Museums

Paper Summary:

This paper explores the roles that museums have today and discusses this against the background of contemporary academic and policy debates. The paper considers whether museums can defend their role as a conserving agent, especially in times where the Internet and other media have become the main source of information for most people. The paper then concludes that the traditional museum, as it exists for more than 200 years now, plays and will always play a special but nonetheless important role in the lives of the people and in a society that rather is a changing collectivity than a rigid system.

From the Paper:

"The term 'museum' is originally derived from the Greek word mouseion, which simply meant library, and was used for the Ptolematic library in Alexandria (Vergo: 1997, 1). But that collection of books in ancient Greece cannot be compared to the modern form of our so well-known museum. The museum as we know it first came to being in the 18th century in France. After the French Revolution, the private collections of the rich were made publicly accessible and thus gathered together in special places for every citizen to visit. This process of bringing culture to the mass, of 'culturing', was an attempt of constituting a public, of generating 'a self-identifying collectivity in which members would have equal rights, a sense of loyalty to one another and freedom from exclusions' (MacDonald: 2003, 2). "

Sample of Sources Used:

• AMBROSE, T. AND PAINE, C. (1993) Museum Basics, London an NewYork: Routledge.
• HOOPER- GREENHILL, E. (ed.) (1999) 'Education, communication and inter-pretation: towards a critical pedagogy in museums' in The edu- cational role of the museum, 2nd edition, London and New York: Routledge.
• HUDSON, K. (1975) A social history of museums, New York: Humanities Press.
• HUNT, T. (2004) 'A latte and a Picasso to go', The Observer, 15 February.
• MACDONALD, S. (2003) 'Museum, national, postnational and transcultural Identities', Museum and Society , vol.1, no.1, March, pp.1-16.

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• Analytical Essay # 6997 : "The Guggenheim and Metropolitan Museums of Art"
• Comparison Essay # 138963 : "Comparing the Facades of Two Museums"

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