MUSEUMS.

It is often assumed that museums have been a permanent feature of society, simply because they contain some of the oldest things in the world. In fact, in their current form, museums are surprisingly recent in origin, almost entirely Western in conception, internally confused about their identity, and unsure of their future role.

Museums in the early twenty-first century claim descent from the Museum in Alexandria established in the third century b.c.e., but this is only partly true. That museum—a Latin word derived from the Greek mouseion, meaning seat of the muses—was an attempt to bring all the fields of human knowledge together into one place. Its library was its most famous feature, complemented with a collection of artifacts. Contemporary accounts describe a huge complex of buildings, including seminar rooms and banqueting halls. It was more like a prototype university than a museum.

The British Museum, effectively the mother of all modern museums, was established in 1753 as a direct emulation of the museum in Alexandria, but this time as a public service, not as an educational institution open only to scholars. Its ambition also was to bring all human knowledge together into one place. Its library, again, was by far its most important feature. The idea that artifacts could be separated from books in the learning process did not emerge until well more than a century later, and then largely for reasons of administrative convenience. It was not until 1998 that the British Library was separated physically from the British Museum, which in the early 2000s is a totally different institution from the one that opened its doors 250 years ago, and yet it still proudly claims that its collection has remained "inviolable" since then. It is in this way that museums create myths about their permanence, though their role has in fact changed out of all recognition over the centuries.

Origins

Museums owe their origins to three traits in human nature: the desire to understand the universe, the wish to appreciate the artifacts museums contain, and the impetus to educate others. Each of these motivations has its own history, but none, by itself, necessitates the creation of a museum. One might, for example, have no more need for the objects used in one's research when what was being sought was found. Many archaeological remains are now replaced in the ground whence they came. If one wants to appreciate something, one will tend to look after it, but that does not mean that one will necessarily want to share it with anyone else, apart from a chosen few. This appears to have been the ethos behind the earliest art gallery in the world, the Pinakotheke, established on the Acropolis in Athens in the fifth century b.c.e. As far can be determined from cursory contemporary accounts (nothing physical remains), the museum had a religious purpose and showed paintings for the initiates—and the gods themselves—to view. Though it might have been open to the general public, it would be two millennia before galleries were specially created with that purpose in mind. It was not until there was a commitment to universal education that the modern concept of the museum took root and flourished.

Museums did not emerge at all in societies where the scientific study of the material world was not valued, for example, in ancient China and India, nor in countries dominated by religions that focused people's attention on the spiritual rather than the material world, such as Christianity during certain periods of its history and, more generally, Islam. Museums sprang from the approach to learning advocated by Aristotle: that people can only learn by studying the world around them and trusting the evidence of their own eyes, not by listening to others or reading what they have written.

Early Development

Museums only started to develop in the form in which they are currently know them at the beginning of the Age of Enlightenment in Europe, when amateur scientists began to collect the material evidence of what was still widely assumed to be God's creation. By the sixteenth century many European noblemen had "cabinets of curiosities" containing the unaccountable wonders of nature, such as fossil teeth (thought to be satanic) and flint tools (thought to be thunderbolts) and, increasingly, natural and cultural artifacts gleaned from the newly discovered far-flung corners of the world. By the seventeenth century some of these collections had begun to be systematically studied and categorized. Ole Worm (1588–1654), a Danish doctor, used his vast collection to prove that so-called unicorn horns actually came from a species of Arctic whale—much to the chagrin of Scandinavian fishermen, who plied a lucrative trade in supplying such wonders.

The approach of these early scientific collectors was, as it had been in ancient Greece, encyclopedic. The mere activity of collecting similar objects together and placing them in some sort of order—the standard way of working in museums even in the twenty-first century—was then an extremely exciting activity. Barriers of accepted thought were being broken on every front. Geological specimens proved that the earth was far older than anyone had imagined, fossils demonstrated the fact of extinction (thought, by most, to be an impossibility within divine creation), and coins revealed the existence of cultures and dynasties previously unknown to history. Without his vast collection of natural history specimens, Charles Darwin (1809–1882) might never have formulated his theory of evolution. Working in the Museum of Northern Antiquities in Copenhagen, Christian Jurgensen Thomsen (1788–1865) developed the system of classifying prehistory according to the material evidence of the ages of stone, bronze, and iron, the names by which they are still known. It is significant that the formation of the British Museum (and library) was exactly contemporaneous with the publication of Denis Diderot's great Encyclopédie in France.

During the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries public museums burgeoned throughout Europe and America, and soon in other societies influenced by them, such as South America, Australia, India, and South Africa. This was in response to two considerable and growing pressures: the new urge to collect and codify all material things, and the public's desire to see all these wonders. In those days the interests of the scholar and the general public were consanguineous. Crowds gathered to see the first stuffed kangaroo or dinosaur bone or the latest archaeological discovery from Peru. The field of enquiry that was opening was so vast that collectors—and therefore museums—soon began to specialize, dividing into subject areas such as natural history and geology, archaeology, and ethnology, which continue to define their form to this day.

Growth

The main impetus behind the extraordinary growth in museums during the last two centuries—few cities around the world are now without several—has been the growing awareness of the importance of public education. The roots of this egalitarian ideal also can be traced back to the Enlightenment, when people such as Diderot believed that knowledge would enable humankind to make the world a better place. His ideas for a national museum were put into practice by the leaders of the French Revolution: in 1792, just nine days after the Bourbon monarchy collapsed, the Louvre, at that time a royal palace, was transformed into a museum with the aim of embracing "knowledge in all its manifold beauty" so that it would, "by embodying these good ideas, worthy of a free people … become among the most powerful illustrations of the French Republic." Napoléon Bonaparte was following a time-honored tradition when his armies plundered masterpieces of art from the territories they conquered, particularly in Egypt and Italy, and sent them to the Louvre. (Napoléon was, in this case—at least ostensibly—acting solely in the interests of the people. The Italian treasures were returned after his fall from power.)

Individuals and institutions have, since the earliest times and in almost all cultures, collected rare and precious objects as manifestations of their status. There is archaeological evidence of royal and religious treasuries from ancient civilizations as widespread as Peru, Assyria, Greece, and China. What was new, however, during the Enlightenment, was the idea that these should become public treasuries. The members of the aristocracy of Europe were beginning to allow the general public to visit their collections in the eighteenth century; revolutions merely speeded up the process. The English Civil War, however, had come a century before such ideas had taken hold, and Charles I's extraordinary art collection was simply sold—Britain had to create its own National Gallery, from scratch, in 1824. The Hermitage, though still a royal palace, was first opened to the public in 1852, many decades before the Russian Revolution; its collections had been formed as part of Catherine II the Great's (ruled 1762–1796) strategy to bring education to Russia. The Bolsheviks boosted public collections by giving them religious treasures after religious worship had been outlawed. Many icons are now being returned as the churches reopen following the collapse of the communist regime.

Increasing access to culture dovetailed neatly with the Enlightenment's drive for knowledge. This was the great age of the formation of museums. Its high point, arguably, came in 1846 when James Smithson, a self-effacing English businessman, gave the American government the then celestial sum of half a million dollars to found a museum for "the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men." The Smithsonian Institution is now the greatest museum organization in the world, with its many galleries, most of which are ranged along the Mall in Washington, D.C., devoted to interests ranging from art to aerospace and from natural history to ethnography.

During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the establishment of a museum became not just a response to educational need, but a matter of civic pride. This heady mix of political objectives accounts for the worldwide proliferation of museums at that time, from the Australian Museum in Sydney (opened 1828) to the Egyptian Museum in Cairo (1858) to the Museum of the History of China in Beijing (1915), and hundreds of thousands of smaller museums in towns and villages in between.

Museums had another advantage: they attracted tourists. Just as the churches of medieval Europe had competed with each other for relics, so museums sought out the best collections—for tourists, like pilgrims, bring income. Many museums in the late twentieth century were established as part of an economic strategy. Glasgow in Scotland was the first postindustrial city to rebuild itself on the back of an art gallery, the Burrell Collection, which opened in 1983. Gradually museum buildings, such as cathedrals, became beacons of attraction in themselves, which led to the extraordinary flowering of museum architecture in the late twentieth century. The Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, designed by Frank O. Gehry and opened in 1997, is world-famous for its titanium-clad curves, though few could describe its collection—but then it is not really a museum so much as a temporary exhibition hall, exhibiting works on loan from its parent museum in New York.

Agencies of Influence

It wasn't long before people began to realize that museums could be used to influence people. The South Kensington Museum in London was created in 1857 specifically to encourage better industrial design in Britain. It was radical in that it combined engineering with art, and valued objects from the past purely for their capacity to inspire the present. It is difficult to quantify how effective it was—William Morris's famous wallpaper designs were directly influenced by its collections—but the museum gradually lost its motivation and in 1893 was split into the Science Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum, thus creating new categories of museums for science and engineering and the decorative arts.

However, the proactive educational spirit sown by the South Kensington Museum became hugely influential. The push-button displays in the Science Museum were the direct inspiration for the Exploratorium in San Francisco, established in 1969 by Frank Oppenheimer, to help people understand new developments in science. The Exploratorium is not really a museum at all—it doesn't have collections—yet its approach has spawned science centers in almost every major conurbation.

The most radical recent developments in museums have sprung from the desire to educate, rather than to collect. Michael Spock put the old toys in the Boston Children's Museum into storage because he realized his young visitors weren't interested in them. He created a new type of museum in which children could explore the adult world through interactive displays. His methods, particularly his audience participatory programs, have been hugely influential on museums, and new-style children's museums have become almost as widespread as science centers.

Since the 1960s museums have been transformed by the introduction of modern media such as video and film, audio guides, and computers. It is now possible for museums to catch the imagination of a very wide public, but only a few, as yet, have begun to put their visitors first in this way. Most stick to their old, categorical presentations and assume that their visitors will want to learn about microliths, monstrances, and moths, without asking why they might be interested in such things, let alone if they would prefer to find out about something else. When he was commissioned to create what was to become the Museum of the Jewish Diaspora in Tel Aviv in 1968, Jeshajahu Weinberg, a former theater director, realized that it would not be possible to tell this story using original artifacts, because virtually none existed. He therefore created a display that used no original material at all, only reproductions. But, since it has no collections, it cannot really be categorized as a museum at all.

Weinberg's greatest museum, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. (opened 1993), uses all the storytelling techniques he developed in Israel together with real exhibits to mesmerizing effect, and attracts two million visitors per year. One reason for the recent proliferation of Holocaust museums (there are twelve in the United States alone in the early 2000s) is that its last living witnesses are being lost. One of the most important roles of museums in the future may be to preserve the evidence of past events, such as the Holocaust, of which it is imperative that they are not forgotten.

Future Challenges

A central issue facing museums in the early twenty-first century is to find ways to use their collections as a means of entertaining and educating a wide public, while developing their role as a resource for research. The felicitous atmosphere of the Enlightenment, when research and public interest coincided, has passed. Museum collections no longer represent, as they did then, the horizon of human understanding. The frontiers of science extend beyond the visible world collectable by museums, and it adds little to the sum of knowledge for museums to go on building up their collections, as most continue to do, according to categories laid down two centuries ago. But objects will still need to be preserved for future study and to make past experiences vividly meaningful to subsequent generations. Museums tend to go on doing what they have always done—adding another Carracci, crustacean, or car—and yet there is no museum about the history of communism (apart from a few remaining Soviet propaganda museums, which only tell one side of the story), or of marketing. Both are manifestations of ideas and practices that have vastly shaped the lives of people living in the early 2000s, and both have vivid material pasts, ideal for museum display. The challenge for museums is to decide what is important for them to collect in the present—because it is on these collections that their future will be built.

See also Arts ; City, The: The City as a Cultural Center ; Cultural History ; Encyclopedism ; Enlightenment ; Visual Order to Organizing Collections .

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Julian Spalding