c. What does “museum” mean to me?
“Museum” as experience
As I mentioned earlier, this internship helped me to both expand and solidify my personal understanding of the museum—expand in the sense that, for instance, one of our field trips was to Golden Mile Complex, a site seldom considered a museum. Another pivotal moment in my extension of the museum concept was when I read a 2001 ICOM definition which explicitly included “botanical and zoological gardens, aquaria and vivaria”; “science centres and planetaria,” and “nature reserves,” among other things. These institutions aren’t instinctively what we would think of when thinking of museums, and yet, to me at least, classifying them as such doesn’t seem like a huge stretch—why?
A key idea for me is the museum as an experience. Botanical gardens and zoos may not have the same kinds of climate control or collections as museums, but there are similarities in the experiences of moving, looking, absorbing, and learning. Gillman Barracks, as a constellation of commercial art galleries, may not qualify as a museum under either definition, but, for the visitor, going from gallery to gallery is not necessarily all that different from exploring an art museum. When I visited the Ministry of Culture, Community and Youth’s Many Beliefs, One Future, a pop-up exhibition at Raffles City, I experienced it as a museum not because its themes of religious harmony aligned perfectly with ICOM’s proposed definition, but because I recognised the trappings of white walls, artefacts, and vitrines. While acknowledging the importance of high-level academic and professional discussions, I value museums as experiences—ones which bring delight and satisfaction in learning new and seeing beautiful things and a respite from the stresses of the day-to-day. Similarly, Cordero Reiman lyrically describes the past as experienced through the museum as an “evocation,” and Ahmad Mashadi writes, quoting Michael Sullivan, the NUSM’s founding curator: “The Museum shall provide the student a ‘spiritual and emotional experience that will help to bring meaning and illumination into the rest of his life.’”
![](http://cfa.nus.edu.sg/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Image-1-225x300.jpg)
Other components
Thus, a museum is somewhere one visits (and pays, if applicable) primarily for an experience, not a product. But what might this experience more precisely entail?
- For me, a museum ought to engage the senses and through them the mind.
- It should facilitate learning about “the tangible and intangible heritage of humanity and its environment” (a part of the current definition I find worth retaining, since it seems to encompass just about every subject one could imagine).
- The first point also highlights the importance of the object or what Cordero Reiman calls the “corporeal experience.” In our digitally dominated, often alienating world, museums can help ground us, providing the kind of experience for which digital media or “written language” would fall short.
All these are components of my idea of a museum, which further examples and case studies can help to refine. For instance, when faced with Pamuk’s Museum of Innocence, I decided it was not so much a museum as a personal art project, even if others might disagree. Thus I discover that to me a museum is, generally, collaborative, bigger than a single person and idea. To all this I would add another element, which relieves in its simplicity: the museum is a place of inspiration—a “seat of the Muses.”
d. “Museum” as approach
But beyond the museum as an experience, there is another possibility I’m interested in: the idea of the museum as an approach, a particular way of taking in and thinking about things—the museum as a “state of mind.” This is once again informed by the interns’ trip to Golden Mile Complex, which, though historic, is a shopping mall, not what most would consider a museum. Yet, by approaching it with such a possibility in mind, as part of a museum internship, by seeking to observe, learn, and understand its aesthetic properties, historical context, and contemporary issues, did we not in some sense have a museum experience? The visit also resonates with an Indian Heritage Centre field trip I joined last summer, which took us out of the Centre into the broader Little India area, with stops such as the Jothi Store and Flower Shop and Banana Leaf Apolo restaurant—these surrounding areas, according to our guide, could also be considered an extension of the museum.
Is it possible, then, that if I go into a site intending to have a museum experience, I can have one, even if that isn’t the site’s primary function? The Singapore Heritage Society’s write-up of Golden Mile Complex, Pearl Bank Apartments, and People’s Park Complex notes that many architectural UNESCO World Heritage sites have been “adapted” into “museums”, supporting the idea that a site’s functions can change over time, depending on how society generally perceives it. It is also quite natural, however, for a site to have multiple functions at the same time for different people. A student learning about plants at the Botanic Gardens may be having a museum experience while a family nearby plays frisbee or picnics. Even a formally designated museum may not be one to someone going there to meet friends for lunch. On the flip side, if we approach a place like Golden Mile Complex in a certain way (and of course the danger of “museumifying” an active site and lifestyle is there), perhaps we create, on some level, a museum in the mind.
At this point, I suggest a kind of “sliding scale” of museums, in which conventionally recognised museums best facilitate such approaches of looking and learning. To borrow the ICOM phrase, “sites of a museum nature,” from 2001, some sites simply have a stronger “museum nature” than others. But perhaps other sites can also become museums if we as individuals make them so.
e. Potential issues
There are, of course, some problems with these ideas. Firstly, they are not that helpful when it comes to ICOM’s more practical concerns in fixing a museum definition, like funding and other such matters. For this, I would suggest that instead of a universal museum definition, ICOM could work towards crafting a set of “criteria” or “guidelines”—criteria to be the kind of museum under ICOM or the kind to receive funding, not to qualify as a museum at all. We could make use of existing classifications such as “state” or “national” and “independent” or “private” to try and understand the scope of what might be considered a museum. Museums should be, as far as possible, assessed on a case-by-case basis by their individual merits. In this way, perhaps museums deemed most broadly beneficial to society could receive the support they need without excluding more niche and obscure museums from a universal museum ideal. This is not to deny the vital importance of the spirit and values laid out in ICOM’s proposed definition—for they are, indeed, vitally important—but can we find a way to encourage museums to espouse these values without limiting what a museum is?
Another potential problem might be that these possibilities broaden the idea of “museum” too much, allowing too many experiential sites, such as amusement parks, movie theatres, and random shopping malls, to become museums. Components of my personal idea of the museum, like the emphasis on learning and the “corporeal experience,” might help narrow the field slightly. I could refine it further, for instance, to stress the importance of active learning and movement, rather than seated, passive reception of images on a screen. While this is admittedly a roundabout way of arriving at a useful idea of the museum, there is another possible solution—to have a little more faith in people and their good sense, to trust that they will not immediately start calling everything under the sun a museum, and to accept that even if they do, it might still be better than protecting museums behind an intellectually elitist glass case.
I wrap up this section with a quote from J.M. Coetzee’s novel, The Childhood of Jesus, in which a boy has gathered a miscellaneous bunch of shabby objects, to an adult’s disapproval (emphasis mine):
“It’s my museum,” says the boy.
“A load of old rubbish is not a museum. Things need to have some value before they find a place in a museum.”
“What is value?”
“If things have value it means that people in general prize them, agree that they are valuable. An old broken cup has no value. No one prizes it.”
“I prize it. It’s my museum, not yours.”