Origins of Modern Museum - Essay Example

Origins of Modern Museum Introduction The word museum comes from the Greek word mouseion. In ancient Greece, the mouseion was the temple of the Muses, the goddesses of arts and sciences. In the 200's B.C., the word was used for a library and research area in Alexandria, Egypt. Museum is a place where a collection of objects illustrating science, art, history, or other subjects is kept and displayed. At various museums, visitors can learn how people lived and worked in early times, what makes a work of art a masterpiece, or how electricity works. Some people also consider the term museum to apply to such educational institutions as planetariums, botanical gardens, zoos, nature centers, and even libraries.1 A museum collects, cares for, and researches the objects it displays. It also keeps a study collection of un-displayed objects. These objects are sometimes called artifacts and are often studied by students and researchers. Kinds of Museums There are three main kinds of museums: 1. Art Museums, 2. History Museums, 3. Science Museums. 2 Art Museums These Museums preserve and exhibit paintings, sculpture, and other works of art. The collections of some art museums include work from many periods. Famous museums of this type include the Louvre in Paris and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Some museums specialize in artworks of one period. For example, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City displays works created since the late 1800's. Other museums exhibit only one type of art. The Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe, New Mexico, for example, specializes in folk art from around the world. Many art museums also have special exhibits. They borrow works of art from individuals or other museums for such exhibits, which usually last several weeks.3 History Museums They illustrate the life and events of the past. Their collections include documents, furniture, tools, and other materials. Many cities and states have historical societies that operate history museums. Most of these museums have exhibits on local history.4 Other types of history museums include living history museums. Museums of this type include living history farms, historic houses, and historic villages. These museums show how people lived or worked during a certain period. On living history farms, workers demonstrate how crops were planted and harvested in earlier times. Historic houses, such as Mount Vernon, George Washington's home near Alexandria, Virginia, have been restored to their original condition and are open to the public. Williamsburg, a historic village in Virginia, has restored and reconstructed buildings that date from the 1700's. In this village, costumed interpreters demonstrate how early colonists performed such tasks as cooking, making shoes, and printing newspapers.5 Science Museums Such museums have exhibits on the natural sciences and technology. Museums of natural history exhibit displays of animals, fossils, plants, rocks, and other objects and organisms found in nature. Most of them, including the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., have exhibits on ecology and the evolution of human beings. Many museums of natural history have special exhibits on dinosaurs and other topics.6 History and Origin of Museums Early Stage of Museums The modern public art museum owes its origins to the systematic ordering of objects that resulted from Enlightenment efforts to classify and make accessible various branches of human knowledge. The art museum's foundation, however, reflects a more fundamental attitude in Western culture, the tendency of separating certain artifacts from others to give those artifacts special reverence, especially for their aesthetic value.7 The Greek word mouseion was originally applied to a sanctuary dedicated to the muses of Greek mythology. While it soon became known as a place of learning, it did not specifically define a collection of works of art. It may not be surprising, given this etymology, that an ever-present issue in modern museum practice is the degree to which art museums should be dedicated to the preservation, protection, and exhibition of a culture's artistic heritage and the degree to which they should serve as centers of scholarly research or as instruments of popular education. While it appears that paintings could be viewed by the public in a hall called the pinakotheke on the Acropolis in Athens, the notion of a public collection of art seems not to have existed in ancient Greece. Roman military leaders and aristocrats were the first to associate status, power, and learning with a personal collection of objects, usually plundered works brought back from Greece and Asia. There seems to have been political pressure on owners of certain collections to open their houses to the public on occasion, but public museums as they are known today were never established in the ancient world.8 Museums during Medieval Age In medieval times, churches represented a kind of museum, in that splendiferous objects of ecclesiastical significance were often brought together in treasuries and displayed at special times. During the Renaissance small printed and illustrated catalogs of certain churches' relics ere even produced.9 It was in the Renaissance that the early Roman practice of establishing private collections of objects was reintroduced, in this case brought together by both the landed nobility and a new merchant bourgeoisie. Called museo, studiolo, or scrittijo in Italy and kunstkammer or cabinet de curiosité north of the Alps, such a collection of wonders of both natural and human creation was assembled to represent an owner's intellectual and worldly accomplishments and to impress visitors through the quantity and cost, as well as the rarity of and intellectual achievement represented by the objects on view. The classification and ordering systems of these pre-Enlightenment collections, where art, science, and nature merged, anticipated those of the modern museum. It is here, too, where the later public-collection's teaching function has its modern roots. In the mid-16th-century kunstkammer of Augustus of Saxony, areas were provided for the king's craftsmen to use the collection's tools or to copy its objects. The larger and more aesthetically conceived collection of Rudolph II occasionally functioned as a teaching resource.10 In the 1620s the curiosity cabinet of the learned Englishman John Tradescant (which became the founding collection of Oxford University's Ashmolean Museum) could be viewed for a sixpence fee. It was presented, according to its catalog, both "to honour the nation" and "benefit righteous persons" who might want to imitate the works on display. (These two purposes cited from Tradescant's relatively modest and highly personal venture became the goals driving the establishment of public museums throughout Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries.11 While the application of classification and ordering systems were standardized during this period, governments and learned societies, as well as associations of private individuals, encouraged the founding of publicly accessible art museums both to bolster national or civic status and pride and to direct the political, cultural, and aesthetic education of the people. The establishment of the Louvre in the wake of the French Revolution was the most portentous of these institutional acts. Through the publicly accessible installation of the French royal collections, and, later, of Napoleon's spoils of war that represented contemporary ideas regarding the progressive development of national schools of painting in early European artistic centers, the precedent of a nationally specific, linear evolution of the history of art became a firmly established mode of presentation in Western museology. By promoting the French tradition in art and the imperial ambitions of Napoleon's hoarding, the early Louvre also reflects the nationalistic focus of French cultural enterprise established during the age of Louis XIV. This is still characteristic of French arts institutions, some 300 years later.12 In adapting the public museum model to specific national conditions over the last 200 years, every country has altered the Western art museum model in societal specific ways. This is true despite the cross-fertilization and internationalization of much late 20th-century museum practice. Few if any Western countries in the 1980s and 1990s devoted as large a proportion of their national resources to cultural activities as did France. Given the critical tradition of Winckelmann in Germany and the influence of Hegel not only in early German art history and criticism but also in museum conception and installation, a decidedly intellectual and aesthetic focus in German museum programming can be discerned, even today.13 Museums in Great Britain The public museum tradition in Great Britain, beginning with Tradescant's museum, continued to be spurred by the opportunity of making private collections public. In 1753 Sir Hans Sloane bequeathed to the English nation his collections, which, along with the important collections of other individuals, established the British Museum. Even England's National Gallery, intended to imitate continental galleries of paintings created from royal and princely collections, was founded because private individuals pressured the government to purchase the picture collection of the noted merchant, philanthropist, and art connoisseur John Julius Angerstein in 1824.14 The tie linking government action with citizen interest in the Anglo-American museum enterprise was given special commercial as well as educational purpose in the establishment of the South Kensington (later, Victoria and Albert) Museum in the 1850s. Not only would the South Kensington inspire a vast number of applied arts museums throughout continental Europe, but the example it set of practical education to enhance economic enterprise was also used by museum advocates in the United States to spark the interest of entrepreneurs and civic leaders in establishing art museums in North America.15 American Museums The expressed purpose of the innumerable American museums founded in the half-century following the 1870 chartering of both the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York16 City and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston usually integrated the moral value of aesthetic experience with artistic training. By the early 20th century, large American museums increasingly were emphasizing the enhancement of the size and quality of their art holdings as they focused on the aesthetic nature and scholarly function of their institution. This reflected an international trend, the most prominent spokesperson of which, Wilhelm von Bode, also promoted museum installations that would mix media to reflect earlier, often princely contexts, encouraging greater public interest in museums, since it furthered their goals of cultural education. Bode's work, as realized in 1904 in Berlin's Kaiser Friedrich Museum (renamed the Bodemuseum), along with the example of confident scholarship and connoisseurship he set, created the professional standard that museum directors and senior personnel maintained for much of the 20th century. Only since the 1970s, with a change in direction of art museums to more entrepreneurial practices and publicly focused programs, this tradition has been nearly eliminated. While it is an evolution that began in America, it was quickly copied and refined in Europe. All large museums function today with a stronger eye to the wide public appeal and economic viability of programs, particularly temporary ones such as large-scale exhibitions, than at any other time in their history.17 It should be added that large, historically based art museums with extensive public mandates (usually civic or government-supported museums reflective of broad, often conservative standards of taste) have frequently and unwittingly spawned smaller institutions as a special genre of alternative museum enterprise. The private collection as house museum is the oldest and most common of such museums. At their best—for example, the Frick Collection and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in the United States, the Wallace Collection in England, and the Museo Poldi Pezzoli in Italy—these institutions attract broad respect and positive public reaction. In addition, artists and advocates of contemporary art have often, and justifiably, felt unwelcome at large, historically based museums. This, combined with the special needs in displaying and promoting contemporary work, has generated specialized modern-art museums such as the Stedelijk in Amsterdam and the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. These museums have not only catalyzed many imitators, they have also inspired a wide variety of other institutions, among them the kunsthalle, or specialized temporary exhibition gallery with no permanent collection.18 Museums at Present Public interest in museums grew during the late 1900's. Such events as the American Bicentennial Celebration in 1976 helped raise interest in cultural activities. Museums also offered exhibits that appealed to the interests of large numbers of people rather than the special needs of scholars. In the 1990's, many museums began using the Internet, a vast network of computers, to exhibit materials to a worldwide audience. Using World Wide Web pages, many museums allow people to view art and artifacts on their home computers. The Internet has also helped museum workers acquire materials, conduct research, and obtain funding.19 Many museums have become involved in disputes with national governments over the ownership of artworks and artifacts. Some governments have called for the return of items that may have been stolen from their original owners or removed illegally from their country of origin. As a result, many museums have examined the provenance (ownership history) of items in their collection and have returned some items to their countries of origin. Museum operations are funded by several sources. These sources include foundations and corporations; national, local, and state governments; and individuals. Some museums charge admission and sell reproductions or gifts relating to their exhibits. Some offer food services, movies, or concerts for a fee. Museums also may earn money by selling duplicate or less desirable items from their collections.20 References Cato, Paisley S. Clyde, Jones, Natural History Museums: Directions for Growth. Mountain-Plains Museums Association, Midwest Museums Conference, Texas Tech University Press. Errington, Sharyn. Honeyman, Brenton. Stocklmeyer, Susan M. 2001. Using Museums to Popularize Science and Technology, Commonwealth Secretariat. Falk, John H. & Dierking, Lynn D. 1992. The Museum Experience, Howells House. Geisel, Roseanne W. 2009. Take in Some Culture at the Art Museum, Business Insurance, Chicago, Vol. 43, Iss. 13; pg. 22, 1 pgs Huntley, Dana. 2008. The American Museum in Britain. British Heritage; Vol. 29 Issue 4, p19-21, 3p Jackson, Virginia, Jackson, Ann S., & Connelly, James L. 1987. Art Museums of the World, Greenwood Press. Lee, Paula Young. 1997. The Museum of Alexandria and the Formation of the Museum in Eighteenth-Century France, Art Bulletin; Sep97, Vol. 79 Issue 3, p385, 28p. Lee, Schweninger. 2009. "Lost and Lonesome": Literary Reflections on Museums and the Roles of Relics. American Indian Quarterly; Vol. 33 Issue 2, p169-199, 31p Membery,York. 2008. Rough Crossings, New Statesmen, London, Vol. 137, Iss. 4925; pg. 56, 2 pgs Munson, Lynne. 1997. The New Museology, the Public Interest, pp. 60-70. Museums. 2008. Ornament; Vol. 31 Issue 3, p26-27, 4p. Perkins, Jasper. 2009. Arts around the World, Financial Times, London Roy, Dilip Kumar, 2006. Museology: Some Cute Points, Gyan Books. The Museums Journal. 1994. Museums Association, Item notes: v. 94, Original from the University of Michigan Read More