What does it mean today for a museum of agriculture to meet 21st-century expectations and be simultaneously scientific and popular?
MúzeumCafé 44.
According to János Estók, historian and director of the Museum of Hungarian Agriculture, in order to answer the question a scholarly discourse is required. He agrees with those who interpret an ‘agricultural’ museum as involving everything agrarian in the broad sense of the term, or dealing with a specific field. Others believe that presenting issues in the format of a farm museum is the way forward. He believes it is, but only one among a number of ways.
Historian and museologist József Tóth, who works at the Museum of Agriculture’s Georgikon Croft Museum in Keszthely, believes that in the third millennium it is still important to link museums with physical space. A 21st-century, up-to-date museum of agriculture must cooperate fruitfully with partner institutes, tourism organisations and state actors in provincial development in the fields of regional and international marketing.
According to ethnographer István Páll, director of the Sóstó Village Museum, on no account should such a museum be located in the capital, since those actually involved with agriculture regard the country’s largest city simply as an administrative centre, which has nothing in common with agriculture.
Art historian Renáta Szikra, a staff member of the journal Artmagazin, deals with the relation between nature and art, the tendencies in the development of horticulture and the genres of urban architecture, which from green-guerilla projects of urban development to community gardening embraces many new initiatives. For the majority of urban dwellers, however, land cultivation is a skill that has to be relearnt. Agriculture itself has become an abstract discipline and for the average person it appears just as distant as, say, atomic physics.