Are Museums Relevant or Irrelevant

At a recently started "blogroll" (as opposed to sausage roll) on the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi site entitled "Are Museums Irrelevant?" Robert R. Janes commences a discussion of his book, "Museums in a Troubled World: Renewal, Irrelevance or Collapse" (London: Routledge, May, 2009)".

Some strong claims are made by Janes and the respondents including the usual suspects, some of whom no doubt would want to peddle their wares to help fix the problems which are so readily apparent to those in the know.

This post may be of interest to Museum 3.0 members, particularly in light of the statements.

I have commented on issues relevant to this at an earlier post on my site - and an associated essay and more recently and at (""Managerialism, Accountants and Self-interest"").

At this juncture the one point I would make is that broad generalisations of the kind "museums are failing" suffer from being generalisations. Some museums are various things, other are other things. There are a number of museums which have a adopted corporatisation, marketisation, commercialisation, tourism, entertainment and so on and a number which have maintained a different stand. Of particular interest are some art museums such as the Metropolitan in New York and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and some natural history museums such as the American Museum of Natural History. And then there are other museums such as the Royal Ontario Museum and others. It would currently be fashionable to assert bankers are corrupt and politicians are irrelevant. What do we do then? After we have done that I mean!

Questions such as, "if museum didn't exist, would we want to invent them" don't get us very far, except suggesting a sudden demand for hair shirts (size director). The more appropriate questions would seem to me to be of the kind, what do we know about good museums, what do we mean by such a term and what are the characteristics of such entities?

Enough for now.