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4. Louise Pittaway - 2009-02-03 20:29:20 |
| This is a physical consideration for museums of the future; many of us are at or near (or beyond) storage capacity right now. How will we decide what to discard to make room for appropriate later symbols of each era? This becomes an ongoing dilemma--our view of what best symbolizes past times (I’m thinking history museums) when it becomes essential to weed and refine. And in our current "greening" will we begin to omit objects that later we wish we’d kept--to convey the most accurate image of a place and time. |
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3. Liz Shapiro - 2009-02-02 12:31:03 |
| I love that museums (especially history museums) are finally recognizing that the ever-changing world must be represented by the ever-changing museum. A few thoughts - the "new" museum has tried to be visitor-driven before. Now, there is no choice in the matter. We have all this information, but we have to make it accessible to generations who have grown up in vastly different times, with experiences so different from each other that one generation is often incomprehensible to the other. Can museums be the generational translators? What would that look like? In order to do it, we would need to know *all* the languages that people are speaking. Museum; know thy audience. Susie’s quotation from the NYT about the teenager who was frustrated by his "lack of control" over the characters in a book is striking. How can we offer our visitors "control" over their museum experience in new ways? And appropos of not much but the ubiquity of the gaming population - did everyone see the commercial during the super bowl where real people morphed in and out of their characters from World of Warcraft? Think about the dollars spent on that commercial and the very *particular* audience who it was addressed to. Wow. To quote Stephen Sonheim, there are "so many possibilities." |
" target=_blank> 2. Jennifer Caleshu - 2009-01-31 02:47:15 |
| Truly fascinating! I’m really interested in how museums will react to the fracturing of the collective culture - museums too often seem to me the repository of top-down, authoritarian "this is what is important" culture. Today, and into the future, every individual is an expert and can disseminate their opinions not only to their trusted network (facebook) but to the world (wikipedia, blogs etc). So then who gets to decide what should be saved / collected in perpetuity? Who’s in charge? And what’s important - how do we decide what’s worth keeping when the cultural output is so vast? And how can museums stay relevant to this fractured culture? |
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" target=_blank>1. Elizabeth Merritt - 2009-01-24 02:12:34 |
Welcome to the discussion/comments board for "Museums & Society 2034." We appreciate your feedback.
Elizabeth Merritt
Founding Director,
Center for the Future of Museums |
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