What is Museum Studies? Scholars visit museums to study collections and objects. Tourists come to see the wonders of civilizations and enjoy a museum day-out. Parties of school children doing the Egyptians come to see the real thing: the mummies. We may study at museums just as we may read a book in a library. But what of museums themselves? Why do we have them? What is their function? In writing this book I have tried to explain why museums should be studied and show that they are to be studied for what they are, museums. I’ve had several different readers in mind: (i) students enrolled on college and university museum programmes of study that have burgeoned since the turn of the century; (ii) students in higher education whose programmes of study may touch on museums and (iii) a more general readership that includes museum visitors (and even non-visitors) looking to know more and perhaps wishing to think about museum for themselves.
The expansion of the museum world during the last few decades has transformed museum work. The job has never been and never will be plain sailing. Indeed, Museum Studies is, amongst other things, about preparing students for what the world will throw at them. But today there are more and more fingers poking around in the pie. Sponsors will want to know what it is that they are sponsoring and who will visit. Outreach work aimed at social deprivation may be a condition attached to funding. Meanwhile the next exhibition is always on the stocks. There is due diligence; directors and trustees will need to know that the gifts they accept are not ill-gotten gains. There may be calls for repatriation that complicate matters of provenance. New media beckon and curators and visitors wonder what to make of the digital objects of the metaverse. And the very definition of museum may be in contention: what are museums for and who do they serve?
It’s no wonder then that some museums are complex organizations. Museum studies is about the workplace skills, including those of collaboration with other experts: the administrators, market researchers, lawyers, personnel managers, book editors, caterers and others, who together keep the show on the road. It is also a matter of preparation for working lives in a world where everything is on the move. It must be interdisciplinary training for museum work requires critical appreciation of other people’s expertise. Curators must of course know and interpret the objects that belong to their discipline. They must also know their visitors and what they make of their visiting. Museum work has taken a decidedly social turn, for example in the form of visitor and community studies. For that reason, I’ve tried to show the provenance of the ideas, the concepts and the methods that are derived from the social sciences.
Why is Museum Studies taught in universities? It is because museum work requires critical reflection on what is to be done. Museums are in their own way places of experiment which inform both practice and theory. How do visitors, resolve their sensuous experience of things into their knowledge of objects? How does that experience come to be expressed as curiosity, wonder and knowledge? I see a two-way street when it comes to practice and academia. Indeed, much of the writing that populates the field emanates from university researchers such as historians, social scientists, psychologists and philosophers. It does so for the good reason that museums can be prisms through which we see the problems of our world in the making. Psychologists may arrive at the museum with an interest in learning, economists in cultural economics, sociologists in inequality, cultural historians in the history of science. At the same time different disciplines in bringing their perspectives to museum problems may discover something new about themselves.
So, only connect! I’ve tried to show that the practical problems can take us to things that concern our very nature as symbolic animals. Museums are among the places where objectivity turns out to have a history. We may discover that the epistemological problems of intellectuals are also the troubles of the multitudes who come to see how artists, historians and scientists have interpreted the world. Museum displays, like languages, are a means of orientation. Think of reading and writing. The cognitive powers and the fantasies of a reader are the distributed powers of the bookish person. Reading transforms the imagination. So too with museums. Visitor studies, the leading edge of museum studies, is something more than the study of what individuals experience. It’s about relationships among visitors and between visitors and curators in their companionship with objects. In conducting visitor research, we may learn something about our very nature as animals who in making their way in the world depend on symbols. What interests me is the museum’s role in mediating between the inner space of the sensorium and the outer spaces of society and nature. I’ve tried to show that ‘museum’ as a figure of speech for outdated dusty old ideas is well past its sell by date.
Gordon Fyfe 