Biomedicine on Display

I thought of sending this abstract to the Artefacts meeting in the Museum Boerhaave, Leiden, 25-27 September (this year’s theme is ‘Conceptualizing, Collecting and Presenting Recent Science and Technology’):

COLLECTION IMPOSSIBLE: Distributed curatorship as an alternative to centralised acquisitioning

Centralised collecting of the artefacts from contemporary science, technology and medical (STM) visual and material culture seems to have rather bleak prospects. The looming financial and social global crisis is not conducive to centralized efforts by big museums to save the contemporary STM heritage, not least because the modern state-subsidised museum institution is running out of funding (at least in the West). What can curators then do to uphold their professional obligation to rescue the contemporary STM heritage for future generations? In this paper I will discuss two alternative collecting strategies: distributed curatorship and crowd-sourcing. I suggest that the major aim of STM museum acquisition curators should rather be to raise the general awareness among scientists and the engineering and medical professions of the importance of preserving ‘their’ artefacts (heritagemindedness). Drawing on a historical analogy (biological standardisation in the 1950s), I also suggest that this aim might be achieved best by working out guidelines for the collection, preservation and curation of artefacts to be distributed to individual scientists, doctors and engineers in research institutions and private companies, and to interested members of the public. Presently, social media is probably the best vehicle for producing such guidelines and spreading them widely.

Any views? If you want to take issue with it, do it before 15 July, please? (Or in Leiden, of course).

My impression of the first and only Public Communication of Science and Technology (PCST) conference I’ve attended (Malmö in 2008) was quite mixed. The academic quality wasn’t particularly high, there were pretty few theoretically interesting talks, not much surprising stuff, almost no nerds around, no sudden bursts of creativity — and new media were (with few exceptions :-) totally absent. The whole thing was smoothly organised but there was an aura of a public and business management hanging over the conference venue. I think these biannual meetings are a major hang-out for science communication managers.

But things can change for the better. And even better if researchers and curators from science, technology and medical museums were to attend (there was almost none in 2008). The next meeting will be held in Firenze in April 2012, and the programme will include themes such as:

• What does quality mean in science communication?
• Evaluating public communication of science
• Art and/in science communication
• Ethics and aesthetics of science communication
• Reflexive challenges: communicating PCST?
• Emerging trends and issues in science communication
• Changing media, changing formats, changing science communication models?
• Public communication of technology: the ‘Cinderella’ of PCST?

In other words, a lot of themes that are central to curators and researchers in museums of science, technology and medicine. Deadline for proposals is 30 September. More here http://www.pcst2012.org.

The programme for this year’s Universeum meeting (in Padua, 26-29 May) is available here.

Universeum has rapidly become a vital organisation for the revival of European university museums. The annual meetings have an important role to play to raise the awareness among university administrations that their museums are not only worth preserving but, even better, worth expanding.

Last year’s programme in Uppsala was terribly packed, however: one damn 15-20 minutes presentation (including comments) after the other, short and inevitably rushed coffee breaks, etc. Unfortunately this year’s programme seems to suffer from the same illness. When will they ever learn?

But Padua is beautiful in late May and some of the presentation titles, like “To be or not to be a museum”, sound alluring. So, register not later than Friday 15 April.

Last week we put up a computer in the staff kitchen with Twitter as the only application and main page.

I call it a Tweet Machine. Over the computer I hung a small sign, urging all staff members to write about everything from philosophical reflections to descriptions of what their packed lunch contained that day:

The computer is placed so that every staff member cannot avoid passing it on their daily routine oscillating between coffee machine and office.

Our hope is that the natural curiosity, so stimulated, will help us lure the more shy species of museum staff out on the web.

The experiment has already lead to promising results, as this twitter excerpt shows:

Follow the everyday life of Medical Museion; the museological object-apotheosis’, the indoor decorating debates, meteorological pocket philosophy, coffee drama and cake: https://twitter.com/medicalmuseion

Alain de Botton is an object of dismay to many philosophers because he doesn’t comply with the ritual behaviours of professional philosophy.

But for all of us who don’t consider the publication of peer reviewed articles in academic journals as the fundamental purpose of philosophy, his comments on current human affairs are often refreshing and thought provoking.

A while ago he suggested, in his weekly column in BBC News, that arts and humanities departments should consider offering people guidance how to live, rather than just provide tools for critical thinking. The commentators were divided into those who thought he was in principle onto something and those who thought he was just insane.

Last Friday, de Botton did the trick again, now on the topic of museums. His point of departure for this column is the widely spread suggestion that museums (i.e., art museums; he doesn’t mention other kinds of museums) function as our time’s secular version of temples and churches.

However, in one crucial aspect, museums seem to refuse to play the role of secular temples: they seem to be incapable of linking their exhibitions and objects to “the needs of our souls”:

They don’t do enough with the treasures they have because they present them to us in bland academic ways that fail to engage with the real potential of art, which is — I argue — to change us for the better.

Drawing on Hegel, who defined art as “the sensuous presentation of ideas”, de Botton suggests that “good art is the sensuous presentation of those ideas which matter most to the proper functioning of our souls, and yet which we are most inclined to forget”. Which, in his understanding, helps us answer what a museum should be, viz.:

a machine for putting before us pictures, photographs and statues that try to change us, that propagandise on behalf of ideas like kindness, love, faith and sacrifice. It should be a place to convert you.

At first sight, it looks like de Botton has become a religious convert. But that’s not the case (he claims he’s “a complete atheist”) and that’s not the point of his argument. He’s just ”curious”, he says, about the approach churches take towards art — i.e., “not to put pretty things in front of us, but to use pretty things to change us”.

Accordingly, de Botton suggests that the modern secular museum might allow itself to be inspired by a secular version of the Christian approach to art: ”What if they too decided that art had a specific purpose — to make us good and wise and kind — and tried to use the art in their collections to prompt us to be so?” What if museums gave up their neutral, distant stance and asked visitors to ”look at this image and remember to be patient”, or ”use this sculpture to meditate on what you too could do to bring about a fairer world”?

In short, de Botton wants museum curators ”dare to reinvent their spaces so that they can be more than dead libraries for the creations of the past” and to ”co-opt works of art to the direct task of helping us to live: to achieve self-knowledge, to remember forgiveness and love and to stay sensitive to the pains suffered by our ever troubled species and its urgently imperilled planet”.

I can easily imagine how many of my museum colleagues might think Alain de Botton is really insane (or at least outlandish, retro and generally embarassing). Isn’t a critical museum the true aim of a reflective and theoretically well-informed curatorial profession? (Cf. my earlier post on Piotr Piotrowski and the notion of ‘the critical museum’). Isn’t Alain de Botton just a reactionary crypto-Christian who want to turn museums back into a didactical regime worthy of the old GDR?

Well, maybe de Botton is a crypto-Christian. But even so, he has a point, and I think this point is valid, also for other kinds of museums than art museums.

Now, some kinds of museums do already live up to the call for edification. Many natural history museums, for example, more or less explictly see it as their aim to teach their visitors to take care of nature, help protect fauna and flora, help stop species extinction, and save the planet from climate catastrophies and ecosystem destruction. Such museums have more explicit educational and edifying aims.

So what about history and culture museums? Most such museums are probably more like art museums than natural history museums. They try to avoid being seen as didactic, educational and edifying. True, most such museums want to be critical in one way or the other — of racism, sexism, nationalism, capitalism, consumerism, militarism, Western cultural hegemonism, etc. etc — but they rarely present explicit positive alternatives of how we can negate the negative -isms and live better lives.

But is a ’critical museum’ devoid of any explicit edifying ambitions the only alternative to a traditional nationalistic and high-culture agenda for historical and culture museums? Here Alain de Botton asks the right question, I think. How can we make exhibitions and display our artefacts in a way that change us and our society for the better? Without degenerating into teaching institutions!

I’ve always been pretty tired of identity museums, like the politically correct and historically incorrect National Museum of the American Indian in Washington DC. As Edward Rothstein ends his critical analysis of identity museums in The New York Times the other day:

The Enlightenment had its limitations, of course. But it also shaped the great museums of the West. And many identity museums have yet to absorb that more transcendent vision.

(thanks to Jim Edmonson for the tip).

A great museum is a laboratory where ideas get tested, not a mausoleum full of dead thoughts and bromides.

(Blake Gopnik, “National Portrait Gallery bows to censors, withdraws Wojnarowicz video on gay love”, Washington Post, 30 November 30, 2010; thanks to Judy Chelnick for the link)

A month ago, the Director of the Polish National Museum in Warsaw, Piotr Piotrowski, resigned after the museum’s Board of Trustees had rejected his strategy for the development of the museum. The resignation took place only two years after the Board of Trustees had offered Piotrowski the position on the basis of his proposal for an earlier version of a radical change of the museum, called ‘The critical museum’.

The aim of this proposal was to open the museum to the problems of today’s world and transform it from its status as a provincial version of great museums to an independent institution of intellectual culture which was to compete with commercial tourist attractions. Some local observers believe the Board of Trustee’s rejection of Piotrowski’s strategic plans for the futher development of the museum was related to last summer’s controversial exhibition ’Ars Homoerotica‘; others believe he had to resign because the museum staff couldn’t accept the new strategy.

Whatever reason, Piotrowski’s ideas about a ‘critical museum’ are important and deserve wider circulation. I’m grateful for his permission to post this English translation of a summary of his thoughts:

Critical Museum
In fact, simplifying to some extent, one can distinguish among three types of museums: museum as a temple attended by the faithful who believe in the dogma of the “sacred” character of art, museum as a place of entertainment, “mcdonaldized,” as it were, and involved in the global networks of consumerism and tourism, and museum as a forum which wants to perform critical tasks and encourage reflection on the changing world both on the macro- and micro-scale.

The idea of the museum-as-forum, which Hans Belting refers only to one type of the museum as a response to the globalization of culture and its local aspects, i. e. to the MoCA, should be applied to the mission of another type, i. e. the “universal survey museum.” (Hans Belting, “Contemporary Art and the Museum in the Global Age,” in Peter Weibel, Andrea Buddensieg, eds, Contemporary Art and the Museum. Ostfildern: Hantje Cantz Verlag, 2007, pp. 30-37).

The potential of the “provincialization of the West” in respect to museums I can see in the idea of the “critical museum” – on the one hand, local, not to say “provincial,” and on the other, global. The role of museums is not so much to help develop a new “empire,” but a global politeia, a global constitution of the world on the local, not to say, “provincial” agora. Only such a museum will be able to support the ways of controlling international politics. It will do it by its influence and by addressing local problems which, because of the cosmopolitization of the local, are acquiring global significance. In other words, what gives us a chance is the idea of a local “critical museum” with global ambitions.

There are at least two levels on which such a museum can operate. One of them is its participation on the local agora, analyzing social and political questions, recognized as the key ones for a particular community. Since, however, local communities are in the process of global changing, to address local issues is at the same time global. Not only London is a cosmopolitan European city with its multicultural social strata. Also smaller cities in Europe, including Central and Eastern Europe, are changing their character in the same way, too, however, not in the same extent. Warsaw for example is not such a cosmopolitan center as London, is not a metropolis in the above mentioned degree, and perhaps will never be. However, its character is changing very fast. The local society is much more complex and differentiated in terms of ethnic, political, sexual etc. identities, than it used to be before 1989. The critical museum, thus, should address these processes.

The other level is to rethink the internal condition of the museum in such a historical context, and develop a sort of self-criticism. Something as a critique of local artistic cannons, or relations between local and international art history, should be a subject of a new museum strategy. In one word: both of them, i.e. museum participation in the agora and reshaping its traditional (national and hierarchical) concept of the museum, should be a point of departure in the process of creating the idea of the critical museum, and at the same time its new identity in the face of contemporary cultural and social processes. The theoretical basis of such a museum concept is the museum studies, called also critical museum studies, or new museology, has been developing for ca. thirty years mostly at the universities and art criticism.

Will museums or, more precisely, the type of museum called “universal survey museum,” rooted in a nationalist ideology and European, Western hegemony, prove able to face the challenge? Will the potential of scholarship, if one defines it as critical reflection on reality, be used to transform museums into critical institutions, to cover the distance between the critique of the institution to the institution that is critical? Will the museum or, again, more precisely, the “universal survey museum,” use critical theory, well developed at the universities, and change it into critical practice? Will it drop its role of the mausoleum and become a public forum shaping a politeia? All these questions still remain to be answered.

© Piotr Piotrowski, 2010.

In four earlier posts (# 1 here, #2 here, #3 here, and #4 here), I’ve argued for a more proactive practice with respect to the preservation of the contemporary medical scientific and technological heritage. The posts were provoked by Christian Sichau’s negative attitude (quoted here). There is no space for the new acquisitions, he claimed, and the exhibition curators receive all the museum money anyway. So forget about collecting.

I don’t agree. In my last post I made an argument for distributed curatorial expertise as a way of solving the space problem. Here I’ll argue for another way to overcome the space and resource problem, namely to strengthen the co-operation between museums across the European borders.

Sichau’s pessimistic view is quite understandable as long as museums think of themselves as regional or national actors. From this point of view, not even giants like Deutsches Museum, Science Museum in London, or the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., have the staff, time, and money to embark on systematic (or even systematically selective) collecting programs to cover all or most of the contemporary science, technology, and medicine. As long as they think of themselves as national actors, they will continue to have a space problem.

It’s not made easier by the fact that museums of science, technology, and medicine have very little tradition for working together on collections (except for occasional collaborative projects at the interpersonal level). Museums act as if they are international competitors rather than collaborators and as if each is in principle responsible for the preservation of the entire scientific, technological, and medical heritage.

So as long as you think in terms of a national museum, I guess it is quite difficult to avoid the kind defeatism that Sichau expresses (unless we develop very radical distributed collecting procedures, as outlined in the former post).

But if we think in European terms, the space problem would be more easy to overcome. Why shouldn’t we be able to establish a co-operative collecting program in which national and regional museums agree on how to divide the scientific, technological, and medical heritage between them? One museum specialising on, for example, biomedical laboratory equipment, another on solid state physics, a third on imaging technologies, and so forth. 

After all, there are plenty of historical precedents for doing this. Hundreds of local and regional collections of science, technology, and medicine all over Europe have, throughout the last couple of hundred years, developed rather specialised collections — for example, the collection of surgical instrument and medical instrument catalogues at the Thackray Museum in Leeds, or the collection of eighteenth and early nineteenth century pathological specimens in the Hunterian Museum in London.

True, there are so far no examples of national museums that have deliberately divided the collecting of the late twentieth century and contemporary science, technology, and medicine heritage among them. And admittedly, this is not an easy task. No museum, especially not a national museum, would probablty give up its ambitions to comprehensiveness easily. Even if they do not have the resources today to collect in a comprehensive way today, their ambition is still to cover everything (in some unforeseeable future when they get that precious extra storing space). Without binding agreements of co-operation, no museum will abstain from some areas of acquisitioning and let one of its national or regional competitors take over that particular domain of artefacts.

So to give chunks of the potential artefact acquisition spectrum away to other museums, be they national or regional, is not something that comes easily. Would Science Museum just abstain from collecting nanotechnological and nanomedical objects and let Deutsches Museum take over this burgeoning field? Would Medical Museion stop collecting artefacts from contemporary protein research even if we realised that another European museum maybe had better resources and a more skilled staff to do this?

There are also big administrative and logistic problems involved — how, for example, to develop a continuously updated prospective collection list of the enormous number of artefacts in fields like medical device technology, where a new patent is granted every hour or so?

Yet I believe these are problems that need to be overcome if the development of the contemporary scientific, technical and medical culture over the last decades shall not end on the garbage dumps. If we want to preserve more than infinitesimal parts of the contemporary scientific, technological, and medical heritage, we need to work out a co-operative collecting policy on the European level.

In three earlier posts (here, here and here), I’ve argued in favour of a more proactive acquisition practice with respect to the contemporary medical scientific and technological heritage.

Against some curators who believe we need to restrict acquisitioning (for economic, space etc. reasons), I suggest that we should rather open up the sluice gates for collecting as much contemporary stuff as possible.

Immediately, this sounds like an impossibility. All science, medical and technology museums have limited staff and resources. How could we ever dream of acquiring, keeping and managing the tsunami of images, documents and used artefacts that would arrive from the contemporary world of medicine?

The solution, as I see it, is to begin re-thinking museum acquisition and curating practices in terms of distributed curatorial expertise.

Distributed expertise is a variety of crowdsourcing, a term coined by Jeff Howe in a Wired magazine article in 2006. Wikipedia defines it as a ‘‘distributed problem-solving and production model’’:

Problems are broadcast to an unknown group of solvers in the form of an open call for solutions. Users—also known as the crowd—typically form into online communities, and the crowd submits solutions. The crowd also sorts through the solutions, finding the best ones. These best solutions are then owned by the entity that broadcast the problem in the first place—the crowdsourcer—and the winning individuals in the crowd are sometimes rewarded. […] Crowdsourcing may produce solutions from amateurs or volunteers working in their spare time, or from experts or small businesses which were unknown to the initiating organization.

Crowdsourcing is only one of many social technologies for participatory knowledge production that have emerged in recent years. In analogy to the notion of ‘web 2.0’, museologists like Nina Simon have coined the notion of ‘museum 2.0’. Simon’s idea is not primarily to employ social web media as tools in museum outreach, but rather to rethink the physical museum in terms of the conceptual apparatus of ‘web 2.0’; that is, a participatory museum, in analogy to the participatory web.

The ambitious task of museum 2.0 is to reconceptualise all activities of the museum — research, acquisitions, curating, exhibition making and other kinds of outreach — in terms of user participation, user creativity and distributed knowledge.

To think about the acquisitioning of scientific, technological, and medical artefacts in terms of museum 2.0 implies that everyone who deals, in his/her daily work, with objects which could become potential museum artefacts is a potential curator.

The goal for the participatory museum would be to transform such potential curators into active participants in the acquisition and curating of collections (I call it ‘crowd acquisitioning’).

Social technologies like distributing, curating, and crowd acquisitioning do not by themselves solve the space problem associated with the collecting of the contemporary scientific, technological and medical heritage. However, one of the implications of the participatory museum is that its collections do not necessarily have to be physically located in a central museum building. If curating and curators can be distributed, so can collections.

The idea of a distributed museum collection is not a central museum with peripheral repositories to which only professional curators have keys and access. It should rather be understood as a network of local collections. each managed by its local adjunct curator.

Most departments in most universities have their own small collections, sometimes just a small cupboard with a few objects kept for commemorative and nostalgic reasons. The governing role of the central museum vis-á-vis the distributed museum collection would then primarily be to offer advice in the form of guidelines for ‘best museum practice’ in acquisitions and curating.

To think in terms of a network of distributed museum collections not only promises to solve some of the problems with lack of storage space. It may also become a powerful instrument for raising the historical awareness and responsibility of practitioners-curators. Instead of employing more professional staff to collect, curate, and register artefacts in the central museum repository, scarce resources would be better used by training practitioner-curators to become gatekeepers that build relations between the museum and the rest of the university.

In this scenario — what would the role of the curator be? Instead of doing all the curatorial work themselves, professional museum curators would rather develop guidelines for how the network of distributed curators shall curate and preserve; the professionals would also distribute protocols for registration in a wiki-based central database; and, most importantly, they would spend much time and energy raising discussions among the practitioners of why the scientific, technological, and medical heritage is worth keeping and its role in the creation of cultural identity. In short, the main role of professional museum curators would be to build a distributed curatorial experience.

Much of this is hardly new. Many local and regional museums have worked along these lines long before the concept ‘museum 2.0’ was coined. Many science, technology, and medical museums once started as participatory collecting projects initiated by enthusiastic practitioners, who created small local collections, some of which still remain in the custody of departments and scientific societies.

Medical Museion is a case in point. Today the museum has one of Europe’s largest, richest, and most varied collections of medical artefacts of all kinds — but actually it once started as a private initiative by Copenhagen doctors on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Danish Medical Association (DADL) in 1907. Initially conceived as a collection of contemporary medical devices for a temporary show to commemorate the progress of medicine since the founding of DADL in 1857, the collection was made permanent and the museum continued to grow, largely thanks to the enthusiasm of the contributors, and it continued to do so for at least two or three generations.

Today, such participatory acquisition practices have largely been abolished. The progressive professionalisation in science, technical, and medical museums throughout the twentieth century has made such practices look amateurish and antiquated.

However, I believe it is time to rethink the advantage of bringing practitioners of science, technology, and medicine into more active roles in the work of acquisitioning and curating. Citizen-science projects such as fold.it and Galaxy Zoo are excellent examples of how this can be done in principle — although the specific features of museum knowledge production, that is, its material artefact, is an extra challenge to overcome (affter all museums cannot be run in the virtual space only).

Read the final and last post in this series of five here.

On next Thursday, 16 April, I’m contributing to a meeting on the theme ”ICOM’s Code of Ethics and the grey zones of museum practise”, organized by Danish ICOM.

The background for the meeting is that ICOM’s current Code of Ethics (from 2004) apparently doesn’t cover a number of ‘grey zones’, which Danish ICOM believes may be in conflict with the Code, for example, the problem about the collection and display of human remains. Write the organisers:

When do human remains constitute scientific material not differing from for instance animal bones or manmade tools, and when do they represent a deceased person deserving sensitive treatment in the entire museum process from excavation to exhibition?

I guess the human remains issue is the reason why Danish ICOM have asked me to participate (though I’m not sure they would if they had read some of my earlier writings on this issue, for example, my paper at the human remains conference in London in 2005 :-).

Other alleged ethically problematic issues include the fact that some museums allow auction houses to operate on their premises or offer museum visitors the opportunity to bring their collectables to the museum to have them evaluated by auctioneers, something conflict with the Code’s rule that members of the museum profession should not partake in any kind of heritage trade. Yet another problem is how museums shall handle international trade in cultural and natural heritage, for exampole, “How should Danish museum professionals deal with demands for the return of objects appropriated for instance in colonial times”?

The meeting will begin with four 30 min talks by Alissandra Cummins (President of ICOM) about ICOMs ethical rules; Bernice Murphy (Chair of ICOM’s Ethics Committee) on grey zone cases from an international perspective; Caitlin Griffiths (Museums Association) on grey zone problems in the UK; and Eva Mähre Lauritzen (the Natural History Museum in Oslo) about similar ethical discussions in Norway.

Then follows a two hour long panel discussion between Anne Højer Petersen (Fuglsang Art Museum), Peter Pentz (The Danish National Museum), Jette Sandal (Museum of Copenhagen), Mille Gabriel (Danish ICOM), Henning Camre (The Danish UNESCO Commission) and myself (Thomas Söderqvist, Medical Museion).

The meeting takes place in the Museum of Copenhagen between 1pm and 5.45pm. For further information, see here or contact Vinnie Nørskov, klavn@hum.au.dk. For registration, email mtj@museumstjenesten.com (tell them if you want lunch).

A couple of days ago, I argued against Christian Sichau’s restrictive acquisition policy for museums of science, technology and medicine. I suggested, not only to actively promote the acquisition of visual, material, and textual objects from contemporary laboratories and storage rooms, but indeed to open up the sluice gates for collecting as much contemporary stuff as possible.

An optimistic ‘‘Yes, please’’ policy is nicer and wiser than a pessimistic ‘‘Nein’’ policy.

My argument is based on my experiences from Medical Museion’s integrated research and curatorial program ‘‘Biomedicine on Display’’. The program was launched in 2005 with the explicit intention to lay the research foundation for the acquisition and public outreach of the visual and material culture of late twentieth century and contemporary biomedicine — a time period which so far has been very sparsely represented in museums of science, technology, and medicine.

During the past four years we have run a number of research projects on a variety of aspects of late twentieth century and contemporary biomedicine. Parallel to these research projects, we have set up a series of exhibitions with more or less explicit connection to contemporary science (‘Oldetopia’, ‘Design4Science’, ‘Eye Catchers and Swagger Images’, ‘Split + Splice: Fragments from the Age of Biomedicine’, ‘Primary Substances: Treasures from the History of Protein Research’, and ‘Healthy Aging’).

These research projects and exhibitions have been more or less closely associated with the collection of a large number of recent artefacts from laboratories and hospitals in the Copenhagen region. Some artefacts were chosen to satisfy the needs of the exhibitions, others were unsolicited donations from university laboratories, hospital clinics, and pharmaceutical and medical device companies.

We have an acute lack of space and certainly do not have enough professional curatorial staff to take care of everything properly. Registration is constantly lagging behind. Nevertheless we rarely say ‘‘No’’. In some concrete cases we have, with some trepidation, done so, but not as a general policy. Why?

Basically, I suggest, because a ‘‘Yes, please’’ policy opens up a whole array of fruitful interactions between museums and practitioners of science, technology, and medicine. Indeed, it promises to change the way science, technology, and medical museums place themselves in relation to the rest of the university.

Instead of seeing the university museum as a closed repository for exquisite objects guarded by professional curators, a ‘‘Yes, please’’ policy is an open invitation to every single researcher, technician, and student at the university to become adjunct curators of their own heritage.

Sichau is right in the sense that museums will never be able to employ enough professional curators to describe, register, and evaluate every single artefact and image in the university’s laboratories and storage rooms. But with the help of our colleagues in science, technology, and medicine, we can create a distributed curatorial expertise.

In the next post, I will discuss the notion of ‘distributed curatorial expertise’ further.

(this is the third part in a series of posts about the participatory museum and distributed curating was  brought yesterday — see the first part here and the second part here. To be continued)

Measured by the number of incoming emails and RSS-feeds, the big news in the science museum world today is a critical article by Edward Rothstein (“The Thrill of Science, Tamed by Agendas”) in the Arts Special section of yesterday’s New York Times.

A century ago, Rothstein points out, museums were simply collections of objects: “And science museums were collections of objects related to scientific inquiry and natural exploration. Their collections grew out of the ‘wonder cabinets’ of gentlemen explorers, conglomerations of the marvelous.”

Rothstein loves the old collection-oriented museums (so do I, and so do my emailing and RSS-feeding friends and colleagues). One of his favourites is the partly dispersed collection of Henry Wellcome, which includes “moccasins owned by Florence Nightingale, Napoleon’s toothbrush, amputation saws, an array of prosthetic limbs, a Portuguese executioner’s mask, Etruscan votive offerings and obstetrical forceps”.

“You look at such collections”, writes Rothstein, ”and sense an enormous exploratory enterprise. You end up with an enlarged understanding of the world’s variety and an equally enlarged sense of the human capacity to make sense of it”.

But over the last two generations, the scientific objects have largely been replaced by politics, educational aims and curatorial experimental ambitions: “the science museum has become a place where politics, history and sociology often crowd out physics and the hard sciences. There are museums that believe their mission is to inspire political action, and others that seek to inspire nascent scientists”. Museums have become agenda-driven.

Although I disagree with Rothstein’s lumping together of science museums and science centers (in my view these have very little in common), I believe he has a point. All of this museological experimentation may, says Rothstein, “be a sign of the science museum’s struggle to define itself”.

But defining itself to what identity? Rothstein is looking forward to some unforseeable “brilliant transformations of the science museum model” — hoping that “today’s rampant experimentation with exhibition styles might eventually yield a new model as yet unimagined”.

Not entirely unforeseeable though. Rothstein places some hope with exhibitions like those in Boston’s Museum of Science, for example a “remarkable 19th-century collection of finely wrought glass models of sea creatures” which becomes part of an exhibition about modeling “and its importance to the pursuit of play, fashion and science”.

In another BMoS-exhibition, “the museum’s animal specimens are joined with a mineral collection, vintage dioramas and other artifacts to explore the nature of collecting and categorizing”; a third example is the revamped 1961 exhibit “Mathematica” (created by Charles and Ray Eames); its ”exploration of abstraction was inspiring to a young boy who saw it long ago; it remains a touchstone”.

All three exhibitions “explain important concepts about how science is done while displaying extraordinary objects and spurring new ways of seeing — all without pressing viewers into a particular program”.

I fully understand Rothstein’s wish to get the thrill of science back in the museum (whether museum or science centre). He is waiting for Jesus the Curator to come to the Museum Temple Place and throw all the paraphernalia and extravaganzas out, and restore the simple virtues of a science museum: science, objects and principles.

Well, to me that sounds like an agenda — another one than the prevailing populist agenda indeed, but it is still an agenda. I don’t think you can avoid agendas by letting the science and the objects somehow speak for themselves. The question is rather what kind of agenda you want.

Nina has a point — her favourite museums are idiosyncratic. There are lots of “perfectly nice, perfectly forgettable” museums, but those that stick in one’s memory are those with individuality, like the Museum of Jurassic Technology. They are often small, because they are not run by committees, and the staff is passionate about what they are doing.

Yet, as Nina points out, most small idiosyncratic museums strive to become bigger and more mainstream rather than remain small, quirky and passionate and cultivating their idiosyncracy. She gives four reasons for this:

Funders and potential donors tend to look for particular benchmarks of professionalism (appropriately), and few are comfortable funding the most risky or content-specific institutions.

As money gets tight, museums look for exhibits, program strategies, and revenue streams that are “proven” by other institutions’ successes, rather than charting their own potentially risky path.

Many museums no longer employ in-house exhibit developers, relying instead on a short list of contractors and consultants. Design firms’ projects often have a common look across different cities and institutions.

Small museums, which are most likely to cultivate local, distinctive voice and approaches, often have an inferiority complex. Rather than asserting their uniqueness, they try to emulate large museums.

Science centers are among the worst. They have, Ninas suggests, three additional reasons for homogeneity:

The audience cycles frequently as families “age out.” Institutions may feel less of a need to offer something unusual or distinctive if the audience will keep refreshing every few years.

The content is often seen as not being community-specific. Science is science, and grocery store exhibits are grocery store exhibits. Funders like the NSF have encouraged science centers in particular to share their techniques and evaluations, which is fabulous but also leads to rampant and sometimes unthinking imitation.

These museums have undergone the fastest growth in the industry in the past thirty years. There is a big business of selling exhibits, copies of exhibits, and exhibit recipe books, and many individuals who start new institutions rely almost entirely on these vehicles to fill their galleries.

I certainly share Nina’s love of idiosyncratic institutions — and I can certainly see the risk of becoming bigger and more established. Can we keep the passion even though we are slowly growing?

Like most museums, Medical Museion is a member of the International  Council of Museums (ICOM). The major benefit of membership is that you don’t have to pay entrance to other member museums (and sometimes are allowed to bypass the queue by getting in through the VIP entrance, which gives a kick of feeling important).

But except for this, one doesn’t really get much out of the hefty membership fee. ICOM, with its headquarters in the UNESCO building in Paris, is just another big transnational bureaucracy.

In the good old days of Western imperialism, ICOM promoted wholesome European and American values. Not so anymore. The 22nd General Conference will be held in Shanghai in November this year on the theme ‘Museums for Social Harmony’.

Took me some time to get my memory in order. In fact, last I heard the term ‘social harmony’ was in a Xinhua news report from the Sixth Plenum of the 16th Central Committee meeting of the Chinese Communist Party, held in Beijing in 2006.

Building social harmony, said a CPC spokesperson then, ”is a major strategic move taken by the Party to build a fair and just society and attain sustainable social and economic development”. And now, four years later, this strategic move has already been adopted by ICOM.

As a corollary, ’Museums for Social Harmony’, has also been chosen as the theme for this year’s International Museum Day on Tuesday 18 May.  

Actually, when you think about it, it’s not that surprising. I don’t believe this is a specific ICOM phenomenon. Transnational bureaucracies probably have quite a lot in common with CPC’s world view of a socially harmonic, authoritarian, market economy-based society.