Given that candidates for the upcoming Local Govt elections in Launceston are now talking about the ‘annual loss’ the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery (QVMAG) makes. There are a number of ways to look at museums and art galleries and it is time that something was said about musingplaces and their purposefulness. Generally, the ‘purpose’ of musingplaces – museums and art galleries – is poorly understood and sadly that is as true in the wider community as it is within the institutions themselves.
Given that AI source date form mulitiple platforms it useful to ask AI about musingplaces purpose. AI says “ A museum’s core purpose is to serve society by collecting, preserving, researching, and exhibiting tangible and intangible heritage. According to the International Council of Museums, these non-profit institutions foster education, community participation, diversity, and sustainable knowledge sharing for the public.
Key Goals of Museums
- Preservation: Safeguard cultural artifacts, historical items, and scientific specimens so they survive for future generations.
- Education: Teach people of all ages about history, science, art, and the natural world through exhibits and programs.
- Research: Provide scholars with authentic raw materials and data to study human history and environmental changes.
- Inclusion: Act as accessible, open community spaces that promote diverse perspectives and social unity."
To argue with that in one sense would be a bit like arguing that motherhood’s purpose was something different to our own relationship with our mother. That said, there is more that could and should be said and especially so currently as the political economic rationalists are contesting the cost of maintaining musingplaces in cultural landscapes.
In any event opening up a subject like this is ever likely to be likened to opening a can of worms. It is what it is.
Nonetheless I think that it’s useful to say something about Prof. Brian Schmidt's contextualisation of universities and ‘knowledge' since the 1980s – musingplaces by extension. Prof Schmidt spoke of a time around about the time when many of our young academics today were born. It is also useful to consider that the first website was created in 1990, and launched to the public on August 6, ( Hiroshima Day) 1991. Prof Schmidt has advocated universities being:
- The defenders of ‘truth' (not THEtruth) in that he emphasised that universities are essentially tasked to purposefully defend truthfulness against populism, misinformation and premeditated ignorance; and they are
- Now in a position where universities' focus is no longer being exclusively to do with being the storehouses of facts – which are now easily searchable online. By extension this means that 'modern universities' must act as guides to help society to gather, interpret and use knowledge effectively; and thus they are
- Tasked to be engaged with society rather than operate in insulated isolation – AKA the Ivory Tower Syndrome. He stresses that institutions like a university (arguably musingplaces too by extension) need to push ideas out into the community and industry rather than hoarding research outcomes internally or by extension like operations that arguably included museinplaces; and
- By extension, being about disrupting the paradigm that suggests that ‘knowledge’ can be ’siloed’ in privileged hierarchical edifices wherever and however they manifest themselves in deference to rhizomatic structures as advocated by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in the mid 1970s.
So, in an attempt to keep it simple, ‘musingplaces’ are a kind of secular KNOWINGplace in a CULTURALlandscape. Rather than ‘adherents/followers’ they have, from where I sit, Communities of Ownership and Interest.(COI)- reference AI here. SO, to know what I’m meaning about ‘musingplace’ I suggest that AI tells it better than I can in TELEGRAMform in the space – reference AI here…. Also, https://garlandmag.com/article/wickery-and-place/ … https://thenudgelbahinstitute.blogspot.com/p/ray-norman.html. I can only say that the QVMAG as a ‘musingplace with a COI has been resisted at every opportunity’ by CoL management and in deference the elected representatives for whatever reason comply. In leu of what else remains a mystery to me except that a series of GMs/CEOs have been my detractors for almost 20 years now for whatever reason I cannot say. It is what it is.
There are well over 2,500 public museums, art galleries, and cultural institutions across Australia. Very few operate as museums and art galleries as a single entity with the TMAG and the QVMAG being standout exemplars. Thus, what applies elsewhere is not always the case in Tasmania given its histories and ’placedness’.
As an institution the QVMAG exists in a place with rich geographies and histories that are at once idiosyncratic and universal in a postcolonial context. There is room to be audacious in the embrace of placedness to serve visitors and Tasmanians alike and here we might well think about The Museum of Old and New Art in Hobart (MONA).
MONA is an audacious operation that arguably sets out to contest contestable ideas and facilitate new understandings to do with being in the world. Arguably, that was The Museum Wormianum purpose when the now famous 17th-century cabinet of curiosities in Copenhagen was created by Danish physician and natural philosopher Ole Worm. Though the original collection was dispersed after his death in 1654, a permanent three-dimensional physical recreation of the room can be visited today at the Natural History Museum of Denmark (specifically housed at its Geological Museum branch in Copenhagen).Musing places
Musingplaces like the QVMAG should be purposeful and strategically oriented towards contesting contestable ideas and facilitating new understandings in a local context. Otherwise, museums simply become theme parks or circuses that exist to placate the masses along with the playing of football in gladiatorial stadiums. Here the Roman satirical poet Juvenal resonates when he reportedly said around 100 CE … "Two things only the people anxiously desire — bread and circuses". The popular expansion "Give them bread and circuses and they will never revolt" is a modern paraphrase.
All this may well be worthy of the QVMAG’s Community of Ownership and Interests deeper consideration.
So, having said something instead of nothing while waiting for everything to be resolved one needs to stand back and see if people think that imagining a musingplace as a circus for the entertainment of, cum placation of, the masses is on the money or it is otherwise an outrageous affront to people’s cultural sensibilities.
