Jane Verdel 3/2/12 E6X-02 (03, 07) Period 9 Money and Education in a Museum Picture yourself standing in the Museum of Natural History, observing the various amounts of artifacts around you. These artifacts could include anything from stone tools to anchors, cooking utensils to dinosaur bones. You are faced with many questions, such as: How were they created? Where were they found? But one question you probably do not have in your mind is why these artifacts are in the museum in the first place. Is it their profitability? Is it their educational aspect? When securing a new work of art or artifact for a museum, one does not realize how much thought it takes for a person to make a selection. In order to make this selection a person usually makes a decision upon these questions. Sources B, C, E, and D prove that the most successful museums have to base their artifacts on monetary and educational purposes. In Source B, Charles Wilson Peale painted himself inside his natural history museum, illustrating a museum based on monetary purposes. His first tactic was displaying various artifacts, such as a mounted turkey, mastodon bones, and jaws in front of his museum to show that there has to be something spectacular, such as these attractions, in order to get a person to come to the museum. Next, he unveiled his museum with a curtain, which symbolized that the museum has to be like a show; a form of entertainment; something anyone would enjoy experiencing. Behind that curtain, Peale revealed new biological specimens that were supposedly the “educational” aspect of the museum, when in reality; they were just there as bait to the public so that there was no boring moment in this circus of a museum. Peale was not trying to educate these people; he just wanted to make the museum as showy as possible so that more and more people would want to observe the artifacts in it. He invited the museumgoers in with a devious look on his face; which basically stated to come in for the show as long as they brought their wallets. While there was no educational significance behind the artifacts and the existence of the museum was not beneficial to the experience of the public in the long-run, the attractions in the museum were beneficial for monetary purposes. Source C discusses the goal of the National Museum of the American Indian, which is to educate the public about Native American culture. It is “the first national museum dedicated to the preservation, study, and exhibition of the life, languages, literature, history, and arts of Native Americans.” All the decisions the museum staff made were based on what information they wanted the public to understand about the Native Americans. The museum also exposes the “diversity of cultures and the continuity of cultural knowledge among indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere and Hawaii.” There were no specific tactics by the museum to make money; it was just about the exposition of Native American culture: “The museum’s holdings also include film and audiovisual collections, paper archives, and a photography archive… depicting both historical and contemperorary Native American life.” While this museum could have all different types of attractions in order to appeal to the public, its sole focus was to provide the public with an understanding of the Native American traditions, habits, interests, tribes, arts, methods, and lives in general. This museum represented the exact result of what an establishment that benefits the public as a whole should incorporate. The incorporation of various artifacts that create an especially informative perception of a specific subject which it is dedicated to preserving, like the Native American culture, is what a museum is all about. If a person can walk out of a museum knowing that he learned something that changed his entire view on a subject, the museum is a significant place, which is why the National Museum of the American Indian was so profitable. Source E discusses how the restoration of a particular view of Williamsburg, capital of Virginia, is more of a commercial enterprise than a history museum. This is proved through a comment from critic Ada Louse Huxtable, who stated that this new “museum” “fosters the replacement of reality with selective fantasy.” Instead of showing the artifacts that would realistically display Williamsburg during the twentieth century, this museum was showing only the appealing parts of the village in order to attract customers. While this “Disney enterprise” received many profits, it denied the public the entirety of Williamsburg as it was during the twentieth century: “it has ‘taught’ Americans to prefer-and believe in-a sanitized and selective version of the past.” A historical museum is supposed to be composed of the essential artifacts that would tell a story about the past, rightfully recreating a piece of art that represents what once was. Instead of including the “historical unpleasantness like slavery, disease, and class oppression;”the museum portrayed a “rosy picture of an elegant, harmonious past.” Although Colonial Williamsburg avoided the other half of the educational considerations when facing the creation of its attractions, it was profitable because it appealed to an optimistic and romantic public. Source D discusses the symmetry between the most important considerations facing museum members when choosing an artifact or other objects while creating a museum. Mary Miley Theobald, in Museum Store Management, uses art museum director Sherman E. Lee’s speech about how a work is chosen, which included that “a work is chosen for reproduction, not because of its aesthetic worth, but because of its marketability.” Basically, she was stating that a sales staff considers monetary purposes when choosing the artifacts that make up a museum, but that does not mean that the artifacts that are chosen do not have aesthetic worth. The artifact that is most profitable can at the same time be an artifact that will educate the public; it doesn’t have to be one or the other. The museum’s main concern is: “money and education; how to achieve the proper balance whereby the educational goals maintain their ascendancy and their profits grow.” This is especially important to consider when acknowledging the staff’s decisions in what artifacts go inside a museum. It is important to understand that a museum has to be educational in some sense in order to attract the public. The only way that the educational aspect appeals to a majority of the crowd is if it is profitable. Those two aspects go hand in hand. It makes perfect sense; would a public rather view a rare resource or a common resource? Of course the rare resource, because it is not a resource someone could just find on the ground. When people go to museums to view jewelry, they look at the jewelry that is most intriguing and spectacular, not the jewelry they could find anywhere. That is an example of the types of decisions the museum staff has to make when considering what goes into the museum. And as long as “museum shops run ethically and educationally, criticism would most likely disappear.” Basically, if the museum is able to include both monetary and educational decisions in its running, it would not receive any opposition. Source D proves that no matter what considerations face a person in charge of a museum, money will always be involved in the decision. Sources B,C, D, and E prove that whatever the main purpose for a museum is; whether monetary or educational, it will be profitable. Source B displays a man in front of a museum based solely on public patronage, and it was still a successful museum even though it was not there for educational purposes. Source C is a museum based solely on educational purposes and is successful because it benefits the public. Source E is a museum that is based on public appeal and does not focus on education but is profitable and successful. Source D states that monetary and educational purposes go hand in hand, and all of the sources prove that to be entirely successful, a museum has to consider both educational and monetary purposes.
Posted on: Mon, 26 Aug 2013 15:33:02 +0000