· By Tam McDonald
Too much of the commentary on the purpose of museums is one-dimensional, prosaic, and entirely uninspired by what excites the human imagination.
Controversy has been swirling recently over what we now think of as identity politics: how do we define ourselves in terms of what we think about other people, and how we act towards them? And how do we memorialise the evolving present of our lives as it slips behind us in the rear-view mirror and disappears into the past? What statues do we erect? What do we display in our museums? Aside from whatever we might do or say as individuals, what do we establish and maintain as totems of our collective will? What speaks for the community of “us”, as opposed to the foibles or fears of any single one of us?
Amidst all the well-intentioned circumspection as well as the more illiterate virtue signalling, an article appeared last week in the Financial Times, reviewing a quartet of recently published books examining what it is that museums do, as well as how and for whom they do it. It is an enlightening read and at least one of the books is a strong candidate for “drop everything and buy it” status. Unlike the other three more obviously didactic and polemical books, “The Future of the Museum: 28 Dialogues” is a wide-ranging series of interviews with a community of museum directors from 14 countries around the world.
Writing in The Art Newspaper, the curator of these interviews, New York-based Andras Szanto identifies six key ways in which the world of museums might innovate in addressing the post-Covid world. All six adaptations are thoughtful, sensible, and are variously directed at a future of greater accessibility, a keener community orientation, and a more discerning sensitivity to the messages conveyed by the objects they curate.
One point in particular advocates that museum spaces and resident technologies should be made more accessible and entertaining for everyone. Broadly underpinning all of these assumptions about why the modern museum actually exists is the idea that all guesses at the future of the museum accept the physical space that it inhabits – the pile of bricks that it is – as an enduring given.
But technologies that prove to be the most transformative over time tend thrillingly to exceed, rather than simply enhance, the enduring givens of everyday life. The printing presses of Fleet Street are one of the best examples of this that English history has to show. It wasn’t just its colossal impact following its appearance at the end of the 15th century. Its advances over succeeding centuries pulled the rest of the economy along with it, lifting London clear of the disasters that struck in the 1660s, powering the Enlightenment in the 18th century, and ensuring that there was only going to be one place where English journalism was going to establish itself in the 19th century.
Whatever might be done to brighten the experience of their visitors, tomorrow’s museums will not wholly address today’s challenges if they don’t solve the problem of place: where they actually are In Real Life. Virtual Reality could be the device that rescues museums from their contentious literalisms, elevating them to their proper and more enduring place in the human imagination.