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
No comments:
Post a Comment