The
transaction of Culture
This week’s readings struck a chord inside me as an
artist. I have been to innumerable museums, different in so many ways from
each other – some small, some famous, some with fine arts, some with
installation art, some historical, some not much different than a junkyard. I
should preface this whole blog with the fact that I LOVE going to museums. I
love the anticipation of seeing an exhibit with rave reviews. I love meandering
aimlessly after seeing the exhibit and stumbling upon amazing pieces I was
never expecting to see that day. I even love the hour I always spend in the
gift shop pretending I’m going to further culture myself by buying books upon
books of breathtaking art…until I see the breathtaking price tag. This is important to say because I am clearly
bias to the experience of going to the museum.
After taking in all the readings, I realized I had
amassed a giant list of questions, which could all be summed up in one: What
makes a museum?
A museum can be described as a multi- media platform on which different
medial practices can be combined: an exhibition works with objects, but
increasingly also with texts, images and audiovisual representations in a
spatial arrangement. The museum is based on a loose association of these medial
practices which are sometimes used to comment on each other, sometimes layered
next to or on top of each other. - Silke
Arnold-de Simine
I love and hate the vagueness of this description.
It is free enough to be all-inclusive, but is it not giving enough credit to
the value of presentation? It alludes to the necessity of special arrangement,
but without any guidelines. So does this mean every hoarder’s dream of a
backyard semi-trailer filled with “objects” is a museum?
I do think there are some clear differences between
the Louvre and a semi full of junk:
1)
MONEY. Museums are made with money, by money, for
money. Although it is a less romantic view, it’s true – In the article about
re-designing the PEM it was made blatantly clear that the design was very much
impacted by ‘the client’ funding the project. On the other side of that
transaction of culture is the gift shop. Museums are an experience and the gift
shop is a way to extend that experience to the privacy of home. It’s also a way
for the museum to make money, but at this point, I feel like it is part of the
transaction of culture.
2) CONTEXT.
What if the museum is in the suburbs? What if it’s in the city? What if a
STarchitect has signed on to build the project? What if the critic, whose writing is the
defining criticism of the museum, going to be read around the world, knows the
architect personally? What if the building were funded by the government?
Funded privately? Furthermore what if that private entity just so happens to
carry a brand in itself? I could keep on going, as I’m sure anyone reading this
could as well, but the point is, context changes our preconceptions of a place.
Even before we get there, we’ve made a decision about it based entirely on
second-hand experience.
3)
AUDIENCE. If there are no people, isn’t it just a
time capsule?
4)
COMPETITION. A museum is immediately in competition
with all other museums, especially those that share a common characteristic,
and therefore can be judged against one another (i.e. – geographic location,
similar subject matters, competing architects?) As stated in the readings,
museums are in a race to be the weirdest, the most bizarre, the most
intriguing. This ties in with the expectation of a museum to be a tourism
mechanism. The city wants a flashy museum so people are attracted to it, and
want to come and pay to see the
flashy museum.
Do I think that a mastery of all the above criteria
“make” a museum? Absolutely not. I think to some degree a museum needs to be
aware of each of these attributes. I think Sarah said it best in her blog when
she wrote,
“I would
say it should be whatever purpose it is trying to fulfill…Just like there isn’t
one right way to do art or to experience it, there cannot be one prescribed
method to what a museum should be”.
If
I were to amend that comment the only thing I would add is that some methods
are better than others, and it takes a thoughtful group of people (not just an
architect) to figure out what that method is.
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