” (Dobrzynski 3). However, I disagree with this conclusion. Interactive experiences and contemplative approaches can co-exist just so long as museums adjust in response to how our ever-evolving culture receives it. Transitioning from museums’ elitist paradigm is critical to creating a more accessible community-conscious design. Dobrzynski, on the other hand, views these differences as “shedding the very characteristics that made [art museums] so special” (1), a pessimistic sentiment that shows her contempt towards development.

At the end of the long massive granite hall lined with intricately carved marble panels telling stories of gods, myths and stories reside the British Museum’s infamous classical Greek sculpture collection, Elgin Marbles. Even before the word “archeology” was coined the removal of artifacts from their original context or location have been occurring. From Egyptian mummies, to imperial treasures of China, to the Elgin Marbles from Greece, objects have been taken from countries to be sold for profit, saved for private collections or put in museums for most of society’s existence. However, in the past few decades, governments have taken action in asking for such objects to be returned to their indigenous culture. Unfortunately, museums like the

Although blockbuster exhibitions inspired by popular culture are moving away from the traditional role of the museum as an educational institution, the blockbuster model can still stay true to the museological goal of education. The First Emperor: China’s Entombed Warriors at the Art Gallery of New South Wales is an excellent example of how the original concept of the blockbuster exhibition as a spectacular display of the wealth of an ancient civilisation, first seen in The Treasures of Tutankhamun exhibition at the British Museum, is still being used by museums today. It is possible for institutions to produce exhibitions that reflect popular taste in ways that continue to create opportunities for learning – be it formal or informal. As argued by O’Reilly and Lawrenson, exhibitions like the First Emperor present “scholarship in an accessible format in a way that people who don’t usually visit museums will

As you walk through a museum and you look at at the different cultures you are able to experience all types of things. ”Some artifacts have been in museums for decades or even centuries and now some countries want them back” (passage 1 para 2). Egypt, Greece, and Rome are countries that have really cool histories, if their relicts are stuffed in their museums than people can’t enjoy their stories. You can try to return the artifacts but some might be neglected. “Some scientists generally supported the law in which countries that find artifacts within their borders receive

‘Imagine you were in charge of a museum’s collecting policy. What would you chose to collect and how would you justify these decisions?’

According to the American Alliance of Museums, community engagement in museums includes the use of this facility as “a center where people gather to meet and converse and an active, visible player in civic life, a safe haven, and a trusted incubator of change” (Long 141). Different museums