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The below arguments all circle around one assumption: museums will not continue to exist in their present 150-year old form for the foreseeable future, at least not as relevant institutions. As many other businesses, they face a rapidly changing culture, through which their mission will be redefined and will take on new meanings.
They are challenged in their core definition as showcases of material culture through the most innovative force in contemporary culture, the Web. The unprecedented access to billions of replicas of cultural artifacts will lead to significant changes in how we look at, consume, or produce cultural artifacts. Virtuality, both in its narrower technological and its broader cultural meaning, will prove itself as a fundamental category of museum practice.
Narration – as a form of reflection, interpretation and representation of culture – will become the fluid core of what museums are about. Traditional one-way presentations of expert institutions (such as museums) will be altered by the ongoing transformation from collection-based to audience-driven missions and, equally, by two-way Web 2.0 communication models, both on- and offline.
Museums will need to translate the potential of user generated content for their field, as other industries have done before. As an expert institution they will be part of an ongoing reevaluation of what expertise still means in contemporary culture. And while they are localized institutions being physically defined by the space in which they function, their visitors – both local and global – today come from unprecedented diverse national, religious and cultural backgrounds.
The physical space of museums will remain important as temples of civic and secular sacred spaces in contemporary urban life. But their physical structure is the shell that museums partially need to leave behind. Their relevance will be defined through a much broader local/global network and their success in claiming venues outside their onsite structure.
(I) THE CONVERSION OF THE REAL AND THE VIRTUAL LEADS TO A REEVALUATION OF THE MUSEUM’S CORE DEFINITION AS A SHOWCASE OF MATERIAL CULTURE
The World Wide Web is redefining core museum tasks as collecting, preserving, and exhibiting. The current digitization of millions of objects in digital heritage programs leads to new forms of collections management and unparalleled access to replicas of museum artifacts. This transformation is changing museums as we know them: it inspires new forms of preserving, displaying and understanding cultures both on- and off-line.
An exploration of museums and virtuality benefits less from a statement of their differences than from an investigation of common grounds and shared objectives. Put simply, on-site museums and their online counterparts are merely two ways of exhibiting cultures.
Despite the considerable and costly digitization efforts few museums have so far fully embraced the diverse potentials of an unlimited space for display and communication. While other industries expanded and reconfigured their business through the Web in the last years (or were forced to do so), museums approached its potential with a mixture of caution and distance. Old debates (e.g.: are museums about objects or are they about ideas?) color the ambivalence regarding the relevance of virtuality for the ‘museum experience’.
As museums traditionally define themselves as showcases of material objects that visitors can experience on-location, the virtual display mode of the Web appears to be a distortion of this encounter. But does this assumed dichotomy of the ‘authentic’ versus the ‘copy’, of the ‘real’ versus the ‘virtual’ really help us to understand what museums are about?
Artifacts may tell a story, but they do so within the curatorial and architectural meaning and structure given by the larger museum display. This is why “Virtuality” has been and will remain a fundamental category of exhibiting practices. The integration, preservation and interpretation of the museum artifact through collection and exhibition in an Onsite Museum remove and alienate the object from its ‘authentic’ environment. They introduce a new and virtual “museum order” and add a frame of meanings to the artifact. It is the object’s physical presence within this new curatorial context that traditionally constituted the ‘museum experience’.
Methodologically, the virtual representation of objects on Museum Websites only mirrors and re-configures that earlier transfer of the object from its ‘authentic’ (original, historical, physical or emotional) context into the museum environment. As museums redefine the value and meanings of an artifact by taking it into their collection, its digital counterpart on the Web challenges the frame of reference one more time. Thus, re-location of objects is not new to museums, but its very rationale. Museums are experts in framing objects in ever new contexts, and the Web is just one of them.
Notions of virtuality usually have a technological basis. Digitization hereby refers to the transfer of existing information and the reproduction of physical objects in an electronic form. But do virtual reproductions simply mimic their real counterparts? I find that definition too restrictive; digitization is more than a reproduction technique. Etymologically speaking, virtuality comes from the Latin virtus, which has several meanings, including excellence, strength, power, and (in its plural form) mighty works. The word describes a modus of participation or potentiality. In this sense, virtual objects can be seen as illuminating the potential meanings of art and other objects. Virtual exhibitions contextualize objects through narratives, just as onsite exhibitions. Virtuality should be understood as a complex cultural interpretation of objects that forces us to rethink the tangible and intangible imprints of our cultural history.
Debates on ‘virtuality’ refer back to fundamental debates on art and reproduction technologies, as instigated by Walter Benjamin’s 1934/35 essay on The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Benjamin’s dictum that art looses its aura and immediacy of experience through the possibility of its mechanical reproduction (its reproducibility) was much quoted in today’s debate of ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction’, led by Jean Baudrillard, Paul Virilio and Stuart Hall. His analysis marked the incision mass reproduction of art meant for our perception: The digitization of artifacts and their worldwide accessibility through the Web radicalizes this incision one more time.
The translation of museum objects into electronic representations renders both gains and losses. The much-praised social and civic space in which the object is experienced is lost. The digital reproduction appears foremost as visual (or aural) information, similar to a document. Although in galleries visitors experience the objects in a spatial order, they usually cannot touch the objects. Virtual programs eliminate the physical dimension altogether as well as the momentum created by the object’s physical presence; after all, bytes have no aura. But the digital copy can offer new venues for contextualizing the object and investigating its informational layers as well as interactive options for exploring its material characteristics and history.
The manifold bonds between the physical and the digital in today’s world have blurred the distinction between real and virtual: They increasingly overlap, feed on each other, become inseparable.
Museums can no longer assume that they will continue to exist in their present 150-year old form in a culture that radically is changing our notions of reality/virtuality or is multiplying our access modes to culture. The museum’s core definition as a beholder of ‘authentic artifacts’ has lost its once obvious meaning in a world that no longer functions in a simple dichotomy of ‘authentic’ versus ‘copy’. The boundaries between the real and virtual have become fluid, ambivalent and multi-layered. The narration of material/virtual culture – as a form of reflection, interpretation and representation – will become the fluid core of what museums are about.
(II) USER-GENERATED CONTENT WILL CHANGE THE FUNCTION OF MUSEUMS
The Web, and with it our culture, is changing rapidly. It is impossible to predict how it will look in five years time. Let me try anyway: My first prediction concerns sharing as the new mode of how we deal with information. The availability of information including access to cultural artifacts will be seen as a given and change our ways of looking at, consuming or producing culture. If museums do not share their expertise through the Web in multiple ways, they will become dead institutions with a limited lifespan.
Look at the example of Wikipedia, the encyclopedia that relies on volunteers who by now assembled 8.2 million articles in more than 200 languages, or about 15 times as many as the largest edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. It has become the 8th most visited Web site on the Internet. When did Wikipedia start? In 2001. If a volunteer initiative like Wikipedia can challenge an institution like the Encyclopedia Britannica within just a couple of years, you know something is happening. In research Wikipedia was found about as accurate in covering scientific topics as Britannica, which happens to pay its research staff.
Look at Flickr.com, a 2.0 web innovator, which offers a platform for the presentation and exchange of photos. In 2006 it had 4 million users and app. 180 million photos. Today it hosts 2 billion photos. When did is start? In 2004. Newspapers, TV and other media pay attention to FlickR, as they increasingly have the fastest photo shoots from around the world. In 2008 the Library of Congress became the first partner in a pilot project called Flickr commons: The Library team has chosen about 3,000 photos to show on Flickr Commons and invite visitors to help them tagging the photos. Besides using a new venue for showing their collection, the Library of Congress hopes to enhance the quality of their bibliographic records. 24 hours after the photos were put online, the Library had received 4,000 tags and 500 reactions.
A new environment brings new questions. A museum defines itself through its collection. But once information about that collection is transferred into a database, does it matter where the database originates or is accessed? How important is a museum identity in a digital world, and how can it be sustained? Furthermore, while the ownership of intellectual property on the Internet is debated, it seems clear that many Web users do not concern themselves with the provenance of their downloads. What does this mean for museums?
My second prediction: The Web will become a competitor to and co-operator with museums. Initiatives on the Web that take on museum functions will become more visible. They might be faster, smarter and better in an online environment and might easily find larger audiences. The history of other service industries shows us how rapid the Web can redefine the core of their business.
Look at Myspace.com or YouTube.com where users can present their own videos, music, photos, or poetry. When did YouTube start? In 2005. A year later, it had six million users who put an average of 60,000 new videos on the site each day. MySpace started in 2003 and only three years later had 93 million users. MTV and other music channels, which dominated our consumption of music for a long time, might be history: More and more artists use MySpace to present themselves. The Web is the new creative experimental lab.
In recent years, 1.5 billion Web sites, including millions of individual sites, have been established. Never before have such large numbers of people become producers of cultural content, seeking only the respect of their peers as their main reward. In a way, the Web has become a wildly disorganized museum of humanity, a cabinet of wonders and curiosities (and its search machines serve as rather confused curators…).
My third prediction: Museums become producers on the Web everywhere. Museums will be understood as centres of expertise that offer their information not just in the building, on their website and in their publications, but in a variety of online media and networks with similar topics. Create once, produce everywhere. As digital information in whatever form is not bound to a particular location, museums will become producers accepting their audiences as co-producers and actively seeking a proliferation of spaces to reach visitors wherever they are.
And last, not least, the fourth prediction concerns a reversal of roles: Users will generate museum content. Museums saw their audiences as entities they are going to offer information, teach and educate. In the future they still will do that, but in a dialogue: our visitors will offer us information, teach and educate us about our mission and collections. User-generated content – common in many other industries – has just started to change core museum policies regarding collecting, documentation and exhibition. Maybe in some years we will look back with a sense of bewilderment that an institution, which thrives on the appraisal of culture as an expression of the human condition, has been operating for so long without enabling its visitors to contribute to its work.
(III) THE RETURN OF THE EXPERT
While contemporary culture seems to turn all of us into cultural producers, or at least give us the respective tools, the role of the expert and expert institutions like museums have become unclear. The wisdom of the masses, as instrumentalized by Wikipedia, seems to diminish traditional hierarchies of power, knowledge and expertise. And yes, money. While Google, Youtube or Myspace have developed into powerful companies, none of us free floating producers of websites and cultural information has been paid for what we contributed to that success. We have become free and cheap assets.
While museums need to translate the potentials of user generated content for their business, they also face the question of how they can prevail as an expert institution and how expertise will be valued (and paid for) in the future. Being conservative institutions trusted by the audience more than any other public institution, museums might be able to cast themselves as a leading voice in the necessary reevaluation of expertise in contemporary culture. The future of museums will be partially shaped by this new balance between traditional expertise and the wisdom of the masses.
(IV) THE EFFECTS OF GLOBALISATION ON RELEVANCE: WHERE IS HOME?
The Web is not the only challenge to the context, in which museums operate. Globalisation effects also force museums to re-evaluate their mission. Their onsite and online audiences are changing dramatically.
While some praise the liberating effects of free trade and greater global communication, claiming that marginalized groups are empowered as a result, others fear standardization and forced assimilation into a Western-dominated world. Like it or not, the development to an increasingly interdependent world is a given: What role will culture, and more immediate, museums, play in this new globalization movement?
What should museums in the 21st century attempt to achieve? Relevance.
When is a museum relevant to its visitors? If visitors feel that a museum offers something to their life and that is develops, in dialogue with them, within the very same society of which we are all part off. Ideally, but that already is the high art of museum making, a museum becomes a natural point of reference or even authority in its area. A hub of connectivity, a docking station for people, ideas, discourse.
While this often was more of a utopia than a reality, these goals are increasingly more difficult to reach due to the differentiation of our audiences.
Museum visitors are traveling more than ever before. Tourism has become the world’s largest growth industry, and museums have become key partners. Heritage travel is one of the fastest-growing segments of domestic and international tourism. Four out of five of the top tourist attractions in the U.K. are museums. Cultural enrichment has become an incentive of mass tourism. As a consequence, the number of museums and heritage sites is rising worldwide, as is the percentage of the regional and foreign visitors they attract.
Migration has equally changed the context in which museums operate. According to a United Nations International Migration Report in 2002, 56 million emigrants live in Europe, 50 million in Asia, and 41 million in Northern America. As museums strive to determine their civic role and build partnerships with their constituents—often a “local” focus—they also are challenged to communicate with and serve national and international audiences—the “global” focus. Urban centers have become transnational areas that are no longer defined solely by their nations, but by the ever-changing mix of permanent and temporary residents with widely diverse cultural and ethnic backgrounds. Globalization is happening right in our own neighborhoods. Interaction with these diverse constituencies, both transnational and local, is challenging museums to develop new communication skills.
Off course, globalization is not only changing our audiences, but also us as museum professionals. No longer do our models come solely from around the corner. Networks across national borders have become a given.
Museums have been remarkable successful in understanding and creating public and civic space. They have become the new cathedrals, at times sacred spaces, in which visitors want to experience themselves and others. Cities worldwide build museums in order to pacify and civilize public space. Museums have become tools of successful city branding, and some museums like the Guggenheim, the Louvre, or the Hermitage have used their brand name to create satellite museums across the world. But for most museums, globalization means a rediscovery of their local environment: their visitors, their staff, their collections, their tools to reach out to larger audiences, their mission in a quickly changing world.
A more inclusive mission will determine both the ethical signature and economic endurance of museums in a global world. The corporate world is more advanced in communicating across lines of ethnicity, language, nationality, gender, sexual orientation or religion. Museums can profit from this expertise as well as avoid the pitfalls of the often-superficial localization strategies that corporations use for their global products. Museums do not offer commercial merchandise, but cultural experiences. It is in this market of experiences that globalization challenges museums. Many businesses today sell their products in part by using museum display techniques in their overall strategies. Museums have to compete with many components in our economy of experiences without losing their distinctiveness and, especially, credibility.
The proliferation of national museums in the nineteenth century was a consequence of the development of nation-states. So how will national collections be affected by the transnational networks of the twenty-first century? Could museums move to the forefront—as they did in defining a national consciousness in the nineteenth century—by guiding their audiences into a pluralistic and transnational understanding of culture?
After all, museums know, maybe better than any other institution, that cultural artifacts are hybrid in nature: products of cross-cultural influences. Isn’t cultural diffusion as old as mankind? Off course, globalization in the twenty-first century has radically accelerated the scope, speed, and depth of cultural distribution. Some assume that this will turn a few into producers, many into consumers, and all of us into members of a McWorld. Others embrace cross-cultural exchange as the breeding ground of new cultures. Will museums learn from best practices around the world while keeping their distinctiveness? Or will they merge into a globally indistinguishable model? The global museum—a copy-cat?
As globalization takes us perhaps inevitably toward a standardized consumer culture, museums face some challenging questions. Can they make a meaningful contribution to the preservation of cultural diversity? Can they effectively document the isolation of marginalized groups, the disappearance of culturally specific traditions, or the alienation felt by immigrant residents? Just as museums have established biodiversity policies that help to sustain the natural ecosystem, can they—or should they—also strive to safeguard the “cultural ecosystem”?
With their collections as their core, and with their missions of civic responsibility and building community, museums, more than any other institution, might have the potential to create real understanding between cultures. Museums at their best have the special ability to make us feel—wherever we come from—culturally “at home”.
But home is not an easy experience in a world where everything seems to be connected with everything. Museum generate global attention through ever more impressive cultural cathedrals. Their peaceful civic spaces seem to bridge and negotiate cultures.
But global attention comes at a price. ‘Ownership’ will become a major issue for all museums due to the increase in international travel and the accessibility of vast new amounts of historical records and related data. As our frames of reference continue to expand, international standards—for example, codes of ethics and guidelines concerning the handling of unlawfully appropriated objects—are becoming more widely accepted around the world.
The growing global conflict between the freedom of artistic expression versus religious sensibilities no longer can trust on the merits of argumentation alone: like artists before them, museums might find themselves suddenly targeted if they do not avoid conflict and take a stand. A museum can’t be an institution of everything for everyone. It operates on a mission for which reason it is brought to life, and following its mission, it must claim a position of truthfulness to its goals and of leadership in this field.
Courage is not an easy gesture for a public institution. Will museums choose to be civic leaders and contribute to strengthening a democratic dialogue?
BIOGRAPHICAL REFERENCE: Klaus Mueller: Museums and the challenges of the 21st century. In: Future of Museums. New Thinking about Museums of the Future. London, City University 2008.