Imaginary museums: What mainstream museums can learn from them?

Abstract

The world is full of museums that don’t exist fully in three dimensions – museums described in words or drawn on paper; museum catalogues; museums on the web. There are also many museums that are the creation of artists, novelists and poets, and so have a strong thread of imagination running through them. The latter cast an interesting light on ‘real’ museums and compel us to ask: What is it that the metaphor of a museum enables writers and artists to say? The question is doubly interesting because there is a long history of these 'imaginary’ museums created by artists. This paper suggests that there are five qualities of museums that writers and artists tune into: the power of objects to take us back in time; the apparent ‘alive-ness’ of objects; the power of collections (which is different to the power of individual objects); the ability of museums to shape the world and tell us stories about it; and the role of museums as powerful metaphors through which we can talk about loss, fear and yearnings for the past. So writers and artists find museums powerfully imaginative places; but then so do visitors. Visitor research shows that visitors come to museums ready to use their imaginations. So my question is: Do ‘real’ museums do enough to work with the visitors’ imaginations? Or, to put it another way, Do enough museums think that the visitors’ imagination – and indeed their own - is relevant to the museum experience? It should be. It is.

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