In which I defend museums

While doing research on film archives (for HIS9806), I came across a harrowing quote from one Douglas Crimp, a professor at the University of Rochester. His take on museums took my attention away from the various methods of preservation of nitrate film and I thought I would share it here.

Crimp's view of museums is a pessimistic one. He sees them as institutions of confinement, similar to asylums and prisons (!). He believed they placed art within a confining framework of historicity that disallowed the possibilities of discontinuity and rupture with the past. The author of the book I was reading, film archivist Karen F. Gracy, disagreed; she believed the museum maintained itself in its gatekeeper of culture role by forsaking rigidity and allowing different forms of artifacts in its doors [1].

I had problems with Crimps's statement. Was he insinuating that museums stole art, placing them in an institutional setting where they were decontextualized to the point of being unrecognizable? Did placing them in a historical venue make them any less important, ground-breaking, modern? I have to agree with Gracy's idea that museums have been able to adopt various new objects and represent them as important historical artifacts, everything from celebrity shoes to classic Mac computers from the 1980s (these have to be on display somewhere...). Museums are no longer the stuffy, dark old buildings filled solely with hundred-year-old objects which had belonged to important people. Museums are changing, and are able to show the importance of everyday objects from the not-so-distant past as important cultural, political and economic artifacts.

As for placing objects in confining historical frameworks: What better way to observe how things can be completely new than to place them alongside similar (or not) objects for comparison? True, museums tend to lean towards an idea of progress, and as history students we are taught to never believe something hasn't happened before, and that everything is continuous. Museums, however, are also able to teach visitors about the evolution of ideas, countries, attitudes, etc. I may not know a lot about art, but I can't believe placing an important new piece in a museum will immediately give it a negative historical aura by taking away its individuality. Museums like MOMA are popping up in many large cities and feel very different than museums like the American Museum of Natural History, but they are museums nonetheless. Maybe Crimp needs to redefine his definition of a museum before comparing them to prisons.



[1] Karen F. Gracy, Film Preservation: Competing Definitions of Value, Use and Practice (Chicago: The Society of American Archivists, 2007), 71.