Museums have been undergoing considerable changes in past decades, moving away from being depositories of treasured objects in favour of places of social engagement, learning and entertainment.
With the Gulf states’ lavish investment museums and other cultural spaces, their administrators have called attention to their innovative technologies and interactive programs that invite visitors to do more than view display cabinets.
For its opening week, the National Museum of Qatar assembled directors of prominent international museums to discuss the future of museums and what makes a museum “great.”
Moderated by Museum of Islamic Art in Doha Director Julia Gonnella, “Great Museums of the World” gathered NMoQ Chairperson Sheikha al-Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani, National Galleries of Scotland Director-General Sir John Leighton, State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg Director Mikhail Piotrovsky, Paris’ Musee d’Orsay director Laurence des Cars and Adam Weinberg, director of New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art.
While these museums are diverse in their intended audience and collections, the consensus seems to be that the future of a successful museum lies less in how important the objects are than in placing the viewer at the heart of a museum.
“What I look for in a museum is ... how the collection is engaging the audience, not just aesthetically, but also from an education point of view,” Sheikha al-Mayassa said.
“One has to assume that the average visitor to their museum won’t know much about your history or culture, so it’s how you draw them into that experience.”
Simply having an impressive collection no longer fascinates visitors, Weinberg said, and it’s down to whether or not viewers can connect and engage with what’s on show.
“In the end people come for a need to connect to something meaningful and not in the sense that it’s just information,” he said. “Some museums have great collections but people don’t feel an urgency to go, and then [there are] some museums that might not have great collections that people feel compelled to go to because of some deeper engagement whether it’s political, social, personal or psychological.”
With the increased popularity of museums housing precious acquisitions, such as the Louvre’s “Mona Lisa,” there also comes the challenge of keeping the art in focus, especially with today’s social media trends. How many visitors actually get to stop and take in the details of these masterpieces before snapping a selfie?
“There are fantastic, large museums that attract fantastic numbers of visitors but they can offer pretty miserable experiences,” Leighton said. “They’re overcrowded and there’s a certain dehumanization from the amount of people coming through.
“There’s more of an emphasis now on the actual experience so that you might not remember the details and history of what you see but you will remember how it felt,” he added.
“A lot has changed in the last 10 years the expectations of our audience and the way people travel. We haven’t even touched the digital revolution, which has totally transformed the way we think, operate and run everything in the museum.”
While museums like the Louvre, London’s British Museum and Washington’s National Museum of Natural History are “world-class” homes of unique treasures, they’ve become so popular that some people end up having a less-than-positive experience.
Due to people crowding around a single piece, visitors don’t have a chance to read labels. Many museums have even stopped placing information labels, according to Piotrovsky, having to account for language access, braille and whether people will even read them.
“We used to have wonderful labels with long explanations but my chief designer told me ... people look at the painting, look at the label, then look back at the painting,” Piotrovsky said. “It’s no longer necessary to have labels, today everybody has a phone and they can look it up on the spot if they’re interested.”
The NMoQ is proud of its use of technology to address these problems, like touch-screen information tables, which can be viewed at leisure in multiple languages.
“Our new app ... has audio stories about the things that can be seen here,” Sheikha al-Mayassa said. “There is a lot of info about our exhibitions and ... you can listen as you walk and choose what you want to know more about.”
Museums are starting to rethink their strategy and evolve with the available technology, to offer a more immersive, accessible and informative experience.
Reputation alone may not see these institutions through when more modern competitors arise.
“What used to be a museum was a collection kept in a certain way and displayed in a certain way and without really questioning the way people were reacting to this collection,” des Cars said. “This has completely changed. We have entered the digital age and museums that traditionally deal with their collections are facing a challenge and I don’t think there is a perfect answer,” she added.
“We need to tackle the question in order to address our mission, which is to put the audience in front of these original works of art.
“People want to face a real Van Gogh but that doesn’t mean you cannot do things to explain the context and give information with digital technology,” she said, noting that when she was appointed Musee d’Orsay director two years ago, the museum didn’t have a digital department.
“How do you purpose new technology and the possibilities they bring around the actual work of art?” des Cars added. “When you are dealing with universal masterpieces Van Gogh’s ‘Starry Night,’ Renoir’s ‘Bal du moulin de la Galette’ - this is very tricky and we’re working on this.”
This article has been adapted from its original source.
