Factors Influencing The Way Museum Collection

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

Every effort should be made ahead of time to identify a museum that has items and works one can easily connect to our HUM 111 class and book. Since HUM 111 covers from ancient times to the 1500s AD, it makes more sense to focus on items from that time frame. In general, museums with artistic cultural artifacts and fine arts work better than history museums.

In museums today various pieces are displayed in such a way as to show people that these pieces are what they are and to explain their original uses etc. In Paris for example, a new museum was built in 2006 called Quai Branly and it displayed a collection of Benin pieces including

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

After arriving and going through the security screenings, I proceeded to go down the stairs, entering the exhibit itself. Before even observing anything specific, it was immediately realized that this was no typical museum. Most people know that upon arrival, but only when you first enter the exhibit do you realize that this museum is not one that inspects the past, but one that reminds us of it.

The Peale’s museum different for the curiosity cabinets in the purpose. While the curiosity cabinet were open to the public, the Peale’s museum has an educational and cultural

Karsten Schubert’s article, “The Curator’s Egg”, tells us about the characteristics of these “new museums” in terms of what is prioritized, sacrificed, and how museums acting like corporations can lead to problematic issues. Schubert states, art for all has given way to the 'democracy of spectacle': an ambition to be attractive to the greatest number of people at all costs. It seems as if new museums have prioritized to showcase what the visitors would appreciate. As a millennial living in the 21st century, I have witnessed that art museums have only seem to attract people if the installations and the artwork are instagram worthy. Instead of focus there would be

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

Subsequently, Americans borrowed this European form of the gallery but gave them a distinct American meaning. Conveying concerns about a deteriorating society the The New York Times wrote in 1889, “The great foreign population, largely uneducated, has so upset municipal politics that it is hard for an American of education to be firmly friendly to the civic majority” (Duncan, 1995, p. 56). This statement reveals the notion that the poor and the foreign required civilizing and thus formed the basis for the next phase of museum development. Accordingly, as the number of museums and public access to them increased throughout the 20th century, curators used an orderly display of objects to create a worldly interest and a respect for authority from

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

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

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

The Cambridge Dictionary Online defined museums as “places of study, buildings where objects of historical, scientific or artistic interest are kept, preserved and exhibited”. To The Museums Association, a museum is “an institution which collects documents, preserves, exhibits and interprets material evidence and associated information for the public benefit”. Since 1998, this definition has changed. Museums now enable the public to explore collections for inspiration, learning and enjoyment. They are institutions that collect, safeguard and make accessible artefacts and specimens, which they hold in trust for society. Mike Wallace (1996) categorised museums into four distinct types, namely National Museums that hold collection of