SPECULATIVE MUSINGS

Museums tend to assume importance for themselves that is as a rule endorsed by an elite element of the governing class by means of the funding directly and indirectly flowing from ‘government’ and corporate coffers. There is an up side and down side to all this in the 21st C where depending on ‘tax dollars’ is seemingly less sustainable than in the past. More and more, measurable dividends are being sought.

From the 19th C public museums and art galleries (musingplaces) have operated as kind of ethereal environment somewhat disconnected from the pragmatics of the every day. Sometimes this disengagement has been a wilful separation with a withdrawal into an esoteric and elitist environment where research into the minuscule is tolerated. It is not for nothing that museums have been imagined as ‘ivory towers’ and of less use (value?) than given the splendid isolation they tended to prescribe for themselves.

Given, the culturally insulated and somewhat autocratic environments many ‘musingplaces’ exist within, and their sometimes splendid isolation, the increasing demands of their underwriters are beginning to reflect a diminishing predilection to pamper the indulged esoterics.

Accountability is an increasing demand. Museums and art galleries are a part of academe and in the university sector indulgent research has long lost its elitist and indulgent branding and the pragmatics of productive outcomes increasingly set the agendas of research departments into the future.

The museum world is almost the last bolthole for the esoteric researcher. For better or worse the pragmatists are barking at their doors demanding that museum inmates deliver up ‘dividends’ ¬ tangible and intangible outcomes. However, clever musers are finding ways to salvage something from the delaminating architecture of musingplaces albeit that all this will be requiring greater energy levels and enhanced partiality towards delivering on overhauled KPIs – Key Performance Indicators.

In the 21st C the age of the information explosion is being facilitated by the Internet and related digital technologies. However, for the most part all this is yet to be exploited to its full potential by most musingplaces. In some, their capacity to deliver is being confronted. As events have unfolded the folly embedded in status quo analogue thinking has actually been demonstrated to be the denial of the obvious. Yes, a great many museums and art galleries have websites but a great many (most?) score poorly in regard to content delivery and audience engagement. 

Typically museum marketing, despite the Internet’s potential, is far behind the marketing standards of other community social networks, the business world and other players in the information economy. In order to play ‘catch up’ these institutions are likely to need to form new alliances, and network linkages, with kindred operations or face diminishing relevance in  their 21st C context. 

The democratisation of information is an idea yet to be fully understood and embraced by a great many museums. Albeit a while ago, a museum manager has been reported as saying “we are waiting until we get it right before we do anything online.” 

A great many managers faced with the demand for more information on an increasing range of platforms have given similar responses in order to postpone the challenges and possibilities of digital communication. We might understand this as the simple resistance to change but it is something that musing communicators need to overcome if they expect to survive and remain relevant. The 20th Century imposed change upon the world and at the speed of light. The truth is, ‘getting it right’ – whatever is meant by that – is out of everyone’s reach all the time – and it’s out of the question. 

Museum Trustees and managers alike all need to get used to the idea that change is almost unavoidable. Also, “getting it right” is all too often code for the status quo and that is both unsustainable and counterproductive – not to mention the extreme risk of boring and disappointing one’s audience. 

The question arises, where can musing go in the 21st C? The first thing that might be challenged is the effectiveness of the static exhibit model backed up by a limited program of temporary exhibitions, ‘sexed up’ by the occasional blockbuster.

It is unlikely that the 20th C musingplace archetype will be demolished anytime soon to make way for holograms and virtual adventures in exotic places. Nonetheless, like it has been with radio, television, cinema, newspapers, books and so on, the survival instinct is likely to mean that hither to unimagined alliances will be formed – some more predicable than others. 

In the context of when they are at their best, exhibition environments are complex spaces and at their best they tempt us to embrace ideas and take on new understandings. Exhibitions – static and transient, physical and digital – facilitate the experience of ideas and promote learning.

Like in their Wunderkammer predecessors, exhibitions are a kind of theatre of the world where some purposeful drama is played out. Even though never quite encyclopedic, museum exhibitions are the cultural warehouses invested with communities' belief systems and cultural property.

Exhibitions can be multifaceted and multidimensional – 2D, 3D & 4D – storyplaces. In a way, in their guise as a site for self initiated pedagogy and enlightenment, they have the potential to make the imagined real. But how much do we really know about the moment-by-moment intricate transactions that make up visitors experiences?

To build upon the potential of interdisciplinary musing, interfacing knowledge systems and the underlying wisdom that underpins exhibition and communication design processes, we need to understand much more about what is driving people’s engagement with musingplaces. The multifaceted and expanding communication environments that are contemporary exhibition spaces and musingplaces are offering much more looking forward than to the past. These 'spaces' have thus far given minimal attention to the gifts emerging technologies offer exhibition designers and the cultural thinkers working collaboratively with them.

When Dickens’s Oliver Twist, albeit on behalf of others, ‘asked for more’ he entered the imagination of all who believed they are being sold short. Taxpayers who stay away from musingplaces because they fail to deliver enough for the, well they collectively send unwelcomed messages to the ‘middle management’ of musingplaces. The greatest insult a student can give a teacher is to simply stay away. It needs to be understood, musingplaces bureaucracies depend upon musingplaces’ audiences to want their ideas, their willingness to receive their messages and their participation in a conversation with them.

'The exhibit makers' depends upon the compliance of their audiences in order to make a living. As with Oliver, who was wrongly imagined as being greedy beyond his station in life, musers may yet end up living happily ever after in the countryside engaged in two way conversations and productive musings.

But what might this blissfulness look like in the musingplaces of the future? Reportedly, Dennis Gabor, the Nobel Prize winner and inventor of the holograph, said “The future cannot be predicted, but futures can be invented. It was man’s ability to invent which has made human society what it is. The mental processes of inventions are still mysterious. They are rational but not logical, that is to say, not deductive.” 

Likewise, ‘musingplaces’ have a future that is an unfolding story. It is certain that if they are to survive in a form that is recognisable against their histories it will not be, or is unlikely to be, as community institutions delivering discretionary outcomes for elite audiences rather than egalitarian musers. This is especially so for public institutions operating primarily as cost centres directly and indirectly funded by tax incomes. The future for enterprising musingplaces is less certain but somehow they hold more promise.

Knowledge management is likely to play a significant role in the invention of a new kind of viable future for musingplaces. As likely as not, there will be a range of strategies and practices employed to identify, create, represent, distribute, and enable the adoption and adaption of speculative insights and reflective experiences.

Against this background ‘knowledge’ held by individuals and/or implanted in musingplaces will underpin their raison d’être. Likewise, museums and art galleries are likely to look towards forming closer alliances with enterprises and institutions engaged in gathering and disseminating knowledge and ideas – aligned elements of academe, schools and educators, researchers and inventors, communication operations, publishers, broadcasters, et al.

Typically, knowledge management focuses upon improved performance, competitive advantage, innovation, the sharing of lessons learnt, the integration and continuous improvement of the institution. Here the management of knowledge as a strategic asset is an imperative. Here the focus should be on encouraging the sharing and promulgation of knowledge as it is seen as a key element in musingplaces’ raison d’être.

Knowledge management, and all that it embraces is seen as an enabler and a more concrete mechanism that lends substance and meaning to lived lives.

Museums’ assumed importance is ever likely to depend upon the endorsement of their funders – taxpayers, sponsors donors and Communities of Ownership and Interest. Directly and indirectly the flow of funds from government, corporate and private coffers shape musingplaces and determine their raison d’être. As likely as not, they will be places that will offer participatory opportunities on and off their campuses – and opportunities to engage at relatively close quarters.

As likely as not, measurable dividends will be sought, and  increasingly so, as accountability flow-ons from the funding agencies, sponsors and donors translates into more accountability in respect to their constituencies and musingplaces. Likewise, musingplaces are likely to rely more heavily upon their musers to chip-in more directly towards the survival of public musingplaces however all that will be understood beyond the horizons drawn by the status quo.