Classifications

Definitions are notoriously slippery, yet for at least two particular reasons they're helpful.  First, clarifying a position allows people to determine their understanding of it from which they can better contribute to the discussion, or leave it.  And second, their notorious slipperiness make definitions a prime starting-ground for critical debate.  What is a museum?

It's clear from my Miró post that in my estimation the Tate Modern is a museum, but before I started this blog I'd always referred to it as a gallery and in conversation I still would.  Efficiency makes me call it a museum.  Since the blog is about museum practice, or museology - the business of collecting, storing, and interpreting material culture for enjoyment and edification in the present and analysis and wonder in the future - if I were to call the Tate specifically a gallery, some might ask where its place in the blog was.  In the broad understanding of the term, the Tate is a museum (think 'MoMA' and it becomes really apparent).  The Tate collects, stores and interprets art of the 20th century and beyond in a free-to-enter, public space.  People visit for leisure, study and work.  It is a place of showing - the displays demonstrate and thereby engage and educate visitors.  This latter aspect of the museum is central, and can happen directly when a visitor learns something specific (in the Tate's case) about an artist or an art work, or more obliquely when a display provokes someone to question an assumption.

Preserved historical sites are not necessarily museum spaces.  Museology seeks to interpret as well as conserve; so unless there is a space devoted to helping visitors understand more about the site, or activities or materials with that objective, a site however carefully maintained or old is more archaeology than museology.

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