MAKING MUSEUMS MATTER STEPHEN E. WEILdens of Naughtarnuse are simply unable to con 5 the notion that they might derive some benefit from the assemblage ar public exhibition of groups of objects, Te isa thought that has never oc tony of them, nor can it, Whereas the citizens of Musalot have chosen dedicate a consider 1n of their public resources to the operatio of their museums, the no less w have chosen to dedicate a comparable share of their public resources to-€ land’s already excellent family services, educational s Museums CAN AND DO THEY MAKE A DIFFERENCE? Pash your imagination stil further. Leap three or four ‘Consider the following questions concerning the impact that Musalot's mi ‘Naughtamuse’s lack of them may possibly have mad on the lives of their respective inhabitants Do you think that life on these two islands will have continue in just as parallel a way as it did bef island had museums? I they are no longer quite so parallel, in what specific ways (aside fr fact that one island does have museums and all that goes with them: seum visits, museum workers, muscum as *So here it is a lst: che distinguished ching!” ‘courses, rauseum chat on e-mail, and more) do you envision that life 9 Musalot may,have become different from life on Naughtamuse? Do you consider these differences to be entirely positive for Mu ya think that to some extent they repr think might be attributable to the presence of one kind of muscum (att tory, science, natural history) and others that you think might be att able tothe presence of other kinds? Can you specify which might be How significant do y x the passage of time? Do you think ce did it make that museums were ever here? So what made if they hadn't been? they might be even mote pronounced after five or six? : © your: per Given what you personally know, feel, and think about museums ‘ou prefer to live on Musalot or Naughtamuse? Mi your answer to that be different ¥ some urgent ands ‘stantial need of family services, scholarship funded me cal assistance? Might your answer be different about muscums a great deal less than you actu te Aeecution of Muses in Noverber 1997 in Roa i: ™ ss words came to the great Anglo-American novelist Henry James after z suffered a stroke in December 1915, an episode that James took as si ng that his death was imminent (he did in fact die some twelve weeks Tater), In considering the most fundamental of questions concerning mu ms-—Do museums really matter? Can and do museums make a differ we could more than appropriately echo James's words: So here they at last: those distinguished—or, at least, those persistent—questions, ere are what Phil Nowlen of the Museum Management Institute has for ny years referred to as the ultimate “so what” questions. So what differ Bestions that the muscurn community has, for the past several decades or ore, struggled mightily to keep safely locke: tof pub- E view, With some haughtiness, J. P. Morgan once observed that if you ed to ask what the annual cost of operating a yacht was, then youprobably couldn't really afford one anyway, Too frequently, all too many of us working fn museums have assumed a not dissimilar haughtiness: Ifyou needed to ask the value of a museum, if you needed to ask whether it mats ‘ered, then you probably wouldn't understand the answer anyway That time has gone. Those ultimate “so what” questions are finally here and with us. With us as well are some postulti variably te questions that must i low in their wake. IPmuseums do matter, if they can make a difference, to whom do they matter, and what ae the diferences that they ight make? Who determines, and when, and how, whether they are, in fact, making those differences? And, perhaps thorniest of all, how much of a difference must any particular muscum make, and over what length of time, for some well-informed observer—a donor or an influential legsla- for—to consider a muscum to be successful, to consider it as having demonstrated itself worthy to receive ongoing support? When James sighed “at last," he thought he was facing his end. By con- ‘ast, our “at last” might just as readily signal a beginning, What will be ar- gued here is that rather than being intimidated by these long- deferred tions, the museum commu encourage and even warm! welcome them, Subject to our willingness to take two major steps—one a bold conceptual step forward, the other a more strategic step off to the side—these are questions to which we can properly respond clearly, per- suasively, and positively, he bold one, requires that we publicly face up ‘the reality—and face up to it with a forthrightness that hitherto has been Jacking —that all museums are not equally good and that, in fact, som seums that manage t vent and go about ness might good at all. Such an admissi that we reach some consensus as to what constitutes a “good” museum and, second, that we be prepared to acknowledge that a mus £2 good museum should be considered, by reason of that failure, to be a “bad” museum, ‘The second necessary step, the strategic one, day-to-day busi concerned with articu: lating the potential outcomes that museums can achieve, We must be abl to sort out —with far greater fa than we generally do now—the and somewhat more systemati Il range of pul seums have the capacity to play. All too frequently, museums are chara 96 at, but they are also important for a very great deal tainly important for that, but feee ‘more than that. To conceive of muiseums in so narrow and constricted a way is to omit entircly—or, at leas ‘ : the educational in whic 10 greatly obscure—the many other rich xy are able to pro- and important ways vide a range of public benefits REACHING A CONSENSUS ON MERIT In approaching the first step—achieving some consensus as to what might swwers applicable to all museums, or even to the museums ofa single disc s simply not realistic. This country’s eight thousand! museums vary in terms of the purposes to which they aspire, the resources that they have available, and the infinitely different contexts in which they rate, and it would defy common sense and every statistical expectation K ‘museums, regardless of how evaluated, would be found meritorious. What seems clear at the outset s that these questions on an institution-by-institation basis r in that way has several consequences, It renders Approaching museums in that way has se i shes ’ssecret nscolo, of logic that might (for lack ofa better name) be gam that superbly self-serving syllogism that goes: u undeniably a museum. Ergo, my instte- Inthe face of these long-deferred ‘what ways muscums can make a difference, come, every museum will have to stand and answer for itsell. A second consequence—almost a comic one—of approaching sues course by including a phrase i : That phrase is “bad museum.” have scarcely mura eorbindln ffl uch irve mae ede Sedan sam”—used in any public setting, not a twenty-eight consecutive an- wual meetings of the AAM, not nerable meetings of state =) eS gional museum organizations, not in the pages of Muse tis almos 9asf we are all the children of some great museological mother who taugl us early on that “if you can’t say something nice about another museum, 's better to say nothing at all.” Or, more fancifully, it’s as if museum workers constitute some kind ofa tribe and that this is one of our taboos, “Bad museum” public, It’s ike the “F-word—not polite. Considered less fa “bad museums” may touch on several importar people within the museum field and beyond whom I've described elsewhere as “romantics,” the concept of is not something to be sa museum is an inherently positive one, ‘These are the people who embrace the first and major premise of that se= llogism. Museums, from their viewpoint, se. The notion of a bad museum would, accordingly, be an oxymoron — like an ugly baby oF too much ice cream. Even the worst of museums, like. ice creams, would still be pretty good, Second, the failure to talk publicly about bad museums may also be an unfortunate by-pr fal quest to professi of the museum fcld’s long and general I, Alths process of professionalization as generally positive or at least benign —a ‘means of raising the standards in a particular field—others have seen it as having a distinctively negative aspect. As long ago as 1776, Adam Smith noted in The Health of Nation that “people of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, a conspiracy against the public, oF in some contrivance to raise prices.” One of the characters in Geor play The Doctor's more succinctly. “All professions,” he says, “are conspiracies against y."To some extent, our almost congenital avoidance of open refer- ‘ences to bad museums may simply rest on an understandably collegial and e conversation ends in there appears to be a deep reluctance the museum field to believe that any judgment about a muscum's overall merit could possibly have any validity beyond being merely “one per- son’ opinion,” For those inside a If no objectis of the institution's overall performance is possible, thei key staff members may be Thad a somewhat heated discussion about this with a senior Smi entist who claimed that any effort to judge a museum must be, at best, a about the performance of s good organizations per sh most observers regard the ‘matter of subjective speculation. ‘Thinking to clinch the argument that some ‘museum might genuinely be a terrible place, Lasked what he would think of ‘an institution in which the collections were deteriorating, the pertinent records were either missing or inaccurate, the endowment money was long since wrongfully squandered, and the little information provided to the dwin- dling handful of visitors was almost invariably wrong. After sticking his pipe for a few moments he said, “Sounds lke it could stand some improving.” of virtually any public discourse concerning bad museums ight be merely amusing if it did not also have one serious consequence, Because the museum community has never been willing to grapple openly th what might make any particular museum a *bad” one, by the same token it has failed to address in any sustained and productive way the ques- tion of what might make some other museum a “good” one. The closest it has come is through the AAM's accreditation process, Accreditation, how- ‘ever—and, in a membership organization like AAM, there may well be no alternative—simply works on a pass/fail bass. It does not grade museums; not award a truly superb one an A+ and a less than superb but still ‘more than minimally acceptable one a B-. The museum that is outstand- ing by every possible measure and the museum that can simply squeak past the current accreditation standard fall into the same category. Museums that hail to achieve accreditation at all are largely protected by silence, By facing up to these questions of whether museums matter and whether they can and do make a difference, and by acknowledging that these ques- tions can only be addressed institution by institution, we can begin to pro vide ourselves with a basis on which to make sound, open, and credible judgments about which museums might be good ones and which ones might not. In doing so, we can also begin to provide ourselves with some mean- ingful ways of comparing the actual performance of any particular museum, making the comparisons that must some reasonably objective conclusions concerning their relative merit and their relative worthiness to receive ongoing support. ATTRIBUTES OF A GOOD MUSEUM (On what basis might we judge whether a museum is a good or bad one? ‘What can we identify as the attributes of a good museum? I propose using 9MAKING MUSEUMS MATTER some of the materials developed over the past few years by the Alexandria, Virginia, headquarters of the United Way of America as a model. United. ‘Way has exerted an enormous —even sefsmic—influence throughout the health and human-service field by its formal adoption in June r995 of ‘outcome-based evaluation asthe primary basis on which it would thereafter allocate its grant funds. As succinctly described in one of its publications, this constituted a shift from a previous focus on the programs ofits appliz cant agencies to an emphasis instead on their r that is, on the mea- surable outcomes or impacts that these agencies were able to achieve through those programs In the course of that shift, United Way developed a simplified ‘with which to discuss its new approach. In lieu of asking apy icant agen ies to describe their goals in stich conventional organizational terms as “mission,” or “visio suggested that they focus instead on two key words: “hope” and “expect.” “Given the immense amount of \work that your organization proposes to undertake, what do you ideally hope to accomplish?” And, “realistically, what do you expect to accomplish?” ‘Tho: be answered in programmatic terms, but rather by dese posed program is intended to make a “posi- of people's lives, ‘This lst requirement—that the intended outcome of the programs that United Way funds must be a positive difference in the quality of people's ives—is the cornerstone on which United Way's entire scheme of out- is built. As for what, in that context, United Way means by “outcomes,” these were defined in a program manual as: “bene fits or changes for individuals or populations during or after in program acti edge, attitudes, values, con: , oF other attributes. wre what par- ticipants know, think, or can do; or how they behave; or what their condi- tom is, th ferent following the program.” 1 would argue that these United Way concepts can be diree ted from their health and human-ser vice context into the world of cultural in- stitutions, and specifically into that of museums. I would further argue that United Way's cornerstone—to make a pr lifference in the quality of be consciously adopted as our comerstone as well. ither that, at least at their best, museums oper- and expectation that they will make a positive differ- lity of people's lives, And I would argue finally that we form, ence in the qui preserve, and study collections today not eeause we thnk that those a: Jes are appropriate ends in themselves but because we hope and ex- Fett hoe cl to quote United In one sense, we have no alternative but to rest our defini ‘museum’ on just such a cornerstone. For p {tis conceivably the only such definition that we ean affo are not being operated with the ultimate goal of improving peopl ‘on what alternative basis might we possibly ask for public support? Not certainly, on the grounds that we need museums so that museum profes- sionals might have an opportunity to develop their skills and advance their careers, oF 30 that those of us who truly enjoy museum work will have a place in which to do it. Not hecause they provide elegant venues for open- ings, receptions, and other glamorous social events, And not on the argu- ‘ment that museums—collectively, a humongous enterprise involving in this country alone the expenditure of billions of dollars annually and the dedi- cated elforts of tens of thousands of individuals —deserve to be supported simply as an established tradition or an ongoing habit, long after any good! reasons to do so have ceased to be relevant or have long been forgotten, What about our existing « 7 Could their continued preservation 4 rationale for the ongoing support of museums? Rever ode, might we successfully argue that the objects in these collec- tions are like fetishes, that they embody such potent values that their in- definite preservation is warranted regardless of any relevance oF use that they might ever have to lives now in being or yet to be? At best, such an argument might justify warchousing those objects in some distant and bare- bones storage, but not in the costly museums where we keep them today. Again, we have no real alternative but to argue that museums are at their [Four museums an institution that is operated with the 1 make a positive difference in the quality of lary issues must be addressed. hope and expectation that people's lives. Before we mo First, as for making a difference, will any differences do, or is it only in tended differences wi which we are concerned? f accountability, it must surely be the latter. A museum’s pro- ‘g7am, like any complex institutional activi roduce a range of out- comes, both intended and unintended. Nevertheless, the core question of Inter oMAKING MUSEUMS MATTER positive accountability —in carrying out its program, has this organization made effective use ofits resources?—ean only be answered in terms of the program's intended consequences. Concerning this first attribute, then, some further refinement is needed. The good museum is one that is ope ated with a clearly formula Jar and positive outcomes that The second an grees, muscums are ideological or at least reflective of particular points of view. Equally varied in ideology or point of view are those who may be called upon the evaluate them. Setting aside the case of any diehar _gtaphical echnocrats, who might elect to judge a museum by the skill with which it was managed rather than by the outcomes it was seeking to achieve, those who argue that all value judgments concerning museums are inher ently subjective have at least part of a valid point. Whether the differencs ‘that any particular museum is hoping to make i a positive one is judgment that will necessarily vary from one observer to the next, The observer who regards the Macho City Museum of Male Supremacy with great enthusiasm is not likely to be equally enthusiastic about the newly founded National ‘Museum of Gender Equity, and vice versa. How can we cope with this? Best, perhaps, is simply to acknowledge that there may be no universal accepted positions with regard to certain issues, To the extent that some ideologica) differences may be truly irreconcilable, any judgment as to whether or not the difference that a museum is trying to make isa positive difference must be always be understood to be in some degree subjective What further attributes must we add to this initial one—that the good museum is one that has a clearly formulated and worthwhile purpose? As an old English proverb has i, if wishes were horses, beggars might ride, the case of museums, resources—those at a level commensurate with the outcomes that they hope and expect to achieve—are what provide the horsepower that enables the well-intentioned ones to achieve their worth- while purposes. Except for those romantics who view all museums herently good, it ought be evident that a muscum seriously lacking resources required to achieve its purpose—whether that lack isin dol ol ons, trained staff, equipment, and/or facilities—cannot be evalu. ated as a good museum and must accordingly be considered a bad muscu, Abad museum”isnot an oxymoron, IFanything is oxymoronic in our field, ices that they can reduce the resources available to museums and still expect them to maintain ther prior 6 c sare what well- level of quality. Resources are nota fill. Adequate resources are ; Bee ic siat na must conranieif their good intention ase eyeqit@ be realized. ‘Those are two attributes of the good museut purpose and the resources necessary to achieve that purpose. In order to respond positively to our basic question—do museums matter?—two more Sites must be eonsdereds One relates oleadershp, Within its go- fernance and its own senior staff, the good museum requires a leadership fiercely determined to see that the achievement of its purpose is established ighest priority. The good iriven institution nor a process-driven one. ‘The good museum is a pponedit Lenton Its ee one and makes manifestly clear that other and more conventional mea- ene i tion of peers, high staff clear and worthwhile ist ions —all have to do with means, morale, acquisition of important collecti and not with ends, They may be necessary to the good museum—adequate are—but in and of themselves they are not sufficient to make a museum a good one. The things that make a museum good are difference in the quality of people’ lives, its ts possession of a determined to ensure that those resources are being directed and used toward that end, ast attribute concerns feedback. With purpose, resources, and lead- ership all in place, how does a museum go about determining whether its purposes are being achieved? The museum, as a nonprofit organization, sts the same feedback from the competitive marketplace cs a profit organization relies upon for guidance. In this connection, Unite oe Ese cl model afer le help. The outcomes pursued by health and human-service organizations are far more susceptible to quan~ tification than are those generally pursued by museums. Morcover, such ‘outcomes can often be presented in far more vivid, concrete, and dramatic terms emergency rooms or shelters for battered children —than may ever be possible for museums. ; aaa are not unique in this disadvantage. That museums cannot re- port their results as measurable outcomes or plot them against statistical data bases are problems that they share with a host of ather so por- organizations, ranging from liberal-arts colleges to achvocacy groups to jious denominations. Churches, to. name ta 1¢ of these, argue per- 63MAKING MUSEUMS MATTER suasively that they cannot be expected to report their success in terms “souls saved per pew-hour preached.” With outcomes that tend to be 69 ‘more elusive, imprecise, nd indirect than, for example, drug rehae tation programs or a blood drive, perhaps the best that these organiza. tions can hope to do—rather than to measure~ approximate. For museums, even that looser requirement presents difficulties. In gone eral, the impact of museums on their visitors is not of the one-shot or “Eu. ‘ckal” kind but something far more subtle, cumulative over repeated visits, and quite possibly ascertainable only after many years. Nor can a museum's long-term impact om its visitors always be wholly isolate intertwined with the impact that other community-base Itural organizations may have made on those same vi standing those comp! the good museum must be ab ‘means to assure itself on some regular, reliable, and ongoing basis that its Programs are having their intended effect—or, if they are not, that itis in position to recognize that fact and to make whatever corrections are nec- essary: To the extent thatthe outcome-based evaluation that United Way advocates continues to spread through the nonprofit sector and become a norm for other grant makers, the need for such feedback mechanisms wall become all the more urgent. The foregoing list by no means exhausts the attributes of the good mus seum—elliciency, responsiveness, and accessbi ity might easily be added — but it should suffice when we return to our original, basic question: whether and how museums make a difference. We must turn to the second. ‘of the two steps that need to be taken if that question is tobe answered posi- tively, We must look at the fll range of public-service roles that museums might play to see whether these could be useful —is simply to ascertain or ly sorted into a pattern. ENTERTAINMENT, EDUCATION, AND EXPERIENCE Muscums are most frequently characterized today as sites for informal edu- cation and/or self-directed learning, Excellence and Equity, for example, ar- gues that museums ought to place “education—in the broadest sense of the ‘word—at the center of their p vice role.” Let me begin, though, by considering education in Jex than its broadest sense—by considering it as 4 process by which the specific knowledge that visitors gain through a mu- 6 Jedge that the museum intended that eum visits congruent withthe kn Se _ ee a knowing mother bird, carefully chews up what Ae teglng stor willed for sustenance and then doles tout eaklal by rien. Looking at visitor studies done over the past several decades, Some museum people clearly thought ths was the proper direction ° fmuseum .ce through Chandler Screven’s seminal 1974 study of ia on of Learning in the Museum Envi- feasurement and Fut Fie deepal ennai apetsl pled .echnologies and specific learning outcomes. A saree ie ‘come would include, says Screven, “the speci alee pisee {nuseum vitor) is expected to do as result of exponreto thee terms of ection ves soch a: name, amg, compar ere Ii, ding ena, ste” An exhibition of Greek and Roman pottery, for instance, ‘ight have the following instructional objective: ee ote xy, presented one pair at a time in a test machine, each pait tenaninganeampeofone Greek and one Reman pee, sec correctly deny the Greck (or Roman) example five out of sx pais.” “To determine how much of a visitor’s postvisit knowledge may be m, he discusses how ‘more time on such productive behaviors parisons, as contrasted with less product ing’ or careless = on Ihypothetical visitors to Sereven's hypothetical a of Greek and Roman pottery. One is a recent immigrant from Greece fo svhom the exhibition triggers profound sense of pride in the achievements ‘ofher ancestors. Two others are brothers who lately lost their younger sis- ter and find it somehow comforting that the ats and beauty can endure even .e short. Another is an amateur potter who regularly vis- its ceramics exhibitions of every kind in search of new ideas, Still abe 8 recent tours to Rome, ins thatthe exhibition revives ee 7 amorous and other reading labels and making com- behaviors such as “random gaz- {wo young lovers amuse ther stories to explain episodes depicted on some of the pottery. "the cin is thata visitor might derive considerable personal enrichment Final ries of hi their own funny and my 65MAKING MUSEUMS MATTER from this hypothetical exhibition without ever improving by one bit his or her al inguish a Greek vase from a Roman one, Unless we are to adopt some puritanical point of view that denounces as illegitimate all of a visitor’ responses to a museum visit beyond those narrow, didactic ones intended by its program staff, we have to acknowledge that the totality of ‘what goes on in a museum—the myriad interactions between visitors and +t mixture than much of our museum literature suggests, ‘muscums ignore or reject those many interactions asa kind of s id interactions simply come, in Screven’s language, from -w, might we not accept these as appropriate museum behaviors or even, beyond merely accepting them, actually embrace them as providing im- portant insights into the real riches that muscums can provide to their com- ‘munities? It would be a wonderful irony ifall those distractions, which the ‘more narrowly education-minded among us think of as static, turned out instead to be some of the museum's most important and memorable music, In considering how we might better sort out and consider the full range of public-service roles that museums might play, an article appearing in the New York Times by music writer Paul Griffith suggested an interesting framework. Jn analyzing what the presenters of classical music concerts believed themselves to be providing to their audiences, Griffith referred to what he called “the three Es of music experience.” With some slight modification —principally, the addition of the museum as a place for socialization—1 would argue that Griffith's three Es also de- scribe what museums in their public-service role can provide to their com- ‘munities: entertainment, education, and experience, That the museum vy, for a great number ofits visitors, function primarily as a place of en: tertainment is sometimes a bitter pill for many museum people to swallow. Having prepared for their museum careers through the long and arduous study of a dis fer to sce visitors take an interest 1 same seriousness that they do. And for a great number of regular museum visitors, museum going is a pleasurable leisure-time activity, a way to relax, a form of diver~ sion competitive with film, theater, dance, and other m« ‘ment. Past school age, cultural participation is not mandatory, and the of entertain- 66 the equally myriad interactions of visitors with one another—isa_ nidom gazing” or careless generalization? Or, from an opposite point of Je who participate in cultural events—any questions of conspicuous itera conaumption se —do so mony fo please not om of ety Where the museum differs significantly from film, theater, dance, and those other modes of entertainment is in its rel . the fluidity of a museum visit with the rigid routine of attending a theater: ‘fixed starting time, a predetermined duration, a preassigned place to sit, and a socially enforced rule of silent participation. Because of informality, museum going—in addition to the three Es—is almost unique mong cultural activities in providing the opportunity for valuable so teractions, On occasio art from those edi ¢ the traditional museum ‘Although museum workers tend to see these interactions as periph- tors they may be anything but. Some figures concerning attendance at the Smithsonian are striking Of sixteen thousand visitors interviewed between 1994 and 1996—visitors ‘who had come on their own, not as part of any organized school or other tour—only 14 percent had come by themselves. For the other 86 percent, their museum visits were interwoven with a social experience. As Deborah and Lois Silverman have pointed out (Journal of Museum Education, fall 1996), “People often come {to museums} ‘with their families and other social groups, and they often come first and foremost for social reasons. Although visitors say they come to museums to learn things, more often than not the social agenda takes precedence lity family time, a date, something to do with out-of-town guest place to hang out with friends: these are some of the primary reasons people choose to go to museums.” Je in UNESCO's magazine Muse erature treats as central to a museum 1, Sheldon Annis wrote BBE nothing is more interesting than acting out and within the social roles oftheir he concluded, “Muscum-going ly a happy and so- cial event. Being there in some particular social product. Itdoes not really matter whether the coins were Roman oF 6«accompanies its strategic agenda forth : for the years 1998 to 2000, the AAM ref to muscumsas institutions that ean. i a. the museum may be coi eee In that view, red as a distinctive public space, in which die mingle in ways not readily that museums to an extent have Museum consultant e Heumany fer 1999) that—because of the high des argued (Daedalus, free of public trust they enjoy—museums should also be recognized as one of the few institutions within a communi ee es community that can function asa safety zone, ‘might comfortably send their children or in which, 1 EPP mit hope wo soca ‘idan. Other ate mscum ane ote ee oo ne ms that can provide an antid y satisfy a basic net Moving along to the second le to add to the voluminous museum in its educa notwithstanding, I wou one of the few community institu. to urban loneliness, a ph ss, a place where indi- to bein the company of other people ilfth’s three Es—education—there is ature already generated concerning the al function. As before, and Eselece ond Eyl ait like to continue to treat muscum education in lew {fan ts broadest sense, as referring primarily to the visitor's acquistion of be Partcular knowledge that the mseum intended carat By doing 80, we ean leave maximum scope for what may gual distinctive of Grifith’s three ee experience. ae es and entertainment, beyond their role as site for socal interaction, beso whatever educational functions they may choose to assume, manent also places that indisputably provi stors with an amon infte n almost infinite ange of experiences, Quo’ rageylai Quoting again from Perry, Roberts, Morrisey, and. may have ap learn something nev, ha zed tha they are not and should not be they are in the business of creating environme i the construction of and history, Ripe stor esearch supports this notion ofthe museum ‘ment for the construction of meani ral er ineadl ‘truction of meaning —a meaning that may well (or indeed 68 Il) differ from one visitor to the next. In 1996, Russell J. Ohta ff Arizona State University West studi 1 responses to the highly con- troversial exhibition Old Glory: The American Flag in Contemporary Art when jt was shown at the Phoenix Art Museum. Although each of the visitors he studied experienced “rich moments filled with deep personal meaning,” none of those meanings resembled any other. The meaning in each case was forged from the visitor's own personal identity. What they experienced had nothing to do with either the American flag or its use in art. Their experi- fences, he concluded, were primarily about themselves; “In essence,” Ohta writes, “the exhibition became a looking glass for visi- tors. They experienced what they were capable of experiencing. They ex- perienced who they were.” He concludes by quoting anthropologist David Pilbeam's dictum that, in looking at things, we tend not to see them as they are but as we are. Ohta is not the first to have used the imagery of the mu- ‘eum as a looking-glass experience. In his 1986 article, Sheldon Annis con- ‘ludes that neither museums nor objects are possessed of intrinsic mean- ings, “Rather,” he says, “they accept and reflect the meanings that are brought to them.” [A similar conclusion was reached in a study of informal education in Holocaust mascums by Zahava Doering and another of my Smithsonian col Jeagues, Andrew Pekarik. Arguing that museums, upon close examination, turn out to be “not particularly effective in accurately conveying detailed, factual knowledge,” they argue that the single most powerful determinant of a visitor's response to a museum exhibition is what they refer to as his oF her “entrance narrative.” Constituting that entrance narrative is a basic framework, or the fundamental way in which the visitor construes and con- {es the world; previously acquired information about the exhibition's ‘topic, organized according to that basic framework; and the sum of the visi tor’s personal experiences, emotions, and memories that verify and sup- port this understanding, What their model suggests, they argue, is that “the ‘most satisfying exhibitions for visitors are those that resonate with their ex- perience and provide new information in ways that confirm and enrich their view of the world.” Rather than communicating new information, they say, the greatest strength of museums may be in confirming, reinforcing, and extending the existing beliefs of their visitors, Lois Silverman has reached a sit it by a different route. In widely cited article published in Curator in 1995, she argues from a postmodernist perspective that museum objects are like texts that lack ‘most likely 69SLA SSS ATTA: any fixed or inherent meaning until they have been “completed” throu tot reang nthe cna thor te wills any ro a equally correct—as there are readers. A. sit rocess—by which an object acquires meaning for a particular visitor—oc- ‘curs in the museum. In common with Doering and Pekarik’s entrance nar- rative, such meaning making wi lar “meaning making : of spe- fic memories, expertise, viewpoint, assumptions, and connections that the particular visitor brings to the museum, Silverman is critical of current ¢ for its failure to take better advantage of what she thinks: is the essentially experiential nature of museum says, by their “historical focus on a nearly exclusively educational mission, other potes ‘ously under! Museu isin a new age can become places that ac- a) support and factitatea range of human experiences with rattan collections—social, spiritual, imaginal, therapeutic, aesthetic [experi ‘ences}, and more.” Seton every case invol and in; One final note with respect : spect to experience: In arranging the several hun dred ver oe ‘objects included in the Smithsonian's tsoth anniversary touring exhibition, the organizers consciously sought to elicit th kinds of response. ie pee oe those somewhat dry and distant a of action verbs—to name, arrange, compa exhibition Were asked to do was infinitely more personal. The exhibition in- vited them to remember, to discover, and —pethaps above all—to imagine ‘Venturing only alittle way beyond Paul Griffith's three Es, we re erate a rich pattern of purposes—none of them unimportant —that m scums might pursue in their pul sms, but also that—iFit was to survive Skramstad’s test to the range of publi pal seems clear that only with regard to the fourth and last of these—its ca- 70 pacity to provide visitors with an experience-rich environment-—Is the mu seum’s true uniqueness to be found, The museum that conceives of itself primarily as tourist destination —that seeks to increase its recreational ap- peal in order to attract visitors who might, in turn, bring economic bene- fits to the surrounding community—is constantly vulnerable to the dan- ger that Disney or some Disney clone will conte along and, through the ‘magic of its checkbook, create an even larger and more attractive tourist destination, Similarly, museums have no natural monopoly as sites for so activities even require a physical s already with us, Can distance soci ‘What museums have that is distinetive is objects, and what gives most ‘museums their unique advantage isthe awesome power of those objects to to visitors; museum workers may ‘be equally susceptible. At the April 1997 annual meeting of the Texas As- sociation of Museums in Midland, Hal Ham of Texas A&M's Conner Mu- seum gave a wonderfully provocative presentation about nanotechnology. Nanotechnology is an anticipated twenty-first-century technology that will crmit its practitioners to make exact, molecule-for-molecule reproduc~ ‘of any object—a way to do for inanimate things what cloning can do for living ones. Teasingly, Ham asked his audience members how they would feel about providing every art museum—or perhaps, even, every house- | —with a Mone Liss replica that was in every last molecular respectiden- tical to the original. ‘One museum director immedi not and could never in every way be identical to the Leonardo himself had never personally touched them. Ham stood his ‘ground, Was the Mona Lisa important as a work of a be better, and perhaps one in every home (or w' of all. Or was it also important asa relic, important because of its associa- tion with Leonardo, importar ‘was no show of hands atthe end, but jority of museum people there—myself included —did not at any gut level that these molecule-for-molecule replicas real same thing as the Mona Lisa. They lacked the power to send our imagina: visitors. Nor are those responses ly rose to argue, Those replicas wereMAKING MUSEUMS MATTER ally know why, during the Smithsonian's rsoth anniversary touring exhi- bition, visitors stood in long, uncomfortable Eines to see Abraham Lincoln's {op hat of, more wondrously still although there never Person as Dorothy, to look at Dorothy's ruby slippers? Some, like the Ger man cultural critic Walter Benjamin, tlk about the authentic original ag Possessing an “aura.” Others liken such originals to those objects that Melanesian natives sy are imbued with mana, an inherent supernatural ower. More prosaically, we might hypothesize that—to ‘one of Leo Steinberg's essays—the eye isa part of th and seeing are not the end of what happens toa visitor in a museum but only the starting points ofan ultimately holistic experience Standing squarely infront of one of ity million exact replicas ofthe Mona ‘a, and knowing it to be nothing more than that, a visitor might atthe most k it a somewhat am of modern technology ot at the coring. But standing squarely in front of the the Louvre, that same visitor might have a far richer response Sucha response might, for example, blend the uniqueness of the moment the wonder of being, at that instant, the only ereature in the entire galaxy to be standing in front of that one real thing —with a sense of awe that she and Leonardo were somehow linked across nearly five centuries; tht she ‘might pethaps be standing at precisely the same distance from the Mona Liss ‘hat the artist himself stood at that moment in 1506 when—backing just slightly away from the Painting for a moment—he fir “Basta, enough, fi was such a) of objects to stimulate so diverse a range ‘of responses seems to me the greatest strength of museums, Nor docs thers seem to be any limit to what the range of those responses may be. Some ‘museums are celebratory, others seek to console. Some try to stimulate a Sense of community, others to capture memory. And some simply offer the Important refreshment to be found in breaking the grip of everyday tou Line. As Nelson Graburn wrote, among the various needs of their visitors that museums ean meets one that he termed the “reverential” It was, he said, “the visitor’s need for a personal experience with something higher, more sacred, and out-of-the-ordinary than home and work are able ta supply: « The muscum may provide a place of peace and fantasy, where one can be alone with one’s thoughts and make of the objects and exhibite ‘what one will.” i the opening of Anna Karenina, Leo Tolsoy write, “Happy families are n }0 THEY MAKE A DIFFERENCE? way.” In a sense, all happy in alike; every unhappy family is unhappy eal asmusonrca ese: Common oo gol a he worth things topes od, the reoaroes together riba e things done, and such f lctermination necessary to get those things done, es Pe Nat aa baci since ne Neo eiing dona ivconmarien go unhappy famlies—may be bad in an ae Bi ete define aed macnn and most straight rd way-—a museum that not» god mae —fseems apparent Fe carte anay be bd Vecams| ir ttlck any erie : sortie purpose: o second ving sucha purpose, neers fled ois ble toate the sores nse t scone rd having bh uch purpose an the necessary revo, Pericles lack the wil the deter ees see rae or lst, wth appropriate purpose eure, ad ender alin it smugly and erroneously assumes that itis doing it ality it isnot doing any such thing. ni i cnmtaconnzhcald bat ‘greater concern to the oe Bee museums than has generally been the ve, They wp old resources « ones, and they tend to diminish the high esteem in which mu- ee should be the business of good museums to help nd tohelp move seums ought be hel hosed muscams tnt an change obec goons ante help moe hose that cannot change toward a quiet and dignified exit. Deficienc ec r dhack general canbe arsed without thor- tnihly overburing an organization. By contrast, museums tha arebadbe- cause ter leadership ack the determination to make them good ee + mor dill ase, Pardo its quently jst ach mses ta are—because of their weak leadership the most reluctant to pt aqui dl decent en 150 that the valuable public resources they sti old igh be 1 organization bold might eee for more prodaine oe by ter organizations. Anudaoat lat, we eur tthe ist question: De muss mater? Can sv do they ake ference” The anoer sould De selF eden ie othr pole fom the secret elogi, we hve pole, {ome museums matter. Good museums matter, good muset Mice tditg easel aac ee hati exch hhow we have defined them. The very things that make a siean ne its intent to make a positive difference in the quality of people's lives and, through its skillful use of resources and under determined leadership, ts 33aac On Re EA RRA ST demonstrable ability to do exactly that, Other museums don’t matter. Bad. ‘museums don't matter, and the reason that they don’t matter is also defic ither they have no real desire to make a positive difference in the ality of people’ lives or, notwithstanding such a desire, they lack the ca- pacity and or the leadership to do so. ‘What remains most remarkable to me is how broad a range of purposes the good muscum has available to choose from in shaping its public-service «efforts, Within the broad categories of entertainment, socialization, edu. cation, and experience, innumerable subcategories remain to be identified and named. As most good museums ultimately arive not at just one pur= pose but at some mixture of purposes, the number of possible combina. tions ofthese categories and subcategories is virtually endless. Having ssid that ll good museums are in one sense alike, we can also say th other sense—in the mix of purposes they purse—they almost from one another. It is that variability, it seems to me, that makes museum, work so exciting, even magical. So long asa dedication to public service is its driving force, a museum can be a good one in an almost infinite num. ber of ways. The constructive ways in which museums can innovate and ex- Plore:new dimensions are almost endles, In everything museums do, they must remember the cornerstone on which the whole enterprise rests: to make a positive difference in the quality of people's lives, Museums that do that matter—they matter a great deal. And their crowning glory i that they can thatter in so many marvelous ways. New Words, Familiar Music THE MUSEUM AS SOCIAL ENTERPRISE In back of every museum—profoundly affecting both how its staff goes about organizing its work and what expectations the public may have of ft— les one or more mol. nthe two hued yor ice heim rst recognized asa distinctive type of institution, these models have been ace oan ie arte eb ld end sometines ir power, sometimes disappeared entirely. At other times, new an Bieta rb rela ee le in my own workin Thave followed with fascination the ‘emergence-—particularly in this country, perhaps les so abroad—of anew and potentially dominant model for museums. Because it puts so extreme ‘an emphasis on an organization's outward rather than inward focus, it isa ‘model that seems strikingly different from most ofthe earlier ones that mu- le ates te ent spesium ef nonprebt led the *social enterprise” model, so named by J. organizations, it isc 1 Gregory Dee, Before train to consider what the museum an sociale oe ce, let me mention several older models that it could terprise might be the twenty-fith aniversary of ts Katherine Coffey Award, el ekg Dif to honor the Ta November 197 Anse Associaton of Museums pl ceva’ recipes forthe year 972 through 1996, te an ey, This uxt was ste Awsociation of Meus 1