When I read Roman Krznaric’s post on why every city needs an Empathy Museum, I was reminded of something I wrote about museums back in 2006, so I dug it out.
Recently, I visited the British Museum, and was disappointed. Objects cased in glass were explained by printed text accompanied by pictures. It was like reading a book where one has to walk around in order to turn the page. I wondered what the appeal is in visiting a building in order to obtain information that could have been acquired, in much greater comfort, at home.
The exhibits were uninspiring because they were unreal to me, isolated in their cases. I could not imagine them existing in real life. At the same time my mind was divided between looking at the objects and reading the text next to them. I focussed on neither, absorbing nothing in its entirety. I wondered why institutions spend so much money acquiring objects that they do not intend to make fully available to their visitors. The objects mean nothing if they cannot be understood in terms of where they come from, historically and physically.
As I stood there, people crowded around the exhibits, looking at them through digital cameras. I could hear gadgets whirring and voices calling to each other. The exhibition was all about people from other cultures. It suddenly struck me what a shame it was that so many people from such a wide range of backgrounds should pass each other by in this building and never say a word to each other, maintaining the illusion that they were learning about other cultures. I also felt shame at my supercilious disdain for the way in which they pushed in front of me and crowded round the items I was looking at, getting in my way. Talking to them seemed out of the question.
Even more recently I visited the Horniman Museum, which is clearly designed with children and families in mind. Every room has an interactive element, with activities for children to complete to prevent boredom. I wondered what might happen if museums started to make a similar effort to sustain the attention of adults, rather than overestimating their ability to amuse themselves.
I believe that a museum should be more than a collection of objects. The word originally indicated a building connected with the Muses, who inspired mankind to create things of beauty. I suspect that, in many cases, museums are now visited in the same spirit in which they are curated: mankind’s fever for collecting; the desire to be able to say “I own that” or “I have been there”. There is probably a guide book that says, “You must not go to London without visiting the British Museum”, so people go there.
I would like to develop a new way of exhibiting things. I would also like to find new things to exhibit: not just objects, but ideas, real people, the kinds of things that cannot be collected. The word “museum” refers to the things on display as well as the building that contains them. My ideal museum, then, would not be fixed in a single place: it would move around, evolving to fit into its temporary homes; touched, but not restricted, by its physical surroundings. The museum could be exhibited anywhere, and its ever-changing location would form part of the experience people gained from visiting it. It would also change every time it received a new visitor, because the variety of people who walked through the museum’s doors would be part of the exhibition, and people (myself included) would start to learn that their immediate neighbours are as exciting as historically and physically distant cultures.