Conferences about transformation

Museums and that ‘something else’

MúzeumCafé 18.

Today ‘something else’ is slowly taking over museums. Exhibition objects in glass cabinets, hanging on wall which are roped off and within meticulously furnished interiors are becoming less interesting in comparison with the varieties of related information. Today a museum has to consider visitors not as passive spectators needing instruction but as active participants, even sometimes as creators, though in such a way that even the suspicion of commercialisation does not arise. The encroachment of ‘something else’ has hit museums hard. For a century a museum has been the place where items of unquestionable value were preserved, since something in a collection, or particularly an exhibition, represented a valuable and significant aspect of national progress. Thus a museum couldn’t change a lot, since its essence was to beautifully transform period objects into something permanent. However, after the museum and before the ‘something else’ perhaps it’s interesting to raise questions about the ‘in between’, to make a survey of the systemic perspectives and the possibilities of realisation. On mid-summer’s eve in 2006 the Gizi Bajor Theatre Museum’s series of discussions began with one entitled The Daytime of Museums. The five exchanges focussed on contemporary museum functions, museums and the theatre, museums and the media, museums and space, and the specifics of the Theatre Museum. The participating specialists also touched on the perspectives for contemporary museum education, current questions of collecting and research, and the social role of museums as a ‘brand’. The first conference on the contemporary role of museums and the relationship between theatre and museums was organised under the sub-title Museum Functions in May 2008. A year later, on World Museum Day, with the title Lost Meaning – Museum Functions II, the exchange of views continued, generating even broader professional interest. The aim was to analyse the museum perspectives and structure of ‘existing socialism’ and the post-1989 period, the new approaches of contemporary historical scholarship and the specifics of the Kádár era, and to highlight new paths towards the fruitful cooperation of museology and history. The 2010 conference had the provocative title of McMuseum – Museum Functions III, since the relationship between museums and globalisation was the theme. The aim of the conference, attended by Hungarian and foreign specialists, was to raise specific questions concerning the changing situation of museums. What is the function of contemporary museums? How can museums become players in an intensifying market? How can cross-border working models considered exemplary be applied? How can museums deal with their own past, both with the origin of their collections and with the inherited norms of information provision? What does it mean for a museum to work in a franchise system? What has determined the relations between museums and the public? What is the theory and practice of contemporary museum education, and the manner of its undertaking?