Display Case: Museums and the Just Society

by J. Patrick Greene
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Museums have a unique opportunity to contribute to a “just society” defined by equality of opportunity. Our strength is that anyone can access the knowledge that resides in our collections, associated information and programs. People can learn at their own pace, choose what they find interesting, ignore what they don’t and have experiences that go beyond the mere accumulation of information. A better-informed citizenry results from museums’ ability to enhance an individual’s understanding of the world we inhabit. At their best, museums change people’s lives. While they are not a panacea for all of society’s ills, they are a force for good—and society is the better for their existence.

A fundamental part of museums’ identity is the presence of “real” things—collection items that may be inherently interesting but that also have an aura borne of the associations of provenance, ownership, aesthetics or all of the above. Owning and displaying such items demands authenticity and honesty: If the dinosaur comprises casts of bones or the golden jewelry is electrotype, we must make it clear or risk alienating people who will never believe us again. The reward that our museums receive is trust—a very precious and fragile gift that requires constant attention in order to preserve its value.

Some useful studies have examined the extent to which various media are trusted by the public. An often-quoted 2008 Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) survey, for example, examined visits to U.S. museums. Respondents were asked to rate trustworthiness on a scale of 1 to 5. People who had visited in person provided a trustworthiness rating of 4.62, and those who had used museum websites gave a rating of 4.54. These are impressive—even humbling—results, and they place a concomitant responsibility on museum professionals to live up to such a high level of trust. Codes of ethics, such as ICOM’s and those of national museum organizations like AAM, have provided a framework for values and behavior that have wide support among people working in museums and also those responsible for governance. When museums depart from such values, for example by acquiring illicitly exported antiquities, the public is shocked and the media exact a high price in negative coverage.

The IMLS survey shows that educational background is a factor in museum visiting, with 85 percent of visitors holding university degrees and 35 percent possessing a high school education. The fact that people with degrees (and therefore presumably higher incomes and disposable income) are more likely to visit museums often leads to a pernicious and damaging generalization. How often have you heard it said that museums are the preserve of the middle classes, as if no one from lower socio-economic groups ever sets foot in them? The same survey found that 70 percent of American adults had visited a museum in the previous 12 months in person or remotely, proving that museums actually do reach disparate groups.

Of course, it partly depends on which museums are considered. In the UK, the big national museums in London do have an unrepresentative audience, not least because of the tourist market’s dominance. Step outside London, however, and the situation is very different, as surveys of visitors to museums have demonstrated. Forty percent of visitors to the Tyne and Wear Museums in the northeast of England are from lower-income groups, and Manchester’s Museum of Science and Industry (which I directed from 1983 to 2002) attracts 38 percent of its visitors from lower-income groups. Since so many museums successfully appeal across social barriers, I find it frustrating when commentators and museum professionals persist in restating the myth that museums are for the middle classes.

What benefits do people believe they receive from museum visits? The IMLS survey is helpful on this topic, as well. Eighty-seven percent of respondents said they had learned something new; 63 percent experienced “broadening perspectives on life”; for 42 percent, visits “led to other interests”; for 37 percent, visits “resulted in new ways of thinking”; and 60 percent of visitors said they were inspired by their visit. Together, these represent a powerful influence for good. Every museum visit is made by an individual who can reap the benefits identified in the survey.

Museums also contribute to the health of society. The extent to which museums are valued by the people they serve is most apparent when circumstances are not conducive to their existence. After Russia joined the Council of Europe in 1997, I had the opportunity to visit some Russian candidates for the European Museum of the Year Awards. I didn’t know what to expect since my journey would take me to the Arctic Circle and a distant part of Siberia. Russia was emerging from a long period of central control and suffocating bureaucracy. I was therefore astonished and delighted to witness an outpouring of creativity in every museum I visited. The museum in Salekhard in northern Siberia was like a beacon in a bleak urban landscape to which people were exiled under communism and by the czars before that. There—and in Krasnoyarsk, where the Lenin Museum was being converted to serve new objectives—I saw exhibitions organized by the Memorial Society. This organization exists to uncover the truth of the gulags and was established by survivors and relatives of those who died. The museums were playing an essential role in a society trying to understand the past and come to terms with the present.

The Museum of the Romanian Peasant provided another inspirational experience for me. Established in what had been the Museum of the Communist Party, it provided a focus for the recovery of peasant culture that Nicolai Ceausescu did so much to destroy. We have also seen the battered museums of Kabul and Sarajevo re-emerge to help mend damaged societies. I was struck by the views of an Iraqi defense force member quoted in the UK’s Independent newspaper after a large-scale recovery of stolen antiquities in Basra. Col. Ali Sabah said, “We are very proud. When my soldiers go to the museums with their families and see some of these things, they can say, ‘We got them back for our country.’”

In Australia, Museum Victoria is committed to playing a full and active part in promoting the ideals of a just society. Victoria’s non-indigenous population is made up of migrants from every part of the world, all of whom arrived over the past 200 years. In a successful multicultural society, people feel at ease with each other and have pride in not only their country of residence but their place of origin. Our Immigration Museum is dedicated to that end. We enable communities to tell their own stories each year through four exhibitions and two festivals. In creating the exhibition “Talanoa: Stories of the Fiji Community,” the team ensured representation of all the communities of Fiji, an island with a history of difficult relations among the races. The chair of the organizing committee spoke of the challenges that arose while staging the exhibition, which included uncomfortable content relating to coups and civil unrest. She described using talanoa (storytelling) to resolve issues for the exhibition team, aided by Immigration Museum staff. “We gradually learned about each other in ways we never could have imagined. It was like therapy,” she said.

The story of Victoria’s Aboriginal population is one of dispossession and loss of traditions and culture—but also of survival. Bunjilaka, our Aboriginal Cultural Centre at Melbourne Museum, exists to increase understanding between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people, and especially to reassert indigenous cultural traditions. The existence of the collections is fundamental to that aim. Before European settlement, Aboriginal people in this part of Victoria wore cloaks made of possum skins. Only seven such cloaks have survived, and the two in Australia are in the Museum Victoria collection. They are decorated with clan designs and images drawn from the natural world. The cloaks inspired three modern-day Aboriginal women artists to rediscover the techniques used by their ancestors. The results are a triumph, with beautiful cloaks using traditional designs interpreted in a modern idiom. A just society is one in which people have ownership and pride in their culture. In the case of Australia, museums can play a significant role in enabling its Aboriginal citizens to recover from grave injustices.

These are examples from one country. Consider the impact of thousands of museums across the globe reaching countless people who visit them or use their websites, read about them in newspapers or magazines or watch television programs that use museum content. The informal (and sometimes formal) educational experiences that museums provide—and the knowledge that they disseminate through digitization and the Internet—represent a formidable agent for change on a global scale. In every case, however, it works at an individual level—a person who is inspired by a museum experience.

Philosopher John Rawls’s concept of justice is based on fair terms of social cooperation achieved in a pluralist society. Museums contribute to the just society by recognizing the pluralist nature of our communities, by building self-respect and confidence, by safeguarding and presenting our heterogeneous cultures, and by making the knowledge we hold available to all. We must never underestimate the power of museums for good—and our obligation to utilize it fully.

J. Patrick Greene is chief executive officer, Museum Victoria, Australia. This article was adapted from a paper presented at an ICOM-US meeting at the 2009 AAM Annual Meeting in Philadelphia.