Reactions to the Museums Association’s (MA) Museums 2020 consultation document fall into two main camps. First are those who embrace it wholeheartedly.
A manager in a national museum told me she’d come back from maternity leave, read the paper and been reinvigorated. It reminded her why she chose to work in museums in the first place.
Museums of all types have written passionately of the work they do to improve people’s lives and contribute to their communities. There are inspirational examples of socially useful work from a diverse range of museums.
Many of these museums see achieving impact as driving all of their work, including research, collections management and interpretation. They regard all their activities as supporting their overall goal of making a difference to the world.
The second group sees things differently.
They recognise the value of “impact” as championed by Museums 2020, but see achieving impact as “instrumental” and only part of their role. That leads to the view that Museums 2020 is only a partial account of the sector, neglecting the “core”, which is sometimes referred to as the “intrinsic” work of museums.
I’m not sure the instrumental/intrinsic dichotomy is particularly helpful. Here’s another way of thinking about it.
Over the past few years there’s been a trend for museums to want to make themselves more and more useful – to make a contribution to society and to their local area. In part, that’s the result of a desire to do more to satisfy funders, but in many museums there’s a very genuine drive to do more to make people’s lives better.
There’s another trend, reflected in some responses to Museums 2020, that museums shouldn’t lose sight of the value of providing people with an enjoyable experience.
That’s fine and the MA definition of a museum talks of enabling “inspiration, learning and enjoyment”.
But in hard times I’m not convinced that prioritising giving people a nice time works. It’s not enough – when times are tough, museums need to offer more.
A manager in a national museum told me she’d come back from maternity leave, read the paper and been reinvigorated. It reminded her why she chose to work in museums in the first place.
Museums of all types have written passionately of the work they do to improve people’s lives and contribute to their communities. There are inspirational examples of socially useful work from a diverse range of museums.
Many of these museums see achieving impact as driving all of their work, including research, collections management and interpretation. They regard all their activities as supporting their overall goal of making a difference to the world.
The second group sees things differently.
They recognise the value of “impact” as championed by Museums 2020, but see achieving impact as “instrumental” and only part of their role. That leads to the view that Museums 2020 is only a partial account of the sector, neglecting the “core”, which is sometimes referred to as the “intrinsic” work of museums.
I’m not sure the instrumental/intrinsic dichotomy is particularly helpful. Here’s another way of thinking about it.
Over the past few years there’s been a trend for museums to want to make themselves more and more useful – to make a contribution to society and to their local area. In part, that’s the result of a desire to do more to satisfy funders, but in many museums there’s a very genuine drive to do more to make people’s lives better.
There’s another trend, reflected in some responses to Museums 2020, that museums shouldn’t lose sight of the value of providing people with an enjoyable experience.
That’s fine and the MA definition of a museum talks of enabling “inspiration, learning and enjoyment”.
But in hard times I’m not convinced that prioritising giving people a nice time works. It’s not enough – when times are tough, museums need to offer more.
