No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
The Museum of Big Ideas
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 October 2016
Abstract
Although museums of all kinds continue to proliferate, they have lost the capacity to generate big ideas that characterize epistemic shifts, such as evolution, the labour theory of value, or relativity. They have become mere echo chambers for ideas proposed elsewhere. How might museums regain their capacity to generate big ideas? The development of a Tangible Turn in scholarly thinking is leading to a reinvigoration of knowledge claims derived from material things. Museums are well placed to participate in such a reinvigoration, and in some instances – notably in the natural sciences – already are. Yet to do so they must overcome the taxonomic and systematic divisions that in the nineteenth century stimulated but now inhibit creative thinking. How can disciplinary ossification associated with collection definition be overcome? Two possible models are artists' interventions and arrangement according to philosophical principles, yet neither is sufficient. Curatorial scholars should acknowledge the physical and cultural instability of tangible things, and work with these properties to combine things in revelatory ways, eschewing stable categories. This can be accomplished most effectively in museums associated with universities through collaboration among the scholarly staffs of university collections and with university faculty.
- Type
- Papers
- Information
- Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 79: Philosophy and Museums: Essays in the Philosophy of Museums , October 2016 , pp. 55 - 75
- Copyright
- Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2016
References
1 Nietzsche, Friedrich, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, translated by Zimmern, Helen (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1997), 50 Google Scholar.
2 Thoreau, Henry D., The Writings of Henry David Thoreau: Journal, Volume 3: 1848–1851, edited by Sattelmeyer, Robert, Patterson, Mark R., and Rossi, William (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 376 Google Scholar.
3 Holland Cotter, ‘Opportunity on Madison’, New York Times, Arts and Leisure 31/07/2011, 1, 20.
4 There is much to be said for a return to Guy Debord's splenetic claims: The Society of the Spectacle, translated by Nicholson-Smith, Donald (New York: Zone Books, and Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994)Google Scholar.
5 Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich, What Is to be Done? Translated by S.V. and Utechin, Patricia, edited by Utechin, S.V. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963)Google Scholar.
6 Boas, Franz, ‘Some Principles of Museum Administration’, Science, N. S. 25/650 (1907), 921–933 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.
7 Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus), Ars Poetica, lines 343‒344: ‘omne tulit punctum qui miscuit utile dulci,/ lectorem delectando pariterque monendo’. (‘He wins every hand who mixes profit with pleasure by delighting and instructing the reader simultaneously.’) Horace is writing of texts, not museums. See Horace, , Satires and Epistles, translated by Davie, John (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 115 Google Scholar.
8 An Adventure with Wallace & Gromit, at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, March–August, 1998, was a fascinatingly instructive investigation of the process of creating the stop-motion clay animation movies featuring the duo: A Grand Day Out (1989), The Wrong Trousers (1993), and A Close Shave (1995). Since the exhibition, a further two movies have been released by Aardman Animations, the full-length feature, The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005), and A Matter of Loaf and Death (2008).
9 Conn, Steven, Museums and American Intellectual Life, 1876–1926 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998)Google Scholar.
10 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Philosophical Investigations, Revised 4th edition, edited by Hacker, P. M. S. and Schulte, Joachim, translated by Anscombe, G. E. M., Hacker, P. M. S., and Schulte, Joachim (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009)Google Scholar, Part I.
11 Hacking, Ian, The Social Construction of What? (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1999)Google Scholar; Blackburn, Simon, Truth: A Guide (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005)Google Scholar.
12 Giorgio Agamben's ambitious ongoing study of the human condition in states of exception includes the extraordinary examination of human debasement: Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, translated by Heller-Roazen, Daniel (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1999)Google Scholar. Agamben's translator, Daniel Heller-Roazen, has written an extraordinary account of language loss with enormous historical implications: Echolalias: On the Forgetting of Language (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2005)Google Scholar.
13 Putnam, Hilary, ‘Brains in a vat’, in Reason, Truth and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 1–21 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, especially 18–19.
14 The mummified body of a woman was displayed in the Museo Arqueológico Dr. Eduardo Casanova, Tilcara when I visited in 1998, but reportedly is no longer. For ‘Tollund Man’ and other bodies preserved in Danish bogs, see, in the first instance, Glob, P.V., The Bog People: Iron Age Man Preserved, translated by Bruce-Mitford, Rupert (London: Faber, 1969)Google Scholar.
15 Daniel Lord Smail, Goods and Debts in Medieval Mediterranean Europe, forthcoming. Another example of the archival preservation of descriptions of clothing of kinds that themselves do not survive ‒ the layers of clothing worn by the Parisian poor who lived in shared rooms whose drowned bodies were recovered from the River Seine ‒ is the subject of Cobb, Richard, Death in Paris: Records of the Basse-Geôle de la Seine, October 1795–September 1801, Vendémiaire, Year IV–Fructidor, Year IX (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1978)Google Scholar.
16 As stated on the website of the Glenbow Museum: http://www.glenbow.org/exhibitions/past/2010-2011/index.cfm. See also, Gaskell, Ivan, ‘Museums and philosophy ‒ of art and many other things Part II’, Philosophy Compass 7/ 2 (2012), 93 Google Scholar.
18 For a draft, see http://www.ohio.edu/phylocode/.
20 Introduced by Woese, Carl R. and Fox, George E., ‘Phylogenetic structure of the prokaryotic domain: The primary kingdoms’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 74/11 (1977), 5088–5090 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed. See also Woese, Carl R., Kandler, Otto, and Wheelis, Mark L., ‘Towards a natural system of organisms: proposal for the domains Archaea, Bacteria, and Eucarya’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 87/12 (1990), 4576–9CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.
21 Bewer, Francesca G., A Laboratory for Art: Harvard's Fogg Museum and the Emergence of Conservation in America, 1900–1950 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Art Museums, and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 95–104 Google Scholar, 201.
22 See, for instance, Faries, Molly and Spronk, Ron (eds), Recent Developments in the Technical Examination of Early Netherlandish Painting: Methodology, Limitations, and Perspectives (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Art Museums, and Turnhout: Brepols, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a recent online exposition of the technical examination of one such painting, the Adoration of the Mystic Lamb by Hubert and Jan van Eyck (“the Ghent Altarpiece”), see http://closertovaneyck.kikirpa.be/.
23 Jackson, Joe, The Thief at the End of the World: Rubber, Power, and the Seeds of Empire (New York: Viking, 2008)Google Scholar.
24 East, Edward M., ‘The scope and work of the Botanical Raw Products Committee’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 3/12 (1917), 731–733 Google Scholar.
25 Ndiaye, Pap A., Nylon and Bombs: DuPont and the March of Modern America, translated by Foster, Elborg (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007)Google Scholar.
26 Mark S. Wigmosta, André M. Coleman, Richard J. Skaggs, Michael H. Huesemann, and Leonard J. Lane, ‘National Microalgae Biofuel Production Potential and Resource Demand’, Water Resource Research 47, 3, 2011. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2010WR009966/epdf. Summarized by Frances White, ‘Study: Algae Could Replace 17% of U.S. Oil Imports’, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory news release, 13/04/2011. http://www.pnl.gov/news/release.aspx?id=859; Strobel, Gary A., Knighton, Berk, Kluck, Katreena, Ren, Yuhao, Livinghouse, Tom, Griffin, Meghan, Spakowicz, Daniel, and Sears, Joe, ‘The Production of Myco-Diesel Hydrocarbons and their Derivatives by the Endophytic Fungus Gliocladium roseum (NRRL 50072)’, Microbiology 154 (2008), 3319–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
28 National Museum of Natural History, Algae Research: http://botany.si.edu/projects/algae/collection.htm.
29 Conn, Museums and American Intellectual Life, op. cit., 102.
30 The Warburg Institute fostered Baxandall's studies that resulted in his books dealing with the intersection of physical artworks and abstract ideas: Giotto and the Orators: Humanist Observers of Painting in Italy and the Discovery of Pictorial Composition, 1350–1450 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971)Google Scholar Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972)Google Scholar, The Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980)Google Scholar, and Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985)Google Scholar. The book on German limewood sculpture, in particular, drew directly on his curatorial experience at the Victoria & Albert Museum.
31 These are the categories (together with commercial museums) defined and described by Goode, George Brown, ‘The Principals of Museum Administration’, in Museum Association Proceedings, Sixth Annual Meeting (London: Dulua and Co, 1895)Google Scholar, §4.
32 Dewey, John, Art as Experience (New York: Penguin, 2005)Google Scholar, originally published in 1934. He had earlier collaborated with Barnes to produce Dewey, John, Barnes, Albert C., et al. , Art and Education (Merion: Barnes Foundation Press, 1929)Google Scholar.
33 I make this point in another context in Gaskell, Ivan, ‘Ethical judgments in museums’, in Hagberg, Garry L. (ed), Art and Ethical Criticism (Oxford and Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008), 229–242 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
34 For a more detailed discussion see Gaskell, Ivan, ‘The life of things’, in Henning, Michelle (ed), Museum Media (Oxford: John Wiley, 2015)Google Scholar.
35 Any thorough exploration of this issue would have to take into account Ludwig Wittgenstein's remarks on aspects, especially in the Philosophical Investigations, op. cit., Part II.
36 See http://www.gla.ac.uk/hunterian/.
38 Edward Young, Night Thoughts on Life, Death and Immortality: Night the Ninth, The Consolation, 1745:
‘… how great, How glorious, then appears the mind of man,
When in it all the stars, and planets, roll!
And what it seems, it is. Great objects make
Great minds, enlarging as their views enlarge;
Those still more godlike, as these more divine.’
See Young, Edward, Night Thoughts, edited by Cornford, Stephen (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 257 Google Scholar. The quilt, by Sarah Henshaw Ward Putnam (1800–1894), is in the General Artemas Ward House Museum, Shrewsbury, Massachusetts, a house museum that is part of Harvard University.
39 Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher, Gaskell, Ivan, Schechner, Sara and Carter, Sarah Anne, Tangible Things: Making History through Objects (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2015)Google Scholar.
40 I should like to thank the organizers of the symposium at the University of Glasgow at which I presented an earlier version of this paper for the opportunity to participate: Anna Bergqvist, Victoria Harrison and Gary Kemp. I wish to acknowledge the support in the form of ongoing Research Associateships in North American Ethnography, and in Anthropology, respectively, at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, and the American Museum of Natural History, New York City. Philosophical and historical work is incremental, and incurs many debts. I should like to thank those who helped me in these efforts: Marie Luisa Allemeyer, Ulrike Beisiegel, Mungo Campbell, David Carrier, Sarah Anne Carter, Michael Conforti, Lisa Corrin, A.W. Eaton, David Gaimster, Martin van Gelderen, Samantha van Gerbig, Garry Hagberg, Sherri Irvin, Laurel Kendall, Ross MacPhee, Andreas Pantazatos, Jeffrey Quilter, Sara Schechner, Daniel Lord Smail, Sue Spaid, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich and Peter Whiteley. As always, Jane Whitehead is my most stringent critic to whom I owe the greatest debt, and the most thanks.