I’ve worked for two years in the Museum of Natural History, and only after those two years have I begun to really understand museums. Sure, a museum is a tourist attraction, a hang-out spot, and for me, a lab to do research, but the reason for a museum’s existence, I gradually learned, is more enigmatic.
One would probably say the museum is an educational place, but having explored exhibits, and having worked with well-learned post-doctorates, I learned that much of the museum’s exhibits were outdated. This fact boggled me: if museums are educational institutes, why wouldn’t they spend more money on renewing old information in their exhibits? Why is even the Brain Exhibit, one of the newest, in the museum plagued with faulty information. The main reason for museums must be elsewhere.
I don’t think Museums are mainly research facilities either. Even though, there are scientists doing research in the back rooms of museums, most papers come from universities. The museum would never get the amount of money to fund that kind of research. So, what is a museum? It’s not an exact representation of the past, nor a full-time advocate for the facts of the future.
I find it to be a constructed world of reality and fiction, a world of its own. That’s what I believe a museum is. It takes aspects of the past and also the imaginations of the exhibit designers, to create a world for an audience to walk into and lose themselves in. It is not entirely true and life-scale, but why would the spectator want it to be? The act of imagination on the spectator’s part is half the job. The act of imagination, propels the feelings and beliefs aroused in the spectator, to influence and mold their future. It touches them. So in this way, the museum is a kind of novel, where only a restrictive form of expression is given (exhibits as words), where the reader must imagine. The museum is an advocate for a better world.
The International Center of Photography is not a museum I am familiar with, and words can only do so much to describe a center’s mission. But from what I’ve seen of the building (and the security guards when I visited) and the press releases, I can presume that the mission of ICP is to construct a place not only to preserve photography, but to perpetuate the beliefs of its artists. They had envisioned worlds, of better hope and peace and social justice, and captured them in photographic form; and the ICP, by putting these worlds on display, immortalize these artists and their beliefs, and insert them again into society which needs them.
The actual mission statement is here.
Great to hear you have had such experience in a museum context. That really can inform your definition. I appreciate what you said. In terms of ICP and its mission – you don’t have to create it–the museum has a mission statement. Please go to their website @ http://www.icp.org (there’s a link from the course eportfolio) and post it to your page. After yesterday’s visit do you feel the museum delivered what it states its mission is?
I actually did feel like the museum delivered. When I went into the room with the photographs submitted by anyone who wanted to, the room with the photographs hanging from the clips, I felt a renewed belief in photography: that even the shots by ordinary people could create a powerful effect on the audience. I especially empathized with a shot of a soldier (whose name tag said James, I think) crying and saluting at the same time). I teared up a little bit too. ICP is definitely instigating social change, because it certainly made 9/11 more real to me. It is also delivering new technologies; as I had never seen such a projector-style presentation before; and it is most definitely a mecca for aesthetic expression. I thought the Harper’s Bazaar shots were gorgeous.