What is the point of a museum? In part, it is to preserve, document and research its subject. But, it also has a duty to educate and inform the public. Or does it? And at what price?
Education in so many museums (in the UK at least) is often seen as the most important function of the museum. It may not be explicitly stated as such, but in this author’s experience many small and medium-sized museums will devote an enormous amount of effort to education and outreach work, whilst the bare minimum is devoted to research and conservation. Some of this work is of course hugely valued and important, witness the Petrie Museum of Egyptology’s efforts to reach out to the Arabic communities in London. However, in other cases we really should learn to question the success of our museums’ attempts to engage with their day-to-day visiting public.
Recently, I was able to visit the Vatican Museums, notorious for the huge number of visitors which pass through their halls each day. As I processed behind these hordes, (all doing the ‘museum shuffle’) and into the Pinacoteca, I became increasingly frustrated at the attitude of the visitors. Nobody seemed to be interested in the exhibits! There was excited chatter about their friends and families back home, their dinner plans, shopping and a myriad of other subjects, all to the complete exclusion of the artworks. The few who were looking, did so only to take a quick snap and to move on. The actual number of visitors who truly made an effort to read and contemplate the artworks, and perhaps to be moved by them, was minuscule.
So, OK, maybe I am being a bit of a culture snob here; perhaps it’s not the quality of the experience that matters, but the fact that one experiences it at all. Or perhaps not. What was very clear though was that the Vatican was signally failing in its duty to engage the public with its collections. The overwhelming majority of the visitors could not care less about what they were (or were not) looking at, and as I talked informally to a few of them later, most could not recall more than two or three of the thousands of objects they had been looking at a few hours earlier.
Perhaps this is even more evident at that other hugely crowded site – Pompeii. How many of the visitors ever bother to think about the site (other than to look for the gruesome bits), for most it seems that these sorts of locations form the backdrop for an afternoon’s stroll, a bit like a public park. I do, however, have to exclude one group from this comment, that of children under 10. These visitors always seem to make the most of their visits and its my firm contention that if you want to understand an archaeological site, watch the kids as they will be the ones exploring and trying to figure things out!
So perhaps, we need to play Devil’s Advocate here (and there’s nowhere better to do that than at the Vatican!). If museums are failing in their duty to inform and educate their general visitors then should they be open at all? The costs of opening a museum to the public are enormous and few museums can possibly profit financially from the exercise. If we combine this with the inevitable damage that must result from the hordes of sweaty bodies passing though each day, then we have to conclude that these precious artworks are being placed at risk for little or no real benefit. For too long museums have counted their success by the quantity of visits rather than their quality.
A simple, yet provocative, question must be posed: is the risk and the cost of large-scale general admission really worth it?
Now, I’m not for a moment suggesting that we should return to Renaissance or Victorian times with private, closed collections. Everyone should have the right to view these works, especially if the museum is state-funded. The question is whether museums can continue to support general admission? Perhaps, as is increasingly the case in Italy, admission should be by prior appointment?
Or … maybe, the flip side of the coin should be embraced. If closing museums is politically impossible, (and of course it is), then perhaps museums need to find better ways to engage with the general public. And here I’m not talking about electronic ‘resources’, audio-guides, websites and other new media, all of which consume enormous amounts of money, and are for the most part more a demonstration of the museum-director’s vanity and desire for career-promotion, than a true attempt to inform and educate.
So what would I like to see? Well, I think the museum profession firstly needs to get itself out of this costly obsession with digital resources. IT is of course vital for the day to day management of a cultural resource, but the return on investment of so many of these hugely expensive websites and digital resources is minuscule. For example, huge sums were spent developing the ludicrous Museo Archeologico Virtuale at Herculaneum, yet when I visited, this enormous barn of a building had just seven people in it – and four of them were staff! What a waste of money!
How much better could money be spent engaging real people, true communicators, people who could convey a passion for their museum or site. Imagine how effective half-a-dozen informal ‘explainers’ could be at Herculaneum or Pompeii (though not perhaps the Vatican). I’m not talking here about formal tours, or the miserable, sour-looking guards who loiter on every corner, but real history-lovers, people who might hang around in interesting places and engage the public. Perhaps they could join visitors while they have their picnics and chat with them – it’s these kind of personal interactions that people enjoy and which could truly make a visit to such a site something to remember. What the heritage industry needs above all, is something which we all thought it had in abundance: a sense of imagination!
