Friday, February 5th, 2010
by Ken Yellis
There are an estimated 17,500 museums in the United States. If people think these institutions are pretty much the same once you get inside or that the differences between them are unimportant, it might be hard to persuade them that all 17,500 are needed. Exhibitions can have great transformational power; why don’t they exercise that power more often? Have museums not fully understood exhibitions as a medium? Have we not devoted enough attention to the full repertoire of visitor feelings? Have visitors been telling us this and we have failed to listen? For many people, museums play many roles in their lives; for most others few or none. How can this be? ‘‘Museum-adept’’ visitors seem to prize museums as theaters in which their own emotional and spiritual journeys can be staged, but what about the non-museum-adept? Can the museum-adept teach us how to realize our medium’s full potential?
Tags: emotion, emotional, feeling, Ken Yellis, museum, museum-adept, non-museum-adept, performance, spiritual, theater, United States, US, visual
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Friday, February 5th, 2010
by Elaine Heumann Gurian
In this paper, I suggest that museums have not explored their potential opportunities enough when dealing with their communities under stressful conditions. Each reader, however, should decide when what I am talking about is no longer appropriate for museums in general or your museum in particular. While some museums have moved more in the direction of serving their communities, I am struck by how little philosophical change has actually taken place in most museums after a year into this universal economic downturn. I argue that incorporating a broader palette of social services may make institutions more useful, but at some point these institutions might cease to be traditional museums. My question would be: ‘‘Should you care?’’ I do not suggest that all museums become full-service community centers, though somemight explore that option. Perhaps the question might become: How do we expand our services so that we make museums’ important physical assets of safe civic space and objects useful for tangible three-dimensional learning into more relevant programs that reach all levels of community, and are rated by many more as essential to their needs and their aspirations for their children?
Tags: audiences, children, civic, community, economy, education, Elaine Heumann Gurian, learning, museum, outreach, recession, social services, soup kitchen
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