[BLOG POST 9/22/24] After my "Rattlesnake" show opening I took some time off and as a result I've had lots of things wandering through my mind. This post will look at one of those wandering thoughts – the story behind why we have museums.
Visiting museums was a big part of my upbringing, my mom and my grandmother both made a point of taking us to see them whenever we went anywhere. They were bastions of information, education, research, beauty, and preservation plus they showcased collections featuring the best of the best of the best. I thought that if any item in a museum was SPECIAL and IMPORTANT.
Secretly I have dreamed of my paintings someday ending up in one.
Until recently.
Why? Because I learned that museums, generally speaking, date back to the 1700's when the wealthy European elite class started "Cabinets of Curiosities"or collections of interesting or odd items to show off to their friends.
Dear reader don't make the mistake that I did and image it was an actual cabinet with full of objects. Instead they were rooms filled with items ranging from natural history, geology, archaeology, religious or historical relics, artwork, and antiques.
I don't know about you but the image above makes the "cabinet" look like a hoarder's room full of weird things that no one cares about except them. Another thought that crosses my mind is that they seem like an early version of sitting through your neighbor's vacation slide show.
Anyway, the Smithsonian magazine has a very interesting article about the history of cabinets how they laid the groundwork for today's museums aptly titled: "How Cabinets of Curiosities Laid the Foundation for Modern Museums."
Here are some interesting tidbits from that article:
As their name suggests, cabinets of curiosities aimed to capture and define new knowledge of the world, prizing anything rare, unusual or unique. In 1565, Belgian physician Samuel Quiccheberg’s treatise on collecting expressed the cabinet’s ambitious aims, describing it as “a theater of the broadest scope, containing authentic materials and precise reproductions of the whole of the universe.”
The treatise also emphasized the importance of display and order. Collectors imposed their own systems and hierarchies on the art, antiques, plants and animals within their cabinets in an attempt to create an encyclopedic framework of the world’s knowledge. Many valuable items came from distant places in rapidly expanding global trade networks; they represented both the limits of collectors’ knowledge of the world and the colonial dispossession of each source.
Before cabinets of curiosities, European collecting was largely religious or royal, from the treasuries of the Catholic Church to the collections of Burgundian courts. Increased travel and trade networks fed directly into cabinets, including those created by the rising merchant class. Meadow points out that the displays were not “simply places of extravagant wealth and strange, weird things,” but served practical research purposes, too.
Early cabinets would also have been viewed only in guided tours provided by the collector or staff.
Seventeenth-century cabinets of curiosities explain “the beginning of how museums and collecting [become] tied up with, and in the service of, colonial agendas,” Zumaya says. In the 18th century, the Enlightenment era’s continued pursuit of knowledge ushered in an increased division of the arts from natural sciences, and the reorganization of knowledge and object hierarchies in collections followed. But artifacts continued to be sourced from colonized countries and with exploitative wealth. The most extensive cabinets provided the kernel for new institutions, such as Hans Sloane’s collection, which shaped the British Museum, the London Natural History Museum and the British Library.
Modern museums thereby inherited the concept of the global, comprehensive collection—purchased and looted treasures of the world—from cabinets of curiosities.
Sigh
So museums are another example of the white patriarchy: large buildings filled with things that a wealthy European, probably male, viewed, judged, categorized, and decided was interesting and/or good.
There is a whole world out there of other things that are interesting to people from other backgrounds that are not included in our museums. Gratefully museums (and galleries) are starting to take responsibility for their history and expand their thinking and their exhibits.
Overall I do think it is helpful to keep items from the past and the present for the future and where else can you do that than in a museum?
However, Malcom Gladwell points out in his podcast, "Dragon Psychology 101", museums only display a very small percentage of their collections. He notes, "During his tenure running the Met (between 1977 to 2008), Phillipe de Montebello acquired 84,000 objects, the overwhelming majority of which were packed away in boxes and sent to storage in New Jersey, never to be seen again."
Later in the story Malcom Gladwell references a 1991 court hearing about the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC where the director stated, "We have a new curator of Islamic art. Been with us for a couple of years now. We have certainly the greatest collection of Islamic rugs in the Western Hemisphere, one of the two or three in the world. He has never been able to even see that collection because so much of it is in storage and is so difficult to get out so costly and time consuming that he knows by the records what they are."
So our museums have more than they can show or even see themselves.
So what is a solution? Dream big with me for a moment...
Maybe with all our virtual reality technology we make digital scans of all the items currently in museum collections and then make those scans available to anyone around the world to view in 3D with VR. And then we can return the physical items to where they came from originally.
Now dream even bigger...how about we put that same VR technology in the hands of everyone around the world so anyone who is interested can scan, document, preserve, and share any item they deem important. We'd need a massive database but the collection would be far more democratic than it is now.
Google Arts and Culture is already doing some of that work albeit with photos of artwork in museums and not scans.
Of course no matter what our technology becomes it cannot replace interacting with items using all our senses. This means my idea isn't perfect but maybe it is better than what we have now.
What do you think? Drop me a comment and let me know. 😊
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