Cultural Relevance, Understanding And Education

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.

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

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 article provides information concerning: memories that society wants to acknowledge and pass on to future generations; the manner in which those memories are represented; the responsibility that society has to fully represent aspects of history while also brining into questions the unwillingness to recognise and respect different conceptions of history and how this can diminish the potential that museums have to advance cross-cultural understanding.

The 21st century has seen a dramatic increase in the challenges facing cultural institutions, particularly museums. One of the most pressing issues currently facing museums worldwide is the diminishing level of government support. Despite reductions in government funding, the sustained maintenance of museum collections and facilities continues to require substantial resources. In the face of such difficulties, a growing number of museums have turned to innovative programming, specifically exhibitions, as a way to ensure financial viability through increased attendance. Given the growing competition for consumer leisure time in today’s society, attention has shifted away from traditional scholarly collection based exhibitions, towards the populist exhibition format offered by blockbuster exhibitions. Through a discussion of Harry Potter™: The Exhibition at the Powerhouse Museum and the First Emperor: China’s Entombed Warriors at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, this essay will examine the two approaches museums are taking to the blockbuster model. It will be argued that although exhibitions reflecting popular culture are becoming increasingly more common, there are institutions that manage to reflect popular taste in ways that continue to advance scholarship and create opportunities for lifelong learning.

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.

One of the major controversies confronting museums today is the issue of repatriation. Large museums are constantly facing claims of object ownership made by so named ‘source nations’ (Merryman, 2009, 183), claiming that the objects constitute a part of their cultural heritage and should be returned. There are, however, those who argue against repatriation, claiming that it does more harm than good. Additionally, others believe that objects of cultural significance constitute a piece of the culture of all humanity. I would argue that concern should rest on the objects and their well being. Objects should be seen as pieces of the culture of the whole human race and preserved for scholarship and future generations.

A museum is place for all people to enjoy no matter what other the external factors there are, as soon as, you step through those doors

Artifacts are not just important to where they came from. It is also important for other societies to gain knowledge about the culture the artifact is from. Countries would be fueled by ignorance if they didn’t have knowledge of the past and of other countries cultures. This is supported by a claim that James Cuno made in “Returning Antiquities to Their Countries of Origin.” Cuno believes that museums should collect art from the world’s diverse cultures through purchase or loans and work in collaboration with museums and nations around the world.

When constructing an exhibit, the museum staff must ask themselves: What demographic are we designing this exhibit for. Correspondingly, the museum staff ponders what is the line of sight for the targeted demographic, so they know where to place the artifacts and how the exhibit should be structured. Similarly, the museum staff must predict how the public will respond to their exhibit and the necessary precautions to avoid negative reviews. Most importantly, the museum staff must question if the exhibit can offend a certain demographic and the steps they will need to take to properly represent that society. When creating an exhibit, the museum staff must contemplate how the structure and content will relate to the audience and what is the best approach to have interaction between the exhibit and its attended audience.

This week readings discusses both the history of museums, primarily in the United States, and their evolution from high brow institutions to ones that serve, educate, and engage the populace. The articles also trace the constant discussions museum professionals had regarding the focus and dissemination of their collections. These articles all agree that museums must transform from places that solely focus on the collection, preservation, conservation, and dissemination of rare items to ones that also become a part of the community, represent the many voices and interests of the public, educate, and become a forum for discussion about issues beyond the items in a glass case of hung on he wall.

Try, if you would, to recall your last visit to a museum or other similar institution. Did you immediately accept the information presented to you as fact? Did you stop to think about how a particular exhibit represents a culture and whether or not it was accurate? Since their origin, museums were created for the purpose of preservation and interpretation of the material culture they exhibit, and have been the most widely accepted method for the dissemination of information pertaining to other cultures. That being said, there is an increasing amount of discourse today questioning the value of museums and the ways in which their exhibition of material culture actually serves to devalue or misrepresent their cultures of origin. For this research paper, I have decided to focus in the collections of material culture present in the Beloit College Logan Museum of Anthropology and the Smithsonian Museum. First, I begin by sharing what I have learned about the history surrounding the origins of museums. Next, I identify the ways in which museums obscure and misrepresent the cultures they display through their exhibits either intentionally or otherwise. Finally, I attempt to utilize what I have learned in order to compare the two institutions and identify the ways in which they have taken steps to keep up with modern museological and discourse.

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

To understand the past, we have to understand the artefacts of the past. Artefacts show us another kind of history, another way of approaching the past. Not only do they frame the way we act in the world, they also influence the way we think about the world. So when one questions the ownership of these artefacts, they also question the history behind it. Because the history of art is, in large part, a history of theft, questions over its ownership are bound to ensue. So, how do we decide who owns art and subsequently history? Prevailing post- colonial ideology characterises museums as imperial despoilers and their possession of artefacts a dispossession of the cultural identity from the colonised, robbing the motif behind acquired objects. The idea that an ancient work of art is removed from its original setting, of which it forms an aesthetic and historical part, it loses most of its value and becomes a mere item of archaeology. However, arguments against this idea regard the notion of cultural property a pure myth as such artefacts are deemed inessential and irrelevant to the identity of recently emerged and artificially created nations. Instead the concept of internationalism and the ideas of shared history are propagated to defend the retention of artefacts in mostly western museums. Both sides present valid arguments for and against the repatriation of historical artefacts. It becomes apparent that the reality of

Collections play a crucial role in fulfilling a museum’s mission and purpose. A museum’s collection is defined by its collection policy past and present which in turn helps to shape the museum’s goals and direction. As stewards of collections, museums are expected to maintain the highest professional standards legally and ethically.