Understanding Ourselves
Cultural Heritage Conservation within the Museum: Addressing the Absence of a Museum Conservation Paradigm through Adapting Principles of Cultural Heritage Management
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Bethany Hinds
The emergence of museum conservation as an academic discipline has lead to recognition for the need to establish a theoretical paradigm. Such a paradigm would facilitate engagement with the underlying conceptualisation of museum conservation practices. Museum conservation sits within a wider approach to the protection of cultural heritage that incorporates the disciplines of museology and cultural heritage management. Cultural heritage management therefore shares a common basis with museum conservation. Its developments, through the avenue of a theoretical framework, reflect shifting ideologies of its wider socio-political context. These shifts, encompassing principles of intangible and living heritage, along with community-based and significance-based approaches, present a foundation on which to build a paradigm for museum conservation.
The Museum as Object : Transparency, Self-Reflection, and Reckoning in Exhibition Practice
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Isadora Anderson Helfgott
This paper examines the growing trend in museum practice towards putting museology on display. In an opening scene of the blockbuster film, Black Panther, the character Erik Killmonger regards a display of miscellaneous objects from Africa and asks an imperious white curator in the fictional Museum of Great Britain, “How do you think your ancestors got these? Do you think they paid a fair price?” The curator winds up dead and Killmonger carries his critique of discriminatory systems of power into plans for worldwide revolution. Audiences are left understanding the art museum to be an outpost of colonialism and a bastion of white privilege. In a departure from past practice, museums have begun to acknowledge publicly their own complex histories and the cultural power they hold. Examining wall texts, object labels, juxtapositions, and new types of exhibitions that interrogate both collecting practices and the idea of a singular authoritative voice, this paper analyzes the scope and implications of museums’ increasing embrace of transparency. Long regarded as sacred spaces that promote passive consumption of knowledge, museums in the West have begun to encourage critical engagement from viewers. Moving beyond celebration of enlightened collectors and founding patrons, curators increasingly include reflections on museum procedures, acquisitions, and the processes of decision-making that shape the stories objects tell. This transparency makes the museum itself an object of reflection. It invites viewers to reexamine assumptions embedded in looking and creates possibilities for recasting the museum as an agent of change.
Between Black and White: Unpacking the ‘Grey’ Literature in Museum Ethics
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Beatrice Harris
Museums are held increasingly accountable to the public as cultural institutions with a social function, but also as commercial enterprises with their own clienteles. Such expectations necessitate institutional policies of integrity, transparency, accountability, and demonstration of ethical standards for curatorial practices, collection policies, and engagement with the public. These standards are often most clearly manifested in the ‘grey’ literature, documents such as codes of ethics, strategic directives, mission statements and other policy documents adopted both by individual institutions and across the professional sphere of museums. Since the American Association for Museums published its Code of Ethics for Museum Workers in 1925, many institutions and nations have developed their own ‘grey’ literature governing museum ethics, and/or have adopted the International Council of Museum’s code of ethics. What are the central ethical values or mandates presented in this ‘grey’ literature? Are these values uniform across institutional or national boundaries? Are they adequate as an ethical resource in a context where museums must negotiate complex social, political, and cultural issues that extend beyond the purview of the museum’s ‘traditional’ domain of objective and apolitical collection, interpretation, and display? This paper examines such questions, and proposes that abstract discussion from the academic literature relating to museum ethics, as well as theories from classical moral philosophy may be able to bridge gaps in the ethical guidelines provided by the ‘grey’ literature.
