Today's most prestigious museums are the effete, passionless descendants of carnival freak shows, pulp theater, and wunderkammer filled with bits of Noah's Ark and unicorn horns.
No wonder they can't market themselves out of a paper bag. Instead of struggling so hard to educate, they should rediscover what it takes to entertain.
The idea of collecting stuff to help make sense of the world is not new. About the same time Renaissance painters started using oil paints and 3-D perspective, aristocrats and rich merchants assembled curiosity cabinets (or "wonder cabinets"), which were pieces of furniture mostly filled and surrounded by nonsense.
There were still no real rules for evidencing proof in science, so pretty much everything could be assembled to "prove" anything. Ever hear a children's story about trolls in the forest? Somebody had a pair of troll boxers in their cabinet. Angel wings? You might catch a glimpse of those feathers here and there, while unicorn horns were commonplace. And don't worry, a lunar map could pinpoint the swallows' destinations when they migrated to the Moon.
People experienced these curiosity cabinets in real-time...literally examining objects in drawers, and touching items hung on walls, which evoked thoughts and ideas without much description or rational explanation. They didn’t learn as much as wonder, and connect with the experiences in very personal, emotional ways. First and foremost, people were entertained.
Curiosity cabinets were history's first happenings, or performance art pieces.
Over time, science got more rigorous, and education more common. The scientific method robbed life of myths and superstitions, and replaced them with facts and repeatable processes. We lost our experience of magic, only to have it replaced with steam engines.
Serious museums emerged to educate people on this shift.
Conceived with a civic purpose of enrichment and improvement, not entertainment, people went to them to learn, much the same way that common folk with refined tastes were supposed to appreciate the opera and symphony. From the 1800s, we see cities large and small building these institutions of respectable knowledge.
Curious collections were aggregated still, often focused on the strange and unexplained in medicine. The Hunterian Museum in London and the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia are full of misshapen skeletons, pickled two-headed babies, and other examples of this irrepressible fascination with the odd and sometimes frightening. PT Barnum got his start popularizing such collections; it was only after his American Museum twice burned down that he chose the circus to market his name. Ripley's Believe It or Not was, and is, another example.
This is why most of today's museums are in a branding pickle.
Directors and benefactors talk of "reinventing" the experience and somehow bringing life to their echoey, dusty rooms. Displays get video screens. Fun typefaces are used. Popular topics, like global warming, get special attention, which usually means corporate sponsors throw in money to add multimedia visuals and sounds (and their company logos).
So boring displays are supposedly made less-boring because there's a button to push before you get an answer to a question you didn't ask?
I think that instead of trying (and mostly failing) to make education fun, museums should figure out how to make fun educational. The model for exhibits shouldn't be a linear book of facts, nor the purpose of individual displays that of bringing supposed chapters to life.
Here's my marketing action plan:
- Museums should start with the intention of prompting more questions, rather than answering them
- Base exhibits on a few core topics, with displays that ground subjects
- Design the interactive steps to resemble the steps in a game (or an Internet search). No more declarative lectures of truth in text and images, but rather the display would be tools to help visitors create their own questions. Don't tell people to learn or feel wonder; invoke it. Maybe exhibits are focused on what we don't know?
- Surround those displays with an ever-widening array of follow-up elements, each of which gets smaller and more focused. Understand that a visitor might choose to pursue a "path" along one aspect of this array, and never get the whole picture. This would be user-directed experience (again, imagine an Internet search)
- Make the ancillary elements easier to knock-down and replace, so the further you pursue a theme in an exhibit, the more likely its realization is new or updated
- Open up the exhibit array to third-parties (not corporations looking to promote their brands) interested in helping bring various aspects of a subject's theme to light. The idea would be to swap these displays out fairly regularly, so the exhibits always stay fresh and give visitors a reason to come back
- Consider entertainment elements not normally associated with museums. So what about skipping the docents armed with limited facts, and replacing them with actors dressed in period garb (or simply as fellow visitors) to prompt conversation? Why not design exhibits to have unexpected elements, like loud noises or other surprises (faux problems, inventions, whatever), in much the same way that Disney designs its theme park rides?
- Also, consider structuring museum hours so that they're not open all hours to serve all potential visitors; the penchant of families with infant children to visit museums means the average experience for everyone is reduced to the time and quality that a 1 year-old can appreciate from a stroller. What about teenage kid hours/days? Adults-only nights? The elements of the exhibits could change accordingly.
Whether science, art, history, or culture, museums need to rediscover their roots in curiosity cabinets, and risk asking questions -- of themselves, and with their visitors -- that might not have neat answers.
There's immense potential here: we of the Internet Era need places in the geophysical world to visit and interact with one another, other than waiting in line together at McDonald's. We need to enjoy again the experience of asking questions, being befuddled, and, in doing so, overcoming our cynicism of all-knowingness so maybe we can learn something.
Skip the lecture, and show me a two-headed baby, and I might be curious enough to show up.
