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Museum: the story on HearLore | HearLore
Museum
In the ancient city of Ur, now modern-day Iraq, a clay drum label written in three languages was discovered, marking the earliest known museum label in human history. This artifact dates back to approximately 530 BCE and was part of a collection assembled by Princess Ennigaldi-Nanna, the daughter of King Nabonidus of the Neo-Babylonian Empire. The label did not merely describe an object; it served as a historical record, explaining the origin and discovery of the item it accompanied. This early institution, established at the end of the Neo-Babylonian Empire, contained artifacts from earlier Mesopotamian civilizations, functioning as a repository of knowledge that predated the concept of the public museum by millennia. The existence of this label suggests that the impulse to categorize, label, and preserve history is as old as civilization itself, long before the word museum entered the English language from the Greek mouseion, a place dedicated to the muses.
From Private Cabinets to Public Halls
For centuries, the accumulation of strange and wonderful objects was the exclusive domain of the wealthy, housed in private rooms known as cabinets of curiosity. These collections, often called wonder rooms, were designed to display the empirical explosion of materials produced by increased travel and systematic communication during the Age of Exploration. Naturalists like Ulisse Aldrovandi collected everything from stuffed animals to geological specimens, aiming to consume and catalog as much knowledge as possible. The British Museum, which opened to the public in 1759, initially required prospective visitors to apply in writing for admission, and small groups were allowed into the galleries each day to prevent damage from large crowds. The shift from private collection to public patrimony began in earnest with the Capitoline Museums in Rome, where Pope Sixtus IV donated a collection of ancient bronze sculptures to the people of Rome in 1471. These museums were officially opened to the public in 1734 under Pope Clement XII, establishing them as the first institution where art could be enjoyed by ordinary people rather than just the owners. This transition marked a crucial moment in the development of cultural institutions, symbolizing a shift in the ownership and accessibility of art.
The Revolution of the Louvre
The Louvre in Paris, opened to the public in 1793 during the French Revolution, enabled for the first time free access to the former French royal collections for people of all stations and status. The fabulous art treasures collected by the French monarchy over centuries were accessible to the public three days each decade, a unit of time that had replaced the week in the French Republican Calendar. The Conservatoire du muséum national des Arts was charged with organizing the Louvre as a national public museum and the centerpiece of a planned national museum system. As Napoleon I conquered the great cities of Europe, confiscating art objects as he went, the collections grew and the organizational task became more and more complicated. After Napoleon was defeated in 1815, many of the treasures he had amassed were gradually returned to their owners, though many were not. His plan was never fully realized, but his concept of a museum as an agent of nationalistic fervor had a profound influence throughout Europe. The Louvre's opening represented a radical democratization of culture, transforming the museum from a tool of royal display into a space for public education and national identity.
Cities have increasingly used museums as tools for economic development, especially in postindustrial regions. The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in Spain serves as a prime example, where the Basque regional government funded the museum to renew the city's old port area. The government spent about 100 million dollars on construction, which led to protests from local residents. After opening, the museum attracted over 1.1 million visitors in 2015, with 63% coming from outside Spain. This influx of foreign visitors increased local spending and investment, which helped the city's economy and generated tax revenue that exceeded the initial investment. Similarly, Titanic Belfast in Northern Ireland followed a similar approach, costing about the same as the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. In its first year, Titanic Belfast welcomed over 800,000 visitors, with nearly 60% coming from outside Northern Ireland. Over ten years, the attraction generated an estimated 430 million pounds in direct spending within the region. The use of museums as economic engines has caused debate among museum professionals and local communities, with some cities seeing protests when public funds are used for museum projects, while others, like Bilbao, see the protests decrease as the museum becomes successful.
The Fight for Decolonization
A global movement for the decolonization of museums has been gaining momentum since the late 20th century, challenging the biased narratives embedded in museum collections. Proponents argue that museums are a box of things that do not represent complete stories, but rather show biased narratives based on ideologies, in which certain stories are intentionally disregarded. The 2018 report on the restitution of African cultural heritage, authored by Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy, is a prominent example regarding the decolonization of museums and other collections in France and the claims of African countries to regain artifacts illegally taken from their original cultural settings. Since 1868, several monolithic human figures known as Moai have been removed from Easter Island and put in display in major Western museums such as the National Museum of Natural History, the British Museum, the Louvre and the Royal Museums of Art and History. Several demands have been made by Easter Island residents for the return of the Moai, as the figures are seen as ancestors and family or the soul by the Rapa Nui and hold deep cultural value to their people. Other examples include the Gweagal Shield, thought to be a very significant shield taken from Botany Bay in April 1770, or the Parthenon marble sculptures, which were taken from Greece by Lord Elgin in 1805. Successive Greek governments have unsuccessfully petitioned for the return of the Parthenon marbles.
The Labor Behind the Glass
Union membership among museum workers has grown, with over 15,000 museum employees now represented by unions at more than 50 art museums in the United States. The unionization wave has included institutions such as the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum, and the Guggenheim Museum, among others. These efforts reflect a broader movement to address labor issues and promote fair treatment across the museum field. In 2019, workers in multiple museums voted to form unions with more protesting to press for a fair contract and against unfair labor practices. During that year, over 3,000 cultural workers anonymously started to share their salaries online through a pay transparency spreadsheet. In 1971, administrative staff at New York's Museum of Modern Art formed the organization Professional and Staff Association of the Museum of Modern Art, the first union of professional employees, as opposed to maintenance and service people, at a privately-financed museum. The contract negotiated would provide a wage increase, protection against termination without cause, and direct access to trustees and policy-making processes at the museum. Recent union campaigns have often sought wall-to-wall representation, which includes workers from multiple departments under a single contract, contrasting with earlier models that organized workers by occupation.
The Future of the Collection
As digital culture has increased in society, museums have needed to respond to these changes in the facilities that they offer online. Some museum scholars have even begun to question whether museums truly need artifacts at all. Historian Steven Conn provocatively asks this question, suggesting that there are fewer objects in all museums now, as they have been progressively replaced by interactive technology. As educational programming has grown in museums, mass collections of objects have receded in importance. Dorothy Canfield Fisher observed that the reduction in objects has pushed museums to grow from institutions that artlessly showcased their many artifacts to instead thin out the objects presented for a general view of any given subject or period, and to put the rest away in archive-storage-rooms, where they could be consulted by students, the only people who really needed to see them. This phenomenon of disappearing objects is especially present in science museums like the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, which have a high visitorship of school-aged children who may benefit more from hands-on interactive technology than reading a label beside an artifact. The future of the museum lies in balancing the preservation of physical objects with the need to engage a digital-native audience through virtual tours and online collections.