It Doesn’t Matter How Good Your Stuff Is If I Don’t Know What It Is

 There’s a fun little game they play on antiques roadshow; Good, Better, Best. The idea is they lay out three object, one worth something like £50, another a few hundred and one high value item reaching into the thousands. The joy of this of course is that you can’t really tell unless you’re an expert. And this is exactly the same in a museum.

One of these Sold for $16million, one for £15’000 and the other £150. Can you tell which?*

It’s possible to get all sorts of interesting tat in an antique shop but what’s valuable is hard to determine. Whilst price is not strictly speaking important to a museum an objects importance is.

This general idea has broadly been taken up by most museums these days that a roman oyster shell that was thrown away in great piles can be made more interesting than a painting worth tens of thousands of pounds depending on the story you tell around it.

This develops a simple idea that should be hammered home. The object in the museum is not important, it’s the story about it that is.

This leads to two major streams of thought, firstly how important are the objects themselves? This is a big theme of my work in museums made of replicas and museums with limited objects. But secondly how best to tell stories around the objects themselves.

As mentioned this is all well and good and basically everywhere except the oldest and least updated of collections generally understands this… So why for pity's sake are there still tons of museums out there that just display random stuff!

You’ll see this time and time again. A display case about… say… the Etruscans. And it gives a small amount of information saying they buried their dead, made pots etc. And then the cabinet is full of…. Stuff? 

We can make the logical link that the stuff is Etruscan and likely related to funerary rights or cooking. But it’s just 6 pots, a comb and some beads. The labelling is no better simply stating something like (Cooking Pot ~700BC). This is not helpful or useful. What is a visitor expected to do with this information? 

The short answer is that they can simply look at the pot. And perhaps if it is aesthetically pleasing they might take a photo. But that’s pretty much it. This problem is replicated across, basically most of a collection.

So how can we solve this? How can we make each item matter?

The simple yet difficult answer is to make a whole display around each individual item. I don’t think this is perhaps as crazy as it first sounds. If your items are just there to make up the numbers then why even have them at all? This naturally limits how many items you can display in a museum but focuses the mind on precisely what you're showing and why.

A more widespread possibility however is something like comparing groups of items. Rather than using a display that shows a bunch of Etruscan artifacts because they’re Etruscan instead we could show Italian pots over the course of the different people that lived there. Now using these items we’re showing a clear change over time and attendees are actively engaging with them as objects rather than simply looking at them.

The idea is simple in that for any given item on display an average punter should be able to quickly be able to identify exactly why that specific artifact has been chosen. Because there will be a reason, curators pour tons of effort into their choices and over the decades have sought out the best things they can.

Without its context the Rosetta Stone is just a rock and the Mona Lisa is just an old, kinda cracked painting. But that story is what leads literally hundreds of thousands of people a year to visit them.

An Etruscan Coin, the purpose of which will be revealed in the next section

By way of some example, one of the best museums I've ever been to was the (now sadly seemingly closed) Tallinn coin museum. It consisted of a single room with a set of drawers in the middle containing lots of different coins. The man running the place then asked me to pick a coin, any coin, and then told me a little tale about it. What it was, what were the circumstances around its creation and why it was important enough to be in his collection. In this way he made everything feel special.

There was no doubt a certain amount of sleight of hand here, perhaps there was a story or two for each drawer but the impression was clear. Each item had its place in the collection and I could know it by simply asking.

I don’t expect this idea to be done perfectly across every museum and item ever but I think when putting together an exhibit or assessing a collection we need to ask “Why is this object included, and can the visitors figure that out?”. 

 

*Left $16 Million, Middle £150, Right £15’000

 The best museum in the world (in my opinion, and from the perspective of a museum nerd) exists in Los Angeles behind a rather austere and unassuming facade. I was fortunate enough to visit it without really knowing what it was and with no expectations (and also after eating the best chicken i’ve ever had). I would recommend that you do the same if you can (the chicken was from Go Go Bird at the nearby Citizen Public Market). 

But given that popping over to America isn’t likely something to be done on a whim feel free to read on.

Image of the Front of The Museum of Jurassic Technology (Taken from Trip Advisor)

It was after a rather disastrous time working in the US a friend suggested that he’d come and visit and we could do a bit of a US tour. Doing a loop from San Francisco down to LA, across to Vegas and then back via Yosemite. Putting this trip together is actually where my spreadsheet and map system came from.

The Museum of Jurassic Technology was dutifully selected and honestly chosen for a visit because it had a cool name and was conveniently located on our way back from Santa Monica pier. Neither of us looked into it any more than that.

Stepping in through the rather dingy entrance and gift shop we then watched the introductory movie that was shown on a tiny black and white TV with a near incoherent narrator. I turned to my friend and asked “Have we come to another cult museum?”

What followed was a whirlwind of exhibits; one on a middle ranking American physicist and his affair with a moderately famous opera singer, a room of trailer art, the medieval bestiary staircase, the library with nothing but books about Napoleon, the portrait gallery of soviet cosmonaut dogs and so on and so on ending at the top with a Turkish garden complete with free tea and an aviary.

Both in the description here and in actuality it is a wild mess of a place where you don’t know what’s coming next that makes it an absolute delight.

A picture of the medieval bestiary staircase (Taken from Trip Advisor)

What this all means and what’s going on is much like a piece of art somewhat open to interpretation. However to me the central thrust is fairly simple. It’s a museum about museums. What museums are, how they function, and most importantly what we choose to display in them.

In the museum the question is asked “Why should we have a display on Victorian theatre equipment?” but rather “Why not?” which it then promptly does to the exact same standard as any exhibit in any good museum.

It’s asking very important questions that we rarely stop to consider. What are we displaying and why are we displaying it? I would expand on this idea but in many ways that is exactly what the rest of this blog and my continued work with museums is. This equally is the turning point where I really started to get into museum and museum design after seeing what they can be.

So, to that end I would encourage anyone who is going to be anywhere near to make the trip to see what a museum can be in order to consider what they could be.