from The New York Times
New York's Bizarre Museum Moment
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An interesting update to what's happening in the museum scene in New York. The author of the article has brought out certain interesting points for pondering in a honest and humorous way. In view of the changes that some museums initiate to stay current or to reach out to the masses, he observed "that museums don't all still trust art to excite people on its own; they increasingly think it needs to be packaged, marketed and diluted. Does the public also think so?"
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I think another way to think about the issue – other than asking "whether art (or history) should be packaged or otherwise?" – is to ask "what is the audience segment that is being engaged with (or without) packaging". I suspect that one would get very different audience with each approach. And as a museum could not be all-things-to-all-people-at-all-times, instead it could strive to be one-thing-to-some-people-at-a-time.
ReplyDeleteAnd quoting from the article:
"Reducing museums to nothing more than a leisure activity would obviously be insane. So would consigning them to an ivory tower: part of their beauty is their hubbub. "Dream houses of the collective," the phrase Walter Benjamin concocted for the Paris arcades, suits museums today, with their shops and their mobs who go to flirt and eat and pose. But museums are also our traditional palaces of rational entertainment, places for people to discover something they didn't already know, or didn't know they needed to know. They are sacred spaces, too, no matter how unfashionable that may sound: we expect to have in them encounters with authentic objects in a context that is respectful of our intelligence.
People go to museums, in the end, to have an experience unlike what they can get elsewhere, because works of art are not like everything else in life."
And one might also add that it applies to historic and heritage objects, too.