Josh Perelman 08.

09
Workshop on the Future of History Museums

I believe that an assessment of the future of history museums begins with basic questions
about their role in society. Should history museums aim to be universal chronicles of the
human experience? Serve as the attic of human history? Offer visitors a three dimensional
textbook? Display the footnotes of our shared experiences? Chronicle of particular community
or idea? Are history museums tourist destinations? Storytellers? Creators of knowledge?
Critical observers? Political advocates? Such questions oversimplify the case, but I think that
they are fundamental to the discussion at hand. Can we offer some definition (or definitions) of
what a history museum should be? If not, then how can we prescriptions can we make for
their continuing relevance?

With this set of questions about the essence of what a history museum should/could be in
mind, I am often led back to a quote from Jean-Paul Sartre’s book Between Existentialism and
Marxism:

In the domain of expression, success is necessarily failure….It is impossible to succeed, since at

the outset you set yourself the goal of failure (to capture movement in immobile objects, for
instance)….The moment comes when you just can’t take the work any further; all is lost. At
this point, my friend Giacometti explains, you can throw your piece of sculpture in the rubbish
bin or exhibit it in a gallery. So there it is, you never quite grasp what you set out to achieve.
And then suddenly it’s a statue or a book. The opposite of what you wanted. If its faults are
inscribed methodically in the negative which you present to the public, they at least point to
what must have been. And the spectator becomes the real sculptor, fashioning his model out
of thin air, or reading the book between the lines. (pp.19-20)

Those familiar with Peter Novick’s soaring chronicle of the historical profession That Noble
Dream (1988), will know that he chose to end his book with this quote to illustrate the anarchy
that had engulfed the historical profession at the time of its publication. Having spent hundreds
of pages analyzing the vicissitudes of the historical profession, Novick came to the conclusion
that it had become unanchored, absent a reigning ideology or methodology. Whether or not
this would bode well for history and the historical profession, Novick did not predict.

Twenty years later, it seems to me that history museums have reached their own critical
moment. I’m not sure if anarchy would be the best word to describe the present situation, but
scarcity of funding, declining visitorship, the increasing role of technology in how we find
information, and the declining public trust in its institutions (to name a few) have precipitated
very real and very serious existential challenges to historical institutions.

In the midst of this cacophony, I find Sartre’s words alluring and provocative. Can we negotiate
the politics of representation and the indeterminacy of perception, topics that have attracted no
small amount of scholarly investigation, philosophical musing, and critical dialogue? How do the
answers to this question affect the practical realities of institutional life?
 Josh Perelman 08.09
Workshop on the Future of History Museums

Often museum professionals, or those they enlist to collaborate with them in the creation of
exhibitions, do not have the luxury of the critic (no personal stake in the fate of the exhibition)
or the scholar (time). Instead, those tasked with the creation and production of historical
exhibitions negotiate between the demands of a host of stakeholders (among them board
members, museum staff, artifact donors, scholars, the public, and, of course, budgets), public
assumptions about objectivity (or “objectivity”), and their own ambitions. Mediating between
these requires considerable political and creative acuity, but, at least in my opinion, the
institutions that do so will be those that define the future, whatever it may be.

To that end, a few questions we might ask during our sessions could be:

1. What are the most appropriate categories by which to define success/failure (i.e.,
visitorship, design, scholarly rigor, profit)?

2. Can exhibitions that set out to explore the human experience though material culture,
images, and brief snippets of text (traditional history exhibitions) “capture movement in
immobile objects”?

3. A similar question might be: Are object-based exhibitions anachronistic or the vital
footnotes of the human experience?

4. Is technology a panacea or a crutch?

5. Who controls the narrative in an increasingly interactive (but not necessarily informed)
society?

6. What role can/should local historical institutions play?

7. If “it is impossible to succeed,” then what role does experimentation play in exhibition
development? Can museum be sources for intellectual innovation?

8. What is the relationship between big ideas and social history in narrative development?
How can history museums help their visitors better understand conflict and controversy?

9. If the “spectator becomes the real sculptor,” what role do history museums have as an
authentic (and accessible) sources for knowledge?

10. Is it time to explode fixed categories and embrace interdisciplinary, multivocal, and
multimedia methods of representation? What is gained? What is lost?