A New Post

In Kreps’ article, they speak of a shift in the “goals” of museums. It talks about how they, both the museums and curators, are no longer focusing on collecting objects for the sake of having a collection to display, but are focusing on striving for more of an educational role, and using said objects to reach that goal. Most of the focus in the article is on how the role of the curator is changing with the times. On how the work of a curator is seen as a social-practice, and how that work changes as the relation between objects and humans changes. It’s also interesting that they note how if curating is a social practice, then it follows that curatorship in different societies is unique.

The current ‘state of operations’ for museums that the article is arguing for a departure from involves decontextualizing of objects. Museums currently take objects from their social settings and decontextualize them, or give them a new meaning outside of their initial one, inside of the museum context. They argue against this act, because it creates a disconnect between the people and the object - it is only understood as a “special artifact” and not in the correct context. Also, another point they bring up that is really important to me is that this neglects the cultures it takes from at the least, and at the most, it disrespects them. This change is good because it’s important that the museums give the necessary respect to the cultures they are using to profit.

The Macalik article goes into slightly more detail on what these museums should be moving towards - Discursive Spaces, being “spaces that foster negotiation and debate, polarize and politicize space, and invite discussion fraught with contradictory views.” The main focus of this article, is about how museums (and curators) ought to be more fluid with their purpose than they currently are, by transforming themselves from an object display house, to a more discursive space. They also made the point that in order for the conference on this topic they had to have relevance, they must have relevance not only to the museum community and other curators, but to the users that populate them as well - a great point. However, I’m not really sure that the current mode of being for museums doesn’t take relevance to users into account - each museum has it’s own category / niche (museum of fine art, museum of science) and users know what they’re getting themselves into when they go to these.

There was a portion of the article that mentioned a change of referring to those who frequent the museums from visitor to user. At first I didn’t really understand how changing the syntax of the same entity from visitor to user changed anything about the actual practice. Curators can still dictate how materials are perceived by guests, regardless of whether we say they’re using or visiting the museum. however, reading further I understood what they meant.

A problem I had while reading these articles is that while I think it is a very interesting movement to provide a more personalized experience for each user that curators have less of an absolute say in, they don’t really go into detail on what exactly that means. It’s easy to make the connection that augmented spaces from out previous discussions can be a good way to implement these values - but what exactly would the content of these new museums be? They don’t give any concrete ideas as to what these experiences would be, and while they make a convincing argument, I don’t really know where to go from there.

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