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Museum REPORT

This document provides an overview of museums. It defines a museum as an institution that cares for artifacts and objects of historical, cultural, or scientific importance. Museums aim to collect, preserve, interpret and display these items for public education. There are many types of museums focused on subjects like art, history, science and children. Some of the largest, most visited museums include the Louvre, British Museum, and Metropolitan Museum of Art. The purpose of modern museums is to acquire, conserve and share collections to increase public knowledge.

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712 views5 pages

Museum REPORT

This document provides an overview of museums. It defines a museum as an institution that cares for artifacts and objects of historical, cultural, or scientific importance. Museums aim to collect, preserve, interpret and display these items for public education. There are many types of museums focused on subjects like art, history, science and children. Some of the largest, most visited museums include the Louvre, British Museum, and Metropolitan Museum of Art. The purpose of modern museums is to acquire, conserve and share collections to increase public knowledge.

Uploaded by

Sunny Sharma
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION

3
A museum is an institution that cares for (conserves) a collection of artifacts and
other objects of artistic, cultural, historical, or scientific importance. Many public
museums make these items available for public viewing through exhibits that may
be permanent or temporary. The largest museums are located in major cities
throughout the world, while thousands of local museums exist in smaller cities,
towns and rural areas. Museums have varying aims, ranging from serving
researchers and specialists to serving the general public. The goal of serving
researchers is increasingly shifting to serving the general public.

Fig 1.1 Louvre museum; Paris


There are many types of museums, including art museums, natural history
museums, science museums, war museums, and children's museums. Amongst
the world's largest and most visited museums are the Louvre in Paris, the National
Museum of China in Beijing, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., the
British Museum and National Gallery in London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art
in New York City and Vatican Museums in Vatican City.

Museum architecture is defined as the art of designing and installing or building


space that will be used to house specific museum functions, more particularly the
functions of exhibition and display, preventive an remedial active conservation, fig 1.2 British museum; London
study, management, and receiving visitors. Since the invention of modern
museums, from the end of 18th century and the beginning of the 19th,while old
heritage buildings were also being reconverted for museum use, a specific
architecture evolved that was linked to the requirements of preserving,
researching and communicating collections through permanent and temporary
exhibitions.
The beginning of 21st century will be undeniably marked as the museum’s golden
era. The audience hailed the opening of new museums and the expansion of
already existing institutions with excitement and glorification, without restraint.
Since the beginning of the museum boom, at the end of 1980’s, the role of the
museum in modern society has been examined. Museums, like Stirling’s museum
in Stuttgart, represented the birth of a new architectural genealogy, spreading fig 1.3 Vatican museums
worldwide at the speed of light. One of the most important characteristics of the
contemporary (“new”) museum is the so called, “usable flexibility”.
4
Public areas, including vast entrance halls with versatile function, auditoriums,
museum restaurants and shops, are becoming more and more important for urban
scenery, while new buildings, aside from their role of being urban catalysts in
postindustrial cities, are equipped with determined aesthetic mechanisms,
enabling their authors to express their architectural skills, so that museums
frequently become stunningly pure materializations of their authors’ attitude
toward architecture itself.

Contemporary museum buildings are “seismographs of the architectural culture to


which they belong“. The way in which the architectural forms are expressed, in
order to ensure the accommodation of the increasing functional and fig1.4 guggenheim museum spain
representative complexity of the contemporary museum, illustrates the
development of architecture and accelerated changes in trends which can act
either in parallel or counteractive states, but most frequently, in complete
opposition to each other. . Every option has a different approach to the
organization of interior space, and museological criteria considering collection
presentation; or for conveying emblematic and symbolic values of museum;
different ideas about the relation between museum and urban surroundings; ideas
about materialization and technology.

Purposes: ’
The purpose of modern museums is to collect, preserve, interpret, and display fig1.5 royal ontario museum

items of artistic, cultural, or scientific significance for the education of the public.
From a visitor or community perspective, the purpose can also depend on one's
point of view. A trip to a local history museum or large city art museum can be an
entertaining and enlightening way to spend the day. To city leaders, a healthy
museum community can be seen as a gauge of the economic health of a city, and
a way to increase the sophistication of its inhabitants. To a museum professional,
a museum might be seen as a way to educate the public about the museum's
mission, such as civil rights or environmentalism. Museums are, above all,
storehouses of knowledge. In 1829, James Smithson's bequest, that would fund
the Smithsonian Institution, stated he wanted to establish an institution "for the fig1.6 modern art museum dubai

increase and diffusion of knowledge.”

5
Museums of natural history in the late 19th century exemplified the Victorian desire
for consumption and for order. Gathering all examples of each classification of a
field of knowledge for research and for display was the purpose. As American
colleges grew in the 19th century, they developed their own natural history
collections for the use of their students. By the last quarter of the 19th century, the
scientific research in the universities was shifting toward biological research on a
cellular level, and cutting edge research moved from museums to university
laboratories. While many large museums, such as the Smithsonian Institution, are
still respected as research centers, research is no longer a main purpose of most
museums. While there is an ongoing debate about the purposes of interpretation
of a museum's collection, there has been a consistent mission to protect and
preserve artifacts for future generations. Much care, expertise, and expense is
invested in preservation efforts to retard decomposition in aging documents,
artifacts, artworks, and buildings. All museums display objects that are important
to a culture. As historian Steven Conn writes, "To see the thing itself, with one's
own eyes and in a public place, surrounded by other people having some version
of the same experience can be enchanting."

Museum purposes vary from institution to institution. Some favor education over
conservation, or vice versa. For example, in the 1970s, the Canada Science and
Technology Museum favored education over preservation of their objects. They
displayed objects as well as their functions. One exhibit featured a historic printing
press that a staff member used for visitors to create museum memorabilia. Some
seek to reach a wide audience, such as a national or state museum, while some
museums have specific audiences, like the LDS Church History Museum or local
history organizations. Generally speaking, museums collect objects of significance
that comply with their mission statement for conservation and display. Although
most museums do not allow physical contact with the associated artifacts, there
are some that are interactive and encourage a more hands-on approach.

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