museum studies

Ken Arnold’s and my Dogme-style “manifesto” for creating science, technology and medicine exhibitions has just been published as a feature article in the last issue (#2/2011) of the Museums Journal. We’ve been inspired by Danish directors Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg, who spearheaded the now 15 years old Dogme 95 manifesto for purifying the art of film-making. They wanted to engage audiences […]

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 […]

In the last session of the conference in September, Thomas Schnalke from Berliner Medizinhistorisches Museum made an allegory on the situation of the medical museums today, suggesting that these kinds of museums might be conceived as patients suffering from a molecular medicine and virtual reality virus. He went on to put forward that art and artists, […]

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 […]

At the conference in September, Ken Arnold and Thomas Söderqvist presented 15 dogmas for museum practice. Inspired by the Danish film directors Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg’s Dogme95, Ken and Thomas’  list included points like “Leave out as much as possible”, “Never show ready-made science”, “Avoid artificial lighting”, “Use no replicas or reproductions, just […]

At the conference in September, Kim Sawchuk talked about why, in this micro-molecular age, we are still hanging on to the fantasy of travelling inside the anatomical spaces of our own bodies. Kim admits that she herself has become what she calls a ‘biotourist’, a person who visits medical museums in order to experience the […]

This session at the conference “Contemporary medical science and technology as a challenge to museums” in Copenhagen last month circled around the concept of the Renaissance Wunderkammer, and how we might use techniques of curiosity and wonder to engage people with scientific and historical objects. Joanna Ebenstein —who writes the blog Morbid Anatomy— talked about […]

The implication of the theme — ‘Contemporary medicine and technology as a challenge to museums’ — for this year’s biannual EAMHMS conference in Copenhagen last month is that it is difficult to exhibit the molecular level of the recent medical understanding of the body. How can we display such molecular and other tiny structures? And what […]

Tiffany Jenkins is soon coming out with a book titled Contesting Human Remains in Museum Collections: The Crisis of Cultural Authority in Routledge’s ‘Research in Museum Studies’ series. Drawing on interviews, ethnographic work, and media and policy documents, the book analyzes, says Routledge’s announcement, “the influences at play on the contestation over human remains, and examines the social construction of […]

Travel guides and leisure sections in the newspapers regularly list museums you just “must” see. But I’ve never actually seen a list of museums that I’m supposed to be discouraged from visiting. Until now — here’s one that covers “the most unnecessary museums in the United States”:  The Museum of Bad Art: The justification for […]