The comments on Part Two have been really fascinating to read and take in. Addressing your feedback has been very important to me, so Part Three is still cooking. And a core part of that practice is finding other information in the world to help make a point, provide examples, or provoke assumptions. Seemingly everything coming onto my screen this week has had relevance to this exercise, so I thought I’d pass along some of the background reading I’d been doing while writing the next post.
New models
1) Nina Simon’s latest book club subject on her Museum 2.0 blog is “Blueprint” the fascinating chronicle of the abortive attempt to create a Dutch Museum of National History. It’s a great read, and I’m looking forward to the discussion.
2) In the same vein, Science Gallery, Dublin has posted an open call for “GAME” their new exhibition on the future of play. I haven’t been (yet) but I’m intrigued by Science Gallery’s vision, to be “a dynamic new model for public engagement at the interface between science and the arts.” Among the differences, they tout five factors:
- Our flexibility – five dynamic, changing programmes per year, with no permanent exhibition;
- Our focus on 15 – 25 year olds as our core target audience bridging high school, university and early stage career;
- Our open call process – Science Gallery crowd-sources its installations and events on broad themes linking science, technology and the arts;
- Our fresh approach to connecting the university and the city – bringing university research groups, staff and students into dialogue with the arts and creative community and the public; and
- Our Leonardo Group – 50 inspirational individuals drawn from the local creative community of scientists, artists, engineers and entrepreneurs who feed ideas into the development of Science Gallery exhibitions and events.
No permanent exhibition? The whole place becomes whatever the current exhibition is? Very interesting…
New ways of being
3) Rich Cherry tweeted a great nugget from Seth Godin called, . “The quickest way to get things done and make change” that also bears on our discussions
“Not the easiest, but the quickest:
Don’t demand authority.
Eagerly take responsibility.
Relentlessly give credit.”
Easy to write. Much harder to live, but if they could baked into the DNA of a new organization, how might those sentiments express themselves?
4) Following on the call to eschew demanding authority, Maria Popova posted a short review of a book on on storytelling and the search for meaning. “The Spirituality of Imperfection” The title alone was enough to interest me, but what caught my eye and made me add it to this list was Popova’s assertion that the book “is really about cultivating our capacity for uncertainty, for mystery, for having the right questions rather than the right answers.”
Living and working in an institution that is very concerned with both “being right” and getting visitors to ask the right questions, this book seems like it’ll be getting added to my list at the bookstore soon. So many modern museuological concerns, like the authority crisis, the (mis)appropriation of curation, participatory culture, and more, all relate to this need to both know, and be “right.”
5) This notion of being in the storytelling business amplifies something Seb Chan has posted on Fresh and New(er). We’ve been talking for some time about the lack of magic in museum exhibitions, particularly science museums. Go read “On Sleep No More, magic and immersive storytelling” and read it all the way through, because Seb’s saves his best questions for the very end.
6) Turning data into information is one way museums tell their stories. Mia Ridge tweeted this little gem that goes right to the heart of so much of what being an institution with a collection is like nowadays.
We can propagate huge data sets, but can we contextualize them so that anybody else who’s not already an expert might find value in them?
7) Both Janet Carding and Mia Ridge forwarded along this provocation by Hadrian Ellory van Dekker, Head of Collections at the Science Museum, called ‘What are Science Museums for’ where he takes apart a dominant paradigm in my part of the field about how “problematic” collections are. What is interesting is that he doesn’t bemoan interactive exhibits as usurpers. Instead, he problematizes the whole perceived dichotomy and ends up saying, “Science centre or science museum? Why should we have to choose? Any science museum, fortunate enough to possess a collection of significant and historic objects, quite simply has to be both.” Collections-based or interactive doesn’t need to be an either-or proposition.
Truth.
7) Lastly, I can’t point to it yet, but talking with Koven Smith about his upcoming MuseumNext talk on “the Kinetic Museum” has been enormously helpful to me. Hopefully it will appear in some form online so I can link to it.
Part Three is coming soon!
Thinking about Museums 