museum and knowledge politics

The programme for this year’s Universeum meeting (in Padua, 26-29 May) is available here. Universeum has rapidly become a vital organisation for the revival of European university museums. The annual meetings have an important role to play to raise the awareness among university administrations that their museums are not only worth preserving but, even better, worth expanding. Last […]

Last week we put up a computer in the staff kitchen with Twitter as the only application and main page. I call it a Tweet Machine. Over the computer I hung a small sign, urging all staff members to write about everything from philosophical reflections to descriptions of what their packed lunch contained that day: The computer […]

Alain de Botton is an object of dismay to many philosophers because he doesn’t comply with the ritual behaviours of professional philosophy. But for all of us who don’t consider the publication of peer reviewed articles in academic journals as the fundamental purpose of philosophy, his comments on current human affairs are often refreshing and thought provoking. A while ago he suggested, in his […]

I’ve always been pretty tired of identity museums, like the politically correct and historically incorrect National Museum of the American Indian in Washington DC. As Edward Rothstein ends his critical analysis of identity museums in The New York Times the other day: The Enlightenment had its limitations, of course. But it also shaped the great […]

A great museum is a laboratory where ideas get tested, not a mausoleum full of dead thoughts and bromides. (Blake Gopnik, “National Portrait Gallery bows to censors, withdraws Wojnarowicz video on gay love”, Washington Post, 30 November 30, 2010; thanks to Judy Chelnick for the link)

A month ago, the Director of the Polish National Museum in Warsaw, Piotr Piotrowski, resigned after the museum’s Board of Trustees had rejected his strategy for the development of the museum. The resignation took place only two years after the Board of Trustees had offered Piotrowski the position on the basis of his proposal for […]

In four earlier posts (# 1 here, #2 here, #3 here, and #4 here), I’ve argued for a more proactive practice with respect to the preservation of the contemporary medical scientific and technological heritage. The posts were provoked by Christian Sichau’s negative attitude (quoted here). There is no space for the new acquisitions, he claimed, and the exhibition curators receive all the museum money anyway. So […]

In three earlier posts (here, here and here), I’ve argued in favour of a more proactive acquisition practice with respect to the contemporary medical scientific and technological heritage. Against some curators who believe we need to restrict acquisitioning (for economic, space etc. reasons), I suggest that we should rather open up the sluice gates for collecting as […]

On next Thursday, 16 April, I’m contributing to a meeting on the theme “ICOM’s Code of Ethics and the grey zones of museum practise”, organized by Danish ICOM. The background for the meeting is that ICOM’s current Code of Ethics (from 2004) apparently doesn’t cover a number of ‘grey zones’, which Danish ICOM believes may be in conflict with the Code, for […]

A couple of days ago, I argued against Christian Sichau’s restrictive acquisition policy for museums of science, technology and medicine. I suggested, not only to actively promote the acquisition of visual, material, and textual objects from contemporary laboratories and storage rooms, but indeed to open up the sluice gates for collecting as much contemporary stuff […]

Measured by the number of incoming emails and RSS-feeds, the big news in the science museum world today is a critical article by Edward Rothstein (“The Thrill of Science, Tamed by Agendas”) in the Arts Special section of yesterday’s New York Times. A century ago, Rothstein points out, museums were simply collections of objects: “And science […]

Nina has a point — her favourite museums are idiosyncratic. There are lots of “perfectly nice, perfectly forgettable” museums, but those that stick in one’s memory are those with individuality, like the Museum of Jurassic Technology. They are often small, because they are not run by committees, and the staff is passionate about what they are doing. Yet, as Nina […]