Guide to New Museum Studies

3The standard sources for museum information and bibliography are The Smithsonian Institution Research Information System (www.siris.edu), which, under "Specialized Research Bibliographies," as of January 1, 2004, cites 686 entries for "Museum Studies" and 43 entries for "Museology"; and the International Council of Museums/UNESCO Information Centre (http://icom.museum/#infocentre). Museum-related book series are published under the rubrics of Museum Studies, Heritage, or Museology, by Routledge, University of Leicester Press, and Athlone Press; the Edifir Press series, "Voci del Museo," is an Italian equivalent. Susan Pearce has edited useful collections of reprints for Routledge: e. g., The History of Museums, 6 vols. (London, 1997); Museums and their Development: The European Tradition, 1700-1900, 8 vols. (London, 1999). Though primarily devoted to museums and museum studies in the U.S., America's Museums, an issue of Daedalus 128.3 (Summer 1999) and an earlier but still pertinent multi-authored survey, Michael Steven Shapiro, ed., The Museum: A Reference Guide (New York, Westport, CT, London, 1990), are ambitious interdisciplinary overviews.

4An estimated [check numbers] universities and colleges in the United State have Public History graduate programs, usually in history departments; however, museum history is routinely and more intensively taught in museum studies programs leading to a certificate or advanced degrees and museum careers. Some museum studies degree programs are linked to particular academic disciplines (art history, anthropology, natural sciences, public policy, and in a few cases history); others are not, including the largest at the University of Leicester (UK), with more than 250 students and 10 faculty members. More than 90 U.S. and international museum studies programs, many of them founded since the mid-1960s, are listed (in an incomplete survey) at the Training Program Web Sites Directory of the Smithsonian Center for Education and Museum Studies(http://museumstudies.si.edu/TrainDirect.htm).

5 For the rise of professional differences, see Philippa Levine, The Amateur and the Professional: Antiquarians, Historians and Archaeologists in Victorian England, 1838-1886 (Cambridge, 1986); and Rebecca Conard, Benjamin Shambaugh and the Intellectual Foundations of Public History (Iowa City, 2002). Patrick W. O'Bannon, “Nothing Succeeds Like Succession: Reflections on the Future of Public History,” The Public Historian 24.3 (Summer 2002): 9-16, relates ongoing tales of divorce and mutual suspicion between academic and public historians since the 1970s. The Public Historian, the journal of the National Council of Public Historians, regularly publishes thorough and thoughtful museum reviews in order “to discuss issues of historical exposition, presentation, and understanding through exhibits mounted in the United States and abroad.” To my knowledge, the Journal of American History is the only academic history journal of record in this country or abroad to feature regular reviews (in nos. 1 and 3 of each volume) of museum exhibits.

6 Francis Henry Taylor, Babel's Tower: the Dilemma of the Modern Museum (New York, 1945).

7 Donald Preziosi and Claire Farago, eds., Grasping the World: the Idea of the Museum (Aldershot, UK, 2004); Gail Anderson, ed., Reinventing the Museum: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on the Paradigm Shift (Walnut Creek, CA, 2004).

8 Randolph Starn, Varieties of Cultural History (Bibliotheca Eruditorum, 32; Goldbach [Germany], 2002), chap. 17 ("Authenticity and Historic Preservation: Towards an Authentic History"), 281-96; and chap. 18 ("Truths in the Archives"), 345-59; “Three Ages of ‘Patina’ in Painting,” Representations 78.1 (Spring 2002): 86-115.

9


^ The most informed and thoughtful of the older works is Alma S. Wittlin, Museums: in Search of a Usable Future (Cambridge, MA and London, 1970). Trained in museum studies in the 1930s in Vienna and Berlin, Wittlin emigrated to England and then to the U.S., where she worked as a leading academic expert, organizer, and advocate in museum education; her 1970 book, expanding and updating her The Museum: Its History and Its Tasks in Education (International Library of Sociology and Social Reconstruction, ed. Karl Mannheim; London, 1949) remains valuable for its experienced engagement with the past and the future prospects of museums. See too the books by Edward P. Alexander, a distinguished museum administrator who turned to museum history late in his career, esp. Museums in Motion: An Introduction to the History and Function of Museums (Nashville, TN, 1979).

10


^ Museum 148 (1985): 184; similarly the entry s. v. "Muséologie (Nouvelle)," in Encyclopaedia Universalis Supplément, 2 vols. (Paris, 1984-85), 2:958.

11


^ Peter Vergo, "Introduction," in Peter Vergo, ed., The New Museology (London, 1989), 3. The barely concealed hostility in such manifestoes breaks out in one of the first and last stabs at new museological wit: Vergo compares the development of the museum profession to that of "the coelacanth, that remarkable creature whose brain, in the course of its development from embryo to adult, shrinks in relation to its size…(Vergo, 3)." Another influential collection of essays from the late 1980s, Robert Lumley, ed., The Museum Time Machine (London and New York, 1988), was similarly critical of the profession.

12 David Murray, Museums: Their History and Their Use, with a Bibliography and List of Museums in the United Kingdom, 2 vols. (1904; rept. ed. with an introduction by Paula Findlen, Staten Island, NY, 2000): 1:1.

13 Hilde S. Hein, The Museum in Transition: A Philosophical Perspective (Washington and London, 2000), 18; cf. similarly, Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge, 191: "There is no essential museum. The museum is not a pre-constituted entity that is produced in the same way at all times. No 'direct ancestors'…or 'fundamental role'…can be identified." The difficulties faced by the International Council of Museums in formulating official definitions for the 1970s and 1980s are surveyed by Kenneth Hudson, "Attempts to Define 'Museum'" in Museums for the 1980s: A Survey of World Trends (London: Macmillan/UNESCO, 1977), 1-7.

14 Foucault’s most programmatic and most influential statement on the genealogical method is the essay “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History, " in Donald F. Bouchard, ed., Michel Foucault: Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews (Ithaca, NY, 1977), 27-49; cf. Rudi Visker, Michel Foucault: Genealogy as Critique, trans. Chris Turner (New York and London, 1995); and for "imaginary genealogies" as fictional but functional alternatives for thinking about actual states of affairs, Bernard Williams, Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy (Princeton, 2002), esp. 20-40.

15


^Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge, 9-10.

16 Sharon MacDonald produces another similarly schematic sequence for museums of science in "Exhibitions of Power and Powers of Exhibition: an Introduction to the Politics of Display," in Sharon MacDonald, ed., The Politics of Display: Museums, Science, and Culture (London and New York, 1998), esp. 5-17

17


^Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge, 190.

18Tony Bennett, Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (London and New York, 1995), 73.

19 Douglas Crimp, On the Museum's Ruins (Cambridge, MA, 1993), 287.

20 Timothy W. Luke, Museum Politics: Power Plays at the Exhibition (Minneapolis and London, 2002), 4.

21 Daniel J. Sherman and Irit Rogoff, "Introduction: Frameworks for Critical Analysis," in Daniel J. Sherman and Irit Rogoff, eds., Museum/Culture: Histories, Discourses, Spectacles (Minneapolis, 1994), x-xi.

22


^Ivan Gaskell, review essay, in Art Bulletin 97.1 (1995): 673-75.

23


^ Gaskell, 674, referring to Theodor Adorno, "The Valéry Proust Museum," trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (London, 1967), 175. Updating the analysis of the museum’s complicity with capitalism, Pierre Bourdieu's 1960s research on "the true function of museums" famously argued that museums furnish the "distinction" of "cultural capital" to the élite so as "to increase the feeling of belonging for some [and] of exclusion for others": Pierre Bourdieu and Alain Darbel, The Love of Art: European Art Museums and their Publics [1969], trans. Caroline Beattie and Nick Merriman (Stanford, 1990), 21; for a cogent critique, see Nick Merriman, "Museum Visiting as a Cultural Phenomenon," in The New Museology, 149-71. For the anti-capitalist museum critique updated yet again in terms of "Late Capitalism," see Carol Duncan and Alan Wallach, "The Museum of Modern Art as Late Capitalist Ritual: An Iconographic Analysis [1978]," and Rosalind Krauss, "The Cultural Logic of the Late Capitalist Museum [1990] rpt. in Preziosi and Farago, eds., Grasping the World, 483-500, 600-18.

24 Neil Harris, "The Gilded Age Revisited: Boston and the Museum Movement," American Quarterly 14 (1962): 545-64.

25 Joseph C. Choate, a founding trustee of the Met, on the occasion of its dedication, as quoted by Calvin Tomkins, Merchants and Masterpieces: The Story of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, 1970).

26


^ Luciano Canfora, The Vanished Library: A Wonder of the Ancient World, trans. Martin Ryle (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1990).

27 Paula Findlen, "The Museum: its Classical Etymology and Renaissance Genealogy," Journal of the History of Collections 1.1 (1989): 59-78. This is the first of Finden's many important studies, which include Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1994); most recently, "The Renaissance in the Museum," in Allen J. Grieco, Michael Rocke, and Fiorella Gioffredi Superbi, eds., The Italian Renaissance in the Twentieth Century; Acts of an International Conference, Florence, Villa I Tatti, June 9-11, 1999 (Florence, 2002), 93-116, anticipates Findlen’s arguments for the Renaissance "birth" of the museum in a forthcoming book, A Fragmentary Past: Museums and the Renaissance. Andreas Grote, ed., Macrocosmos in Microcosmos: Die Welt in der Stube; zur Geschichte des Sammelns 1450 bis 1800 (Opladen, 1994), is an rich collection of articles by major scholars on Renaissance and early modern European museums.

28 Crimp, On the Museum's Ruins, 294.

29


^ See Andrea Witcomb, Re-imagining the Museum: Beyond the Mausoleum (London and New York), 18-26, for references and a discerning synthesis drawing on the work, among others, of Meg Armstrong, Robert Rydell, Paul Greenhalgh, and Tony Bennett. These connections and the tensions engendered by them are a major theme in the collected essays of Neil Harris, Cultural Excursions: Marketing Appetites and Cultural Tastes in Modern America (Chicago, 1990), e. g., chap. 3 ("Museums, Merchandising, and Popular Taste: The Struggle for Influence"), 56-81; chap. 6 ("Great American Fairs and American Cities: The Role of Chicago's Columbian Exposition"), 11-31; see too, more recently, Harris's "The Divided House of the American Art Museum," in America's Museums, 33-56; cf. Barbara J. Black, On Exhibit: Victorians and their Museums (Charlottesville, VA and London, 2000) for a nuanced account showing that in Britain, particularly in London, "the museum did possess a centripetal force… [as] the age's great enterprise" (4) but that it also generated "frenzy and furor" (19).

.

30 G. Brown Goode, The Principles of Museum Administration (New York, 1895), 2-3 (on the lack of a general treatise on museum administration and the classification of museum types); 9 (the diverse functions of museums); 10 ("the dead museum").

31 George W. Stocking, "Museums and Material Culture," in George W. Stocking, ed., Objects and Others: Essays on Museums and Material Culture (Madison, WI, 1985), 8, citing the example of contemporaneous divergences such as Pitt Rivers' linear evolutionary exhibits in his Oxford museum vs. Franz Boas' context-oriented exhibits of multiple functions and meanings in keeping with the principles of liberal relativism.

32


^"The appreciation of the utility of Museums to the great public lies at the foundation of what is known as 'the modern Museum idea'"; its development together with libraries, reading rooms, and parks "referred to by some wise person as 'passionless reformers'… is due to Great Britain in much greater degree than to any other nation…": Goode Brown, Principles, 71-2, citing the Great Exhibition of 1851, John Ruskin's promotion of working class museums, and the work of Sir Henry Cole in Birmingham. The guiding precept is printed in capital letters: "THE DEGREE OF CIVILIZATION TO WHICH ANY NATION, CITY OR PROVINCE HAS ATTAINED IS BEST SHOWN BY THE CHARACTER OF ITS PUBLIC MUSEUMS AND THE LIBERALITY WITH WHICH THEY ARE MAINTAINED" (73).

33


^ Since its appearance in 1980, Carol Duncan's essay "From the Princely Gallery to the Public Art Museum: The Louvre Museum and the National Gallery," revised in her Civilising Rituals: Inside the Public Art Museum (London, 1995),, 21-47, has set the terms for the thesis that the public art museum of the "new bourgeois state," especially in post-revolutionary France, inherited and transformed the cultural politics of absolutism; see Jean-Pierre Babelon, "Le Louvre: Demeure des Rois, Temple des Arts," in Pierre Nora, ed., La Nation, Les Lieux de Mémoire (Paris, 1986), 2:3, 169-216; and for a well-documented account, Andrew McClellan, Inventing the Louvre: Art, Politics, and the Origins of the Modern Art Museum in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1994).

34


^ Daniel J. Sherman, Worthy Monuments: Art Museums and the Politics of Culture in Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge, MA and London, 1989); see too Eduard Pommier, "Naissance des Musées de Province," in Nora, ed., La Nation, Les Lieux de Mémoire, 2:2, 451-93.

35


^ James J. Sheehan, Museums in the German Art World from the End of the Old Regime to the Rise of Modernism (New York, 2000); Susan A. Crane, Collecting and Historical Consciousness in Early Nineteenth Century Germany (Ithaca, NY, 2000), esp. chap. 4 ("Finding Form for the Content: Historical Museums"), 105-42.

36 Wittlin, Museums, 81-101, is a good survey of the rise of national museums and international organizations; the Paris-based International Council of Museums currently has more than ninety national members.

37 Wittlin, Museums, 121-93. Neil Harris, "Polling for Opinions," Museum News 69.5 (September-October 1990): 46-55, gives a negative turn to a similar chronology: "authoritarian condescension" before World War I; "authoritarian experimentalism" in the early twentieth century, "populist deference" after World War II; "existential scrutiny" in the 1990s. See Ivan Karp, "Museums and Communities," in Ivan Karp, Christine Mullen Kreamer, and Steven D. Lavine, eds., Museums and Communities (Washington and London, 1992), 8-11, for an appreciative summary which also takes issue with Harris over the negative chronology. Veteran museum administrator and teacher Edward P. Alexander has used the biographies of museum directors with very different, often highly controversial agendas as a touchstone for the history of modern museums in his Museum Masters: Their Museums and their Influence (Nashville, 1983); and The Museum in America: Innovators and Pioneers (Walnut Creek, CA, London, New Delhi, 1997)

38 John Walker, "The Genesis of the National Gallery of Art," Art in America 22.4 (1944): 21; and Benjamin I. Gilman, Museum Ideals (Cambridge, MA, 1923), 24, quoted by Wittlin, Museums, 151.

39 Wittlin, Museums, 163.

40


^Wittlin, 175, lists the following post-World War II trends: "An increasing interest and changes of taste in art museums; An increasing concern with ecology, in both museums of natural history and of anthropology; An awareness of minority groups; Manners of display tending toward a Total Environment; A museum-school marriage; A new emphasis on research; Multi-Track versus One-Track establishments; A widely spread malaise with regard to existing conditions in the presence of program ."

41


^ Stephen E. Weil, A Cabinet of Curiosities: Inquiries into Museums and their Prospects (Washington, D. C., 1995), 13.

42 Susan A. Crane, "Curious Cabinets and Imaginary Museums," Susan A. Crane, ed., Museums and Memory (Stanford, 2002), 80; see Lawrence Weschler, Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder (New York, 1995) and for a full bibliography, Crane, "Curious Cabinets," 227-8, n. 1; cf. Black, On Exhibit, 19, for a kind of genealogical museum sublime (or ridiculous): "As the collective voice of these thinkers [nineteenth- and twentieth century writers on museums] would conclude, the museum is a whorehouse is a mausoleum is a department store is a secular cathedral is a disease is a glory…"

43


^See, e.g., Ludmilla Jordanova, "Objects of Knowledge: A Historical Perspective on Museums," and Peter Vergo, "The Reticent Object," in The New Museology, 22-40, 41-59; Edwina Taborsky, "The Discursive Object" and Peter van Mensch, "Methodological Museology; or Towards a Theory of Museum Practice," in Susan Pearce, ed., Objects of Knowledge (London, 1990), 50-77, 141-57; James Clifford, "Objects and Selves," in Objects and Others, 236-46; Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, Heritage (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1998), 17-78 (chap. 1, "Objects of Ethnography," rev. essay of 1991); Elaine Heumann Gurian, "What is the Object of this Exercise? A Meandering Exploration of the Many Meanings of Objects in Museums," in America's Museums, Daedalus, 163-83. Hein, The Museum in Transition, 51-68 (chap. 4 "Transcending the Object"), offers a critical analysis of the epistemological displacement of museum objects: see below p. 000. The terminology derives directly or indirectly from the notion of "the discourse object" in Michel Foucault, Archeology of Knowledge (London, 1972), 140.

44


^ "The Discourse of the Museum," in Reesa Ferguson, Bruce W. Ferguson, and Sandy Naire, eds., Thinking about Exhibitions," (New York: Routledge, 1996), 214; cf. the measured critique of similar claims by Ivan Gaskell, Vermeer's Wager: Speculations on Art History, Theory and Art Museums (London, 2000), e. g., "the subsumption of the visual by the textual—proposed by a preponderance of orthodox theorists—seems to me to be erroneous, for it involves an oversimplification of the artefact, and our responses to it" (14).

45 Steven Conn, Museums and American Intellectual Life, 1876-1926 (Chicago and London, 1998).

46 George Brown Goode, "The Museums of the Future," Annual Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution for the Year Ending June 30, 1889; Report of the National Museum (Washington, D. C., 1891), 433; cf. Bennett, Birth of the Museum, 42-43, quoting Sir William Henry Flower, Essays on Museums and Other Subjects Connected with Natural History (London, 1898), 18, 49.

47


^ Conn, Museums, 262.

48See nn. 33-34 above.

49 Didier Maleuvre, Museum Memories: History, Technology, Art (Stanford, CA, 1999), 1-2; cf. Maleuvre, 15-39, and for the argument that Quatremère was not so much opposed to museums per se as to the removal of art from that "universal museum," the city of Rome, Jean-Louis Déotte, "Rome, the Archetypal Museum, and the Louvre, the Negation of Division," in Susan Pearce, ed., Art in Museums (London and Atlantic Highlands, NJ, 1995), 215-32; on the long afterlife of Quatremére's critique, see Daniel J. Sherman, "Quatremère/Benjamin/Marx: Art Museums, Aura, and Commodity Fetishism," in Museum/Culture, 123-43.

50 G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller, 456, in Maleuvre, 25.

51 Maleuvre, 28; see Sheehan, Museums, 51-52, 87-93, for German repercussions of the controversy and the reception of Hegel’s position in the new professions of art history and museology.

52


^ Charles Saumarez Smith, "Museums, Artefacts, and Meanings," in The New Museology, 9.

53Quoted in Le débat 41 (March-May 1987): 65; this seemingly tongue-in-cheek remark is not so far removed from the preparations for the opening of remodeled Museum of Modern Art in New York as reported by Arthur Lubow, “Remoderning: How MOMA Will Retell the Story of Modernism,” The New York Times Magazine (October 3, 2004), 60-69, 94, 120-21. For the limits of binding clauses on “cultural treasures,” see the essays by legal scholar Joseph Sax, Playing Darts with a Rembrandt: Public and Private Rights in Cultural Treasures (Ann Arbor, 1999); for fresh historical analysis on the rise and decline of public claims to cultural property, see Jordanna Bailkin, The Culture of Property: The Crisis of Liberalism in Modern Britain (Chicago and London, 2004).

54


^ Charles Saumarez Smith, "The Philosophy of Museum Display: the Continuing Debate," in

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