Hi Martin,

IMHO new museum exhibits can improve " the awe, wonder, and inspiration"; I am thinking abut Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality or Digital Holograms. Moreover visual installation (e.g. based on videos) can help in understand lso difficult concept. E.G. 4D reconstrucive models can show in a easier way the historic process (diachronic) of a site or a find. Maybe older museological approaches can have a kind of fascination on some people, but most of the new technological exhibits (especially if based on mobile devices) can improve this level of augmented information without modifying (if necessary) an "old style" presentation of the collection. In other words we can have both of the things (old style presentation with the possibility of new technology exhibits) in the same museum.

In my own artist opinion, I don't understand why only Internet is open 24/24 7/7 to artists to expose theirs works. Museums turned into big expensive pastry shop where you have to stay far from the pieces, at times monitored by armed guards. It lacks innovation, it lacks life. When by chance something happens, it's always thanks to an artist initiative. This Bansky piece, clandestinely installed in Brittanic Museum (GB)'s walls stayed unnoticed for weeks.

Hi Fred,

I completely agree with you. If we replace the guards with story tellers who actually interact with visitors in a humane way and treat the objects as living things with their own life-stories, we might get better success. I run a small studio-museum in a street corner near Brussels airport. I am at hand twice a week for to hours at a time to tell the soties about my collections, most relgious and sacred objects. I am amazed by the number of people who return more than twice to ask further questions about the stories they have heard and to see if there are new living objects added.

Indeed, story telling is the key to inspiration in cases that the objects are not able to be researched by curious visitors.

I do disagree by the way that museums lack innovation. Many museums do search for new/more ways to engage the public and even engage new target groups like minorities from society. There are also many interesting conferences which are showing best practices like Museum Next and the annual Ecsite conference.

But what do the dare to do, apart from discussing around it? The story-tellers are a very good option, if one day is open to free story-tellers, that way getting a chance museums may learn something from their visitors. Why not letting an non-specialized worker arrange an exhibition and decide where to put pieces? As Museums, they should innovate questioning first their own position.

I just had the honor of working on a $100M project transforming a regional natural history museum from an outdated, carpet-lined-walls-relic to a very engaging, innovative, awe inspiring place. Some examples of things we did to combat the lack of interaction or feelings of immersion was definitely technological. We had virtual as well as physical dig In our dinosaur gallery areas. We had touch screens with listening stations at every dinosaur or diorama, yet we also had long, multi surface interpretive panels with hands on learning incorporated. We always had “interactors” in various characters in galleries engaging with guests, usually with a touchable Teaching tool on hand for visitors. This is was essentially pop up theater. We also resurrected the old diorama with taxidermy, but it was always viewed in the round, with items that visitors were ALLOWED to touch on each side to satisfy curiosity whilst protecting the collection. Each main gallery was also augmented with a “lab” where school groups or the general public could have engaging discussions with the educational team members as well as participate in multiple hands on learning activities that would engage everyone from toddlers to seniors. A lot of sight and sound technology was incorporated into the galleries to augment the artifacts themselves. Immersion was the key word. We even added an ever changing Texas sky above our diorama on a 50 ft. Custom dome with an oculus in which a thunderstorm, birds, or clouds would float past, accompanied by light and sound effects. I think the key is to mix old and new, all age ranges. Have interactive PEOPLE as well as activities. Making the visitor feel a part of the exhibition helped engage all ages, while technology satiated the Tech savvy. We also had 180 degree films with integrated sound and lighting (not quite 4D) that would get audible “ooohs” from museum goers. Everything was rethought and designed to get the visitor closer, emerged, engaged, and educated. It was always on our minds to not create “edutainment” but a truly dynamic and state of the art learning environment.

When there is an interactive element, stimulating deeper engagement and continuing the discovery.

There is something to be said for Jennifer Barron's idea of a museum that caters to all manner of needs and people. It might be useful to go back over ones own experiences of museums to see what this throws up, as well as going back into the history of the Museum as a 'Wunder Kammer' or ' Curiosity cabinet' as they were called in the 17th century. But here I will dwell on experiences. As a child my mother often took me to Exhibition Road in London to the Museums. I cannot recall what they housed but remember turning handles to make things work.Then in Stockholm the 'Thielska Galleriet', the large house of an industrialist converted into a museum but still in some way a house, a dwelling place with a wonderful collection of the paintings of Edvard Munch. I would not want this to change in any way. The 'Moderne Museum' in Vienna is a place I have been to once and never again, because of the building itself. On the outside it is a grey bunker with narrow window slits and inside it is like being locked into a machine. The Modern Art Museum in Tel Aviv is quite different, flooded with light.

Already I begin to realise that it is often not so much what is on display in the museum but the actual physical place itself.I can imagine the passing Texas Sky that Jenny described. Sometimes the place and what is in it work together but rarely. The 'Thielska' is one example. By far the best museum I have ever visited was of workers accommodation from the mid- 19th century to the 1970's in Tampere Finland. There was no digitalisation.The museum consisted of a number of separate rooms around a communal kitchen and bath house in what remained of the original buildings. One could look into each room and see the artefacts used by the kind of family that would have lived there, very often five or more family members to a room.I would have loved to have touched the things made by hand in the period before industrialisation got underway in Tampere. But because I could not touch them I drew them instead--I never take photographs in a museum but watch people who do and how they look into their smart phones and not back at the object and then walk on. I sketched a wooden spoon, an infants cradle, the linen blouse of a woman laid upon the black felt jacket of a man, their bed and beside it his hand made leather boots.In one room there was a picture of Marx beside that of Christ. By the time I got to the rooms of the 1970's everything was a purchased commodity that i had no inclination to touch nor draw.

The Art History Museum in Vienna has changed little since the 1880's and I would not want it to be any other way--the wide marble staircase, the ceiling paintings by Klimt, the marble columns, the stucco work. The old museum of anthropology in Vienna was a museum of a museum with hand written labels before the collection was revamped. In the Ephesian Museum in Vienna I drew from the frieze of the goddess Artemis Selene for five years. Artemis the goddess of the hunt, nature and child birth. But of all of them it is still the museum in Tampere that made the strongest impression on me because I could look into these rooms and see a trace of the materiality of the life of Finnish workers: the things they wore, ate from, dressed in, the pictures they had on the walls, the beds they slept in.

Every New Year's eve, for over forty years,( tomorrow in other words), I go to the Egyptian rooms of the Art History Museum in Vienna where I get some of that feeling I had in Tampere. However, I do not pay much attention to their gods, but dwell on household utensils, pottery, garments, writing utensils and surfaces, the foot ware of the ancient Egyptians. Slowly the time lapse between then and now shrinks as I look at the traces, ruins, relics and material remainders of life.

Thanks Derek for that generous reply. I hope it motivates other people to think about their own "museum autobiography". I also draw whenever I visit a museum. I have no talent whatsoever, but I find that there is no better way to really look at an object, absorb its details, and commit it to memory.

Martin I could not agree more. There is a vast difference between just looking and looking and drawing. It occurred to me last night after writing my answer to your question that the real museums are the artist's studio, the writer's room but also the very places where we live our everyday lives.

Best wishes for the New Year.

Dear Herbert

Thank you for raising this question. The more I think and write about it the more it begins to take on a relevance for the book I am at present writing. Museums are places where we go to appreciate, to find information (in a sense the internet is one huge virtual museum dedicated to immediately verifiable information) and to generate associations. It is the associative power of museum collections that is important for me. This is why the actual configuration of the place of the museum plays such an important role as a place that is conducive to the generation of associations. I am at present reading Forster on Aby Warburg and his description of Freud’s’ behandlungsraum or the room where his patients were treated positioned on a couch in a room populated by Freud’s collection of ancient Egyptian and ancient Greek figurines, many of them thousands of years old. A collection of Figures that according Forster to were part of Freud’s ‘private ritual’ but also where the preservation of the memory of their origin and function was an aid to the memory of his patient’s in the process of a Psychoanalysis based on free association. Forster does not neglect to mention the plaster relief of an ecstatic ancient Greek Maenad in flowing robes on the wall of his practice. For both Freud and Warburg, according to Forster this figure was related to both the development of the individual and occidental civilisation. Sloterdijck sums this up with the notion of a ‘ radical allochrony, a fundamental other timeliness in the midst of the present’. I will not go into this in any more detail here but rather relate this to my experience of drawing in the Ephesos Museum. I drew there for five years after visiting an exhibition of Warburg’s Atlas Mnemosyne (Atlas of memory) in a Museum in Vienna: an exhibition that it took me a repeated number of visits to understand but which determined the future direction of my own painting and mixed media work but also my research and writing. What I am getting at, with regard to the Museum, is not only the essential ingredient of the physical place of the museum but that the exhibits give rise to associations, that generate a significant change of some kind in the beholder. The German philosopher Sloterdijk, in a recent book, has described how the German poet Rilke, who at the time was the secretary of Rodin, after a visit to the Louvre wrote a poem about the fragment of an ancient Greek torso as a ‘sender of discrete addressed energies’. The last line of the poem reads: ‘For there is no place / that does not see you. You must change your life’. For me a museum must contain places and things that see me and in this seeing generate a qualitative change.

In the case of art history museums, we should not encourage quasi sanctification of exhibits but encourage the use of past works of art as a source of renewal in the present. The museum is the house of the Muse. In terms of education pupils and students should be encouraged to repeatedly draw from the old masters.