Visitors

Spent a rainy four days in Chattanooga at the Southeastern Museums Conference annual meeting. All boring details aside, I attended a number of excellent sessions. And when I say excellent, I don’t always mean the quality of the presenters was high, just that the topics got me to thinking.

On the collecting plan front (two sessions), its nice to hear from institutions that have--or are attempting to develop--coherent plans integrated with strategic and interpretive plans.

And I saw two sessions on material culture. The first—a basic “this is material culture”—was presented by a group based around a certain state (not NC) Ph.D. program and its associated museum and I found it particularly unsatisfactory. They made a claim to material culture studies being a distinct discipline because it uses a variety—economic, psychological, archaeological,—of analytical styles. Their claim to distinction also depended on an unrealistically tight definition of “traditional” historical analysis. I think they call that a “straw man”. Anyhow, their presentations did nothing to convince me an analytical synergy had taken place and one of the presenters talked about using artifacts to “make the visitor… [do something]” at which point I mentally checked out.

Another presentation focused on this topic: sometimes visitors self-select objects in your museum for veneration—objects that are not what you think are curatorialy important. That is a right-on proposition and contains what the previous session grossly overlooked: that the meaning and value of artifacts to people are as important, if not more, as any theoretical premise.

And right into the middle of this, Elizabeth sent me this story of a repeat visitor to a museum. This writer grasped something that museum people frequently overlook—that visitors (stakeholders, really, in this case) arrive with their own sense of historical importance or relevance. I don’t think it’s as maddeningly diverse as the author thinks, but an extremely important reminder to people who create exhibits and take it a step further by caring how well it succeeds with the visitor.

That is, of course, my concern for the new Civil War exhibit at Historic Tredegar. Kevin Levin reviews it here and in the process, mentions the board of heavyweight advisors. Certainly a high-powered intellectual set that contains the best thinkers about the American experience of Civil War. It follows, naturally, that the big narrative is an academically sound, made-by-committee, satisfactory, snooze-fest. (Again, that’s the impression I get from Levin’s impression. I haven’t seen this yet.) The reviewer even stopped to consider how it will appeal to certain visitors; something that may not have occurred to the advisors.

Anyhow, I should shut my mouth on that one until I see it in person. 

Comments

[Dan]

I've been thinking about this all day long, because I feel like I have a pertinent answer/observation, but I'm not quite sure just how to articulate it. The approach where I work has been "Put some old stuff out on a table and let people look at it", more or less. Our visitors do seem to come in with their own sense of relevance, and come away with very glowing, positive and enthusiastic remarks about what we've done. The funny thing is that I feel like we haven't done anything to interpret our artifacts at all (at least not yet- that is going to be down the road a bit), yet our visitors are not looking for interpretation so much as they just want to see the stuff. Sticking to a "keep it simple" philosophy ain't so bad, I guess.

Dan

[Ann Mefford]

Came across a reference to a Clarence Emerson Ball. The Balls and Krohs of Louisville are cousins of mine on the Rautenbusch side. Are you a cousin? My great grandmother was Marie Rautenbusch who married a Shire who married a McGalin, any of this sound familiar?

[Jim]

Kevin Levin's review carries about as much weight as a Bill Clinton's abstinence program would. Kevin once revelled in the fact that visitation to the Museum of the Confederacy was falling and therefore threatened the museum financially. But the same thing is happening to the ACWC with declining attendence. The question is why? Are citizens becoming bored with a politically rewritten version of history? Was it located in the wrong place? Maybe somewhere around a northern urban area would draw larger crowds and while simultaneously making the "moral hero" feel better about themselves?

Regardless, a better focus on slavery in western civilization and among both regions of America would be much more enlightening to frame American slavery within a broader picture. Who would believe that slavery existed in the colonies of developed countries such as Britain, Portugal, Germany, France, Belgium, and Russia into the 20th century?

Lastly, I would prefer more material from someone like Shelby Foote rather than McPherson for a Virginia musuem.