What is an Art Museum?

Quinn: Hello and welcome back to Pictorial on Relay FM. I'm Quinn Rose. I am someone who did not go to art school, but I have learned so much about what an art museum actually is for today's episode. And I'm really excited cause it's a lot of stuff I've never ever thought about before. 

Betty: And hello, I'm Betty. I'm someone who also did not go to art school, but I also did learn quite a bit about art museums. I actually ended up going down a rabbit hole and ended up reading about like a history of art museums and things like that. So I'm excited to talk about that.

Quinn: Yeah. So a brief introduction to this topic. The idea for this kind of came from, we were on a recent episode, you were talking about postcards, and I mentioned I had seen this postcard exhibit and it actually wasn't in art museum. It was like an art exhibit inside a larger—and I believe I called the British museum a history museum, which I realized later is not strictly accurate. The British museum says that it's "a vast collection of world art and artifacts," so they do definitely hold art in their name. But it sort of sparked this question for me of what do we define as an art museum? What's the difference between an art museum and history museum? How do you decide like if you're one or the other, or you're both apparently in the case of the British museum, because I feel like there's so many, there's a lot of things that I feel like could go either way. And we've already talked a bunch about works of art that we see gaining value because of their age or their technology, sort of their place in history rather than their aesthetic value. So we're already starting to see some of this stuff unravel, and I am really curious to hear some of your starting thoughts on this. As someone who does work in an art museum.

Betty: Yeah, so I'm, I actually, yeah. When you mentioned this topic or when we decided to talk about this topic, I kind of immediately thought about the museums that we have here in Toronto. So I work in the Art Gallery of Ontario, which... pretty certain is like strictly an art museum or it's strictly, or as far as I know, defines itself as an art museum, but there's also close by where that is there's, um, we have the Royal Ontario Museum. I also at first thought it was like a history museum, but it's actually like in my research, I kind of would gather that it's more like the British Museum that it kind of is like a general museum that has like history, natural history, art, and just like all kinds of, all kinds of artifacts. It actually, like the more I looked into it, the more these definitions actually kind of blurred into each other. And there's a lot that can, a lot of museums can kind of get counted as a under different definitions. So that was kind of my initial thought when, when I started looking into this topic. 

Quinn: Turns out it's kind of weird. 

Betty: Yeah. Like a thing that I, I like seem to run into in terms of definitions is kind of that like, history museums tend to present a subject matter, like more so in a—from a chronological perspective, its purpose in general is like documenting history. And I sort of thought back to what we were talking about before. Like I remember we were kind of defining what art is, and your definition was something along the lines of like, art is something that is creative beyond practical intent. The history museums may have objects that are art, but it may also have objects that are just like everyday use objects and artifacts, like things that actually have practical, serve, like some sort of practical purpose rather than purely aesthetic.

Quinn: That is something that I think kind of goes into these blurring lines though. Cause I think there's lots of stuff in a history museum that you could say, well, like, whoa, that was a piece of art that was created. But you know, just because perhaps of the place and time that it was created, it's considered more of a historical idea than in artistic one. I want to dive into sort of more of that conversation. But before we get too into the weeds on that question, cause I think that's going to be a whole thing. You mentioned that you have some info on sort of the general history of museums. Do you want to talk about this first? 

Betty: Oh yeah, sure. When I was looking into just museums in general, like how, how did they start? How did they come about in the first place? So the word museums, actually it comes from the nine muses of the classical Greek goddess, goddesses of inspiration. There have been displays of art and artifacts for a long time, like in probably like ancient Rome or in like Japanese traditional Japanese shrines and places like that. But when I looked into the modern interpretation of a museum that as we know it, it kind of goes back to the 18th and 19th century Europe, going back to the age of enlightenment and some of the early museum things are these things called, I'm probably not going to pronounce this properly. Wunderkammer, which translates—I know it translates to cabinet of wonders.

Quinn: I love it. Wunderkammer! It's so whimsical. 

Betty: Yeah. So there are these like literal cabinets, that like rich merchants and nobles and scholars in Europe... They would have cabinets and they would collect things over their travels or there. Like lives and gifts that they receive. So they were like things with minerals or like animal items or artistic treasures or works of art. Just kind of like their personal collections of people with money and means aware. They just like to display things that they have collected over the years.

Quinn: I know that that's basically just a precursor to exactly the same system that we have now, but the idea of someone just being like, look at all the cool stuff I've collected, come into my house and gaze upon it and think that I'm cool because I have these artifacts and in our wall horn, it's delightful to me.

Betty: Yeah, exactly. I actually, I found this really cute image. Let me see what I can send this to you of a Wunderkammer. It's like a sketch or a drawing of, I think from like the Smithsonian libraries of like somebody's Wunderkammer.

Quinn: Oh, this is such an, it's an artist's rendition. 

Betty: Yeah, exactly.

Quinn: My God, it's got like weirdly shaped animals hang from the ceiling very much. Not to scale. And oh, there's tortoiseshells on the wall, and this is, this just seems like a really disturbing game cabin. Like all these dead animals everywhere. That's sad. 

Betty: Yeah, that's true. So, yeah, so basically a proto-museum or in, that's encapsulated in this picture, and this is, this is probably, yeah. More like a natural history museum sort of thing. So the difference between the Wunderkammer and, modern museum is that like there were basically domains of like wealthy, elite people. They were private. You know, it's, you only get to see it if you're friends with these wealthy people. They're not for public display. So like some of the first public museums opened up in, you know, like the 17, 18th centuries. So there are things like the, the British museum, and so the British museum, so that was founded in 1750. But I did read that the oldest art museum is in—or in Europe at least. It's the... So it was called the Amber Bock cabinet. It's now called the Koontz museum basil in Bazell, Switzerland. And it was open. It was originally a private collection, but then it was sold to the city in 1671, it opened in 60, 61, and then it was sold to the city in 1671. So it's the earliest known public art museum. And so this like idea of displaying art and artifacts to the public, is, was kind of like a enlightened age of enlightenment idea, which is to like, open up our curiosities and to enrich our understanding of the world. And, you know, displaying empirical evidence and things like that.

Quinn: One thing that I also read about specifically in terms of the historical progression of art museums. There's a meta layer to that sentence. Awesome. Sort of like all museums developed from those general principles and that lineage, or there came to be a really specific art museum style that was called the white cube approach.

Betty: Oh yeah.

Quinn: And this was created by Alfred Barr in the 1930s and so he was basically working in the museum of modern art, and he was like, we don't want to bias the viewer. We're going to have white walls, we're going to have minimal minimalist frames. And so you're just going to walk in, you're going to see the art, like pretty much placed out of context, if not entirely out of context. Cause I mean most art exhibits are organized around a specific artist or a specific art movement, but it definitely sort of placed outside of itself in time. And you also find that like a lot, some art museums are really good about putting a lot of information near the artwork that sort of provides backstory on it. But sometimes all you get is like the name of the painter and the medium in which they painted it. If you're like looking at a painting on the wall. And so that definitely is, is sort of divorced from its wider context. And I think that's what a lot of what we think of as sort of an art museum today is that idea. And it's placed in an artistic aesthetic context that just like on the wall next to an art piece from a similar time period rather than a historical context where you're trying to get people to understand how this thing came to be.

Betty: Yeah. Actually it's funny that you mentioned that display technique of the white cube, and you were saying like most of the times you just get a name and a, the painting and the artist next to it, but sometimes you don't even get as much as that. At the AGO we actually have a gallery where the donor had specified that they literally want all the walls to be completely white. The paintings to be hung on the walls and to have nothing next to the, like no labels next to the paintings. So there's, it's literally a white room with just paintings, and if you want to know, like what the painting actually is, there is like a little pocket at the entrance to the room and they have a little booklet that if you open the book, it'll say like "west wall painting one is such and such," but if you don't look there, you don't even know like who a painting is by, or what the name of it. So that's where it's like completely devoid of context. As you were saying, I think one of the differences between that white cube approach versus a history museum approach is that, like in history museums, or at least in my experience, like you tend to have displays where they're trying to provide as much context as possible. Even maybe like the decor in the exhibition to be like historic or styled in like its period and to give you like a lot of information on what was going on in history at the time. Whereas yeah, like this white cube approach is literally the opposite of that, where the attention is given to like the aesthetics of the piece and its artistic value rather than when it was painted and what the historical context is.

Quinn: Another brief note that I think ties into that same idea is I was looking up the definitions of different art museums on the encyclopedia Britannica, not like the paper version because who am I? But the online version. And they did quite an interesting article server about, about museums and the classifications of different ones. And one of the things that caught my eye in the history museum section is that if they want to represent something that they like a historian knew would be there, but they don't actually have that artifact, they might recreate it and they'll say like, this is a recreation of what this would have been. Which is obviously like not something you get in art museums because if it's like a curator made a recreation, it's like, well, that's not the art, then. 

Betty: Yeah, you probably wouldn't have like "this is a recreative Picasso done by the curator."

Quinn: Yeah. We'd be like, excuse me? And this is just a way more poetic way of saying everything that we've been saying. "The art museum is concerned primarily with the object as a means of unaided communication with its visitors." So direct quote, which I think basically is saying that it's meant to exist aesthetically and without sort of. The same kind of historical context that you're going to get in other kinds of museums, but it's just said in such a poetic way.

Betty: Yeah, that's for sure. I'm sure sometimes like you, cause like I've, I've definitely seen art museums present certain types of works or certain types of exhibitions in historic ways, like, especially if someone's doing a retrospective of an artist's life, wanting to tell the story of, you know, an artist from when they were born to when they had their early career to their, like later in life. So like that, maybe present a chronologically and in historic ways. So it's not to say that like all art museums are presenting artworks like devoid of context and history, and history or chronology, but it just, it seems like it's just that, like the intentions are different. And, and I think on, on, the reverse side is... so come across things that said like some, some history museums may come from a ethnographic perspective where they are just trying to present like the culture or the significance of an object rather than presenting something chronologically. 

Quinn: Yeah, there definitely are sort of variations on the broad things that we're talking about and the different sort of individual karyotype, Ariel and overall museum management decisions that are made. One of the things that I wanted to draw in was also sort of the connection to natural history museums, because I think there's, there's classification that's like your art museum and your history museum, and then the natural history museum, which the idea of that is it, oh, here is the natural planet. And animals, and fossils and whatever else, which I think there's something delightfully human about that where we're like, here's all the Earth besides humans, but we put it in a human made box. Will you look at, yeah, exactly. But sort of a thread here is that... I was looking specifically at the American Museum of Natural History in New York and looking at the exhibits that they had there, cause I was like, is there anything human made in this museum? Or is it like purely all quote unquote "natural history," as if humans are not part of the natural world, but whatever. Yeah. But they actually do, they have these things called cultural halls, which are collections from sort of very broad definitions of early cultures where they're like, look at these examples of really early humans where we might've been considered like more part of the natural world. And that the sort of technology and that what we know about them. But what I found very interesting and I think points to, uh, something we alluded to earlier was that there was, and I'm looking at their website right now, their cultural halls are for: Asia, Africa, North America, South America, and the Pacific. Notice anything missing?

Betty: Uh, Europe.

Quinn: Yeah! So the question, why is there not a cultural hall for Europe? Cause one, I want to see Vikings, but to just like, I feel like that sends a really weird message that these objects are part of our sort of natural cultural, human history, whereas the earliest European settlements aren't. And I tried to look up like, Hey, why isn't there a European hall? That was a really difficult question to Google. Um, so I didn't find any like, conclusive. Evidence of someone else asking this specific question, so I might be missing something obvious, but I did find a lot of accounts of people sort of protesting the American Museum of Natural History for the way that it treats these cultural halls and demanding updates to them, greater context placed on them. I didn't see this levied as a specific complaint, but I, it's just something that raised a kind of a red flag to me of saying like, what are the ways that we consider different cultures and sort of the point I'm getting to in relation to art is I suspect that things are more likely to be categorized as art if they're from a white slash European heritage rather than a different culture.

Betty: That's exactly something that I've come across as well. And one thing like when I was looking at the definition of our museums too, is that a lot of places are saying, Oh, you know, art museums, it holds things like paintings and photography and prints, but also like decorative arts, like, you know, chairs and things like I was, I was saying before, like of practical value, but the thing is, when you look in an art museum, you tend to see like a lot of European objects that are like practical, everyday use or cultural objects. But it's placed in an artistic context. But when you have objects from other cultures like African or Asian, or like indigenous American, they tend to be placed in a natural history or a natural history or a history museums context. Like, it kind of just speaks to what I mentioned earlier is that kind of like this whole museum as a modern, as like the modern museum is a very like European or Eurocentric phenomenon and that like, yeah, there, there is a tendency to categorize European objects as art and non European object as artifacts. 

Quinn: I think this is all sort of brought us to a more interesting question where we started with this idea of what is the difference between an art museum and history museum? And I think that's just pretty easy to define in terms of things that we've already talked about because it really is just sort of about how you stylistically make choices and how you present objects. But now we've landed on this question that I think is much richer and harder to answer, which is how do you decide what museum an object belongs in. And that that is going to be so intricately tied to who you are, who is making the decision and the cultural context that you exist in. Because my personal theory is that most objects that are in art museums could also be placed in a history museum, even if it's not necessarily groundbreaking. There's tons of stuff in history museums that like doesn't matter individually, but that is important when placed into a historical context, just as sort of an example of things. I think that's less true the other way around. I think there's plenty of stuff in history museums that's like, here's a spoon, and it's like, well, that's not. Okay. I moved away from natural history here, I'm talking about sort of like general human history, but the fact remains that I think that there is, there is a lot of things that could be crossed that were made the choice to be placed in one or the other.

Betty: Exactly. It presents like, it's not necessarily always a bad thing is not necessarily always saying that, you know, like, they're presented in a poorly presented manner, but it's just saying like, or it's just important to think about. Yeah. Like what context is being presented in and what kind of message is trying to evoke in the viewer? Basically like it's, it's just, it's, yeah. It's just interesting to, to think about like just the way something's presented. 

Quinn: Yeah. Cause something can be placed in a quote unquote "history museum" and still be given the proper amount of respect for it. Whatever it is like as an artistic and aesthetic object as well as placed in a historical context. And I personally think art museums should have more historical context in general. And I think that they—first of all, it's infuriating when you walk into a room and you can't get information on what's happening. Because clearly I like to learn about art, because we're all here. But I also think that especially when almost every sort of like big art museum in, in North America, and Europe was made by white men, and then they steal a bunch of objects from other cultures and they're like looking at our museum and they don't place those objects in context from where they came from, either as historical or aesthetic objects. I think that leaves a lot out of the story. And I would like to know the story. 

Betty: One of the things it does remind me of also, is that we're, so where I work, there's is actually a pretty good African art collection, but one of the issues is that there are a lot of these like, you know, beautiful masks from, I think East Africa, like Ghana and those regions. And one of the things that, the ways it's displayed is just, it's kind of in a glass box and it's on a pedestal. But if you think about, like the history of some of these masks, they're, they're meant to be worn by someone and they're meant to like perform. And I've read, it's just things about how you know, like when you take like a mask that's meant to be worn in a ceremony with along with like music and dancing and just please place it in a glass box, like white glass box. Like that's really, you're not really presenting it in a way for someone to really understand what this piece is meant for. And I'm sure some, maybe some museums are doing things like this, like, you know, having these objects actually be worn. If it's in good enough condition, and performed by, you know, in traditional ceremonies by someone like that would be something that interesting to do. 

Quinn: That would be awesome. Yeah. That would be so exciting to be able to see something that maybe you saw last month in a glass case to be used like how it was actually intended to and to learn something new. Why aren't museums doing this? Like sell tickets? Great.

Betty: Yeah. Seriously. Yeah, I think, and again, yeah, like this topic is interesting because it really, you start to think about just kind of like how museums, like how things are displayed in museums can sometimes kind of be problematic and it can kind of, even though the intent of like, you know, of history museums or maybe even art museums is to provide a better understanding. But like, just the, the act of taking something out and putting it in a white box is actually kind of making it harder to understand some objects and some artworks.

Quinn: That almost reminds me, and it's not the same thing, but I think they're similar ideas with zoos is like we sort of, as humans, we're like, look at these animals, put them in a box. And then over time learned how to keep animals in captivity for the betterment of, of species and sort of education and doing that in like a helpful and healthy way instead of just looking at this tiger I found. Where I think it's, it's a similar kind of thing is like, well, we've grabbed all of these objects and we put them in a box and I keep saying box, but you know what I mean? Room. And then now I think we're just at sort of the beginning of the process of figuring out like what does it mean to have these objects ethically, to actually use them to their full extent of education and sharing them with other people while basically building an updated moral understanding of what it means to have these objects.

Betty: It's interesting to to think about, and it's interesting that like these kind of, yeah. Like these definitions are, are blurred or, and hopefully there will be more institutions that can, you know, display things in like more creative and more like culturally appropriate or culturally contextualized to waste.

Quinn: And as always, we're ending with more questions than we started with, but that is the beauty of learning new things. So thank you for listening to this episode of Pictorial, and hopefully thinking a little bit more about art, museums, history museums, and all this kind of stuff with us. If you want to follow us on Twitter or Instagram we're at both @PictorialPod where there'll be more links and pictures of the stuff that we talked about today. If you want to follow me on Twitter or Instagram, I'm @aspiringrobotfm on both.

Betty: And if you want to follow me on Twitter or Instagram, I'm @articulationsV and I'm also on YouTube as Articulations. 

Quinn: Also, I don't think we've ever mentioned this, but we also—we'll release the podcast in video form on YouTube. And so pictures pop up while you're watching them. If you want to do that, you can also experience it like that. So there's also always a link to that in the show notes, but in case you haven't noticed that, it's there for your viewing pleasure if you feel like that. 

Betty: Awesome. Thank you for listening, art enthusiasts!