Anthro 349, Opinion Article
24 March 1999
In Curator 37/1, Charles Watkins writes his answer to the question posed by Wilcomb Washington: are museums still necessary? Watkins seems to think that in order to postulate an answer to this question, a museum must have a strict, black and white definition. As Lisa Roberts states in her rebuttal in Curator 37/3, his complaint is that “museums have strayed from their mission, and it is time that somebody rein them in.” But who defines their mission? Is it to claim that museums have a collective mission which is so specific it is even possible that they can stray from it? It is my contention that a definite, set-in-stone mission which could apply to all museums as a collective institution, would in fact negate our conception of a museum, and redefine all such institutions, placing them in such categories as shops, schools, and entertainment for the sake of entertainment.
If the basic goal of a museum is education through objects, then every museum that ever existed fulfills their mission. Education is a broad term, and when applied to museums it is generally understood that its meaning is ‘higher’ or formal learning. But this excludes the validity of recreational, informal learning. Museums that use such activities, generally for children, as petting zoos, electricity machines, and suchlike, are not considered by the museum ‘connoisseur’ as true museums. They are play places, substituting thrills for learning. When did learning and fun become such separate and opposite ideas that it is impossible for us to conceptualize an activity that is both educational and fun? Even those who realize they are not necessarily mutually exclusive ideas will, under the guise of connoisseurship, still feel they must draw a line in the sand of when fun is educational and when fun is just fun. But who has the authority to define what is fun? If a child notices when touching a shark that it’s scales are rough, did he not learn something while enjoying himself looking at the pretty fish? Perhaps he is unaware of the reasons behind the texture of the shark’s skin, but he has gained a piece of information he did not have before, and that is what learning is all about.
Learning takes place at different levels for everyone. The Smithsonian, especially in areas of high children traffic such as the Natural History Museum, has exhibits labeled at different levels of comprehension, so a child can understand at least a little of what he is looking at, but so too can his mother read the more in-depth and sophisticated text on the exhibit’s sign and learn something herself. Each visitor, no matter how hard the museum staff tries to give an equal experience to all visitors, will take away their own individual perception. The best a museum staff can hope to do is facilitate this by giving information at varying levels, to provide something for everyone from the novice to the expert.
The next argument stemming from the discussion of whether a museum is entertainment or education is whether a museum can ethically use ‘bells and whistles’ to draw in visitors. A theme park may build a new roller coaster that is clearly only an attention-getter (why else would we title them such as ‘Terror Mountain’ and ‘The Scream’?) without drawing any criticism from its fellows, but if a natural history museum builds a new exhibit such as an IMAX theater, its colleagues cry traitor and blame it for catering to the unintellectual masses. It is this snobbery which makes museums not user-friendly and which creates the problem of not enough revenue from visitors in the first place. Watkins rationalizes this attitude by claiming that with “random thrill show(s)”, no real learning is taking place. Roberts asserts that he misunderstands the nature of informal learning, which I agree with as mentioned above.
If museums must only be education and never entertainment, and they cannot use bells and whistles to draw “laymen”, then the only people they are educating is themselves and their peers, which is not true education at all. It negates the point of a museum in the first place. If this is the only function a museum may have, then the answer to Wilcomb Washburn’s question is no, museums are no longer necessary.