![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
Abstract
Three recent reports – Valuing Museums (2004), Capturing Cultural Value (2004) and The McMaster Review (2008) – argue that there is confusion about the role of museums in society, largely due to government instrumentalism. Capturing Cultural Value maintains that museums can overcome the dichotomy between intrinsic and instrumentalist value by focusing on public value and learning from other disciplines to articulate a more rounded view of their role. Valuing Museums protests the range of non-traditional roles imposed on museums by government. The McMaster Review argues that external measurement should be replaced by professional judgement. For all three, history begins in 1979 so that the account of the “traditional” lacks depth. The missing history is summarized, recalling the reformist origins of many museums and their later retreat from social engagement. This reflects the development of what Perkin calls the “professional society”, in which technical experts dominated virtually unchallenged in the century before the advent of Thatcherism – in 1979. The lack of a unitary traditional museum role is revealed through a case study – the Jameel Gallery of Islamic Art in the V&A. This reveals internal disagreement about the relative authority of visitor and the curators. The failure to act on the extensive visitor studies carried out during the gallery development leads to a significant reduction in the value produced for the public – there is no attempt to represent how the objects were seen from within the cultures which created them, thus excluding a wide range of human meanings. For museums to realize their potential role in society they need to embrace the dual task of revealing the meanings of the objects in their care, and of doing do so in ways that contribute to the continuing process of democratization. The alternative is that they continue to support increasing inequality.
Notes
I would like to thank the following for their assistance: Chris Whitehead for his helpful critique; Helen Rees Leahy for allowing me to read an unpublished paper on the Jameel Gallery; and my colleague Dr Ellen McAdam for her thoughtful response to and early draft.
In 2008 a number of regional and university museums were invited to join NMDC.
The Tate Gallery was built on the site of Millbank Women's Prison. According to Taylor the contemporary rhetoric surrounding the creation of The Tate comprises “metaphors of ‘improvement”: they are metaphors which mobilised the interests and investments of this new class by helping to define the character of its leisure spaces and the character of the “cultural” within them, as much as they also integrated closely with the new images of the national “tradition” that that culture was thought to require. They are odd metaphors, I should say at once, and they emerge in some unexpected places. At their most general they involve ideas of order, cleanliness, posture and certain late-Victorian forms of enjoyment. They also include a particular sub-text that is worth emphasising for its very unfamiliarity – a fantasy about the eradication of crime. These may be odd or unfamiliar metaphors in the world of art history and theory, but they are the stock in trade of urban regeneration.
Stephen Weil Citation(1998) charts the same change in American museums.
Carey's later What Good are the Arts? Citation(2005) falls prey to the great temptation of the specialist, of assuming that everyone sees the world through precisely the same lens as he does. Because the visual arts do not move him or engage him with the same depth as reading, he claims all sorts of benefits for his preferred mode of engagement with culture and dismisses others, despite their personal testimony of their significance.