The question of the role of a museum and the role of a curator highlights an idea we have discussed extensively: given data (in this case, museum objects), tell a story. Kreps comments on how the specific role that a museum plays has changed over time from one of simply presenting collections of objects and information without commentary to telling a narrative with these collections. This transistion parallels the commentary on the role of the library as an institution. Previously, the goals of a museum and a library were similarly making information available to the public (although the museum’s information is curated and the library’s is not). With the availability of technology to allow people to access nearly any information electronically, these roles have had to shift. The museum’s focus must also be on its “users” as Kreps calls them. In particular, as captialism has extended its influence to museums, the users now carry even more power in their ability to provide funding for a museum.

This power can be taken to an extreme. The Museum of Ice Cream, and other pop-up museums like it, exhibit the extreme of focusing on making a museum an “experience” for the user, ignoring the importance of anything else. These provide their visitors with a visually enticing Instagrammable location, but do not provide the visitor with any new information. Arguably, they do not even achieve their goal of making an experience, as there is no story behind oversized plastic popsicles; it solely exists as a “pleasing” image. museum of ice cream.jpg

This is where Jana Macalik’s discussion of making a museum a discursive space is important. Kreps touches upon this, as the role of the curator can be to counter the users’ traditional beliefs. The Enemy at the MIT museum was clearly a good example of this, but as this was already discussed in class, I can comment on another exhibit at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago called Extreme Ice. This exhibit shows photos and videos taken at the poles over the past ten years as a dramatic visual representation of climate change. Its clear intention is to serve as a call to action, and to influence people to care more about this pressing issue facing us. This is explicitly stated a number of times throughout the exhibit. By creating this exhibit, the museum hopes to exert real change to an existing problem by spreading awareness about it. The exhibit is perhaps a more specific example of a discursive space, as it is less about starting a discussion and more about increasing awareness. extreme%20ice%202.jpg