Museum-history and museums of history - George Brown Goode. Cabinet of curiosities. "Musei Wormiani Historia", the frontispiece from the Museum Wormianum depicting Ole Worm's cabinet of curiosities. Cabinets of curiosities (also known as Kunstkabinett, Kunstkammer, Wunderkammer, Cabinets of Wonder, and wonder-rooms) were encyclopedic collections of objects whose categorical boundaries were, in Renaissance Europe, yet to be defined. Modern terminology would categorize the objects included as belonging to natural history (sometimes faked), geology, ethnography, archaeology, religious or historical relics, works of art (including cabinet paintings), and antiquities.
"The Kunstkammer was regarded as a microcosm or theater of the world, and a memory theater. The Kunstkammer conveyed symbolically the patron's control of the world through its indoor, microscopic reproduction. History[edit] Fold-out engraving from Ferrante Imperato's Dell'Historia Naturale (Naples 1599), the earliest illustration of a natural history cabinet "Male Narwhal or Unicorn" England[edit] British Museum history. The British Museum was founded in 1753, the first national public museum in the world.
From the beginning it granted free admission to all 'studious and curious persons'. Visitor numbers have grown from around 5,000 a year in the eighteenth century to nearly 6 million today. The eighteenth century: origins of the British Museum The origins of the British Museum lie in the will of the physician, naturalist and collector, Sir Hans Sloane (1660–1753). Over his lifetime, Sloane collected more than 71,000 objects which he wanted to be preserved intact after his death. So he bequeathed the whole collection to King George II for the nation in return for a payment of £20,000 to his heirs. The gift was accepted and on 7 June 1753, an Act of Parliament established the British Museum. The founding collections largely consisted of books, manuscripts and natural specimens with some antiquities (including coins and medals, prints and drawings) and ethnographic material.
Images from top: The birth of the museum: history, theory, politics. - CAB Direct. Abstract The book is designed to enrich and challenge our general understanding of the modern museum, placing it at the centre of modern relations of culture and government. The view is taken that the public museum should be understood not just as a place of instruction, but as a reformatory of manners in which a wide range of regulated social routines and performances take place. Discussing the historical development of museums alongside that of the fair and the international exhibition, the book sheds light on the relationship between forms of official and popular culture, and museums policies and politics of the past and present. A series of detailed case studies from the UK, Australia and North America are used to investigate how 19th and 20th century museums, fairs and exhibitions organized their collections and their visitors, and on what developments have taken place since then.
You are viewing sample pages from CABI's life sciences databases on CAB Direct. Buy Instant Access » The story behind the world's oldest museum, built by a Babylonian princess 2,500 years ago. 1862 International Exhibition. The Ross Fountain in Edinburgh, manufactured in Paris, was an exhibit at the Great London Exposition. The International of 1862, or Great London Exposition, was a world's fair. It was held from 1 May to 1 November 1862, beside the gardens of the Royal Horticultural Society, South Kensington, London, England, on a site that now houses museums including the Natural History Museum and the Science Museum (London). Organization[edit] The exposition was sponsored by the Royal Society of Arts, Manufactures and Trade, and featured over 28,000 exhibitors from 36 countries, representing a wide range of industry, technology, and the arts.
William Sterndale Bennett composed music for the opening ceremony.[1] All told, it attracted about 6.1 million visitors. Receipts (£459,632) were slightly above cost (£458,842), leaving a total profit of £790. It was held in South Kensington, London, on a site now occupied by the Natural History Museum. Exhibitions[edit] Music[edit] Accident[edit] References[edit] Musaeum. The Ancient Library of Alexandria. The Musaeum or Mouseion at Alexandria (Classical Greek Μουσεῖον τῆς Ἀλεξανδρείας), which included the famous Library of Alexandria,[1] was an institution founded by Ptolemy I Soter or, perhaps more likely, by Ptolemy II Philadelphus. This original Musaeum ("Institution of the Muses") was the home of music or poetry, a philosophical school and library such as Plato's Academy, also a storehouse of texts.
It did not have a collection of works of art, rather it was an institution that brought together some of the best scholars of the Hellenistic world, analogous to a modern university. This original Musaeum was the source for the modern usage of the word museum. History[edit] The Musaeum was an institution founded, according to Johannes Tzetzes, by Ptolemy I Soter or, perhaps more likely, by Ptolemy II Philadelphus[2] at Alexandria. More than 1,000 scholars lived in the Mouseion at a given time. Appearance[edit] Notable scholars[edit] Decline[edit] Legacy[edit] Do Museums Still Need Objects? | Conn, Steven. 272 pages | 6 x 9 | 34 illus. Cloth 2009 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4190-7 | $55.00s | £36.00 | Add to cartPaper 2010 | ISBN 978-0-8122-2155-8 | $24.95s | £16.50 | Add to cartEbook 2011 | ISBN 978-0-8122-0165-9 | $24.95s | £16.50 | About | Add to cartA volume in the Arts and Intellectual Life in Modern America series View table of contents and excerpt "Conn's well-written essays centralize objects as the defining feature of museums as they shifted (albeit incompletely) from being places of public instruction to being places of private consumption, from taxonomic exhibits to narrative ones, influenced by the development of the academic disciplines of science, anthropology, and art history. . . .
An interesting and significant contribution to the literatures of museum studies and public history. "—American Historical Review "Steven Conn provides an eclectic, provocative, and extremely readable tour of the history of museums in the twentieth-century United States. . . . Wikipedia: Museum. Some of the most attended museums include the Louvre in Paris, the National Museum of China in Beijing, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., the British Museum in London, the National Gallery in London and The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.
There are many types of museums, including art museums, natural history museums, science museums, war museums and children's museums. As of the 2010s, the continuing acceleration in the digitization of information, combined with the increasing capacity of digital information storage, is causing the traditional model of museums (i.e. as static bricks-and-mortar "collections of collections" of three-dimensional specimens and artifacts) to expand to include virtual exhibits and high-resolution images of their collections that patrons can peruse, study, and explore from any place with Internet.
[citation needed] The city with the largest number of museums is Mexico City with over 128 museums. Etymology[edit] Purpose[edit] Types of museum. Margaret's museum trailer. Museum Definition ICOM. Museums by type. Articles on individual museums sorted by their type. For articles on types of museums, see Category:Types of museum. For country listings, see Category:Museums by country. For lists of museums, see Category:Lists of museums. Subcategories This category has the following 132 subcategories, out of 132 total.
Pages in category "Museums by type" The following 2 pages are in this category, out of 2 total. Museum Mission Statement. The Metropolitan Museum of Art was founded on April 13, 1870, "to be located in the City of New York, for the purpose of establishing and maintaining in said city a Museum and library of art, of encouraging and developing the study of the fine arts, and the application of arts to manufacture and practical life, of advancing the general knowledge of kindred subjects, and, to that end, of furnishing popular instruction. "1 This statement of purpose has guided the Museum for more than a century. The Trustees of The Metropolitan Museum of Art have reaffirmed the statement of purpose and supplemented it with the following statement of mission: The mission of The Metropolitan Museum of Art is to collect, preserve, study, exhibit, and stimulate appreciation for and advance knowledge of works of art that collectively represent the broadest spectrum of human achievement at the highest level of quality, all in the service of the public and in accordance with the highest professional standards.
MuseumMissionStatements. Prodding Sacred Cows: The Mission Statement. When I was pulling together the book National Standards & Best Practices for U.S. Museums, I found myself increasingly uneasy with the way that the standards use mission statement as the ultimate touchstone for determining what a given museum should or should not do.
Since my current role as resident AAM futurist gives me license to question the basic assumptions of the field, I’m going to start prodding that particular sacred cow, and see where it goes. I hope you weigh in on the discussion. I’ll start by saying I totally understand why museums have placed so much importance on mission statements over the past few decades. Three good reasons being: It establishes a compass direction for all the museum staff and board, combating our all-too human tendency to wander all over the map depending on what prospect looks pleasing at this particular moment. It creates a flexible framework for applying any standards to our hugely diverse field. Sixty museums in search of a purpose.
Fairs Museums USA An analysis of the mission statements of leading US art museums yields some surprising results By András Szántó. From Art Basel Miami Beach daily editionPublished online: 01 December 2011 The most frequently used words in 60 museum mission statements. The bigger the word, the more often it appears Quick. What do the following terms have in common? In fact, if you scanned 60 mission statements of prominent museums that exhibit contemp-orary art, you would find that each of the words above appears exactly once. Why spend time counting up words in mission statements? Each of them will bring their perspective on what it means to set a direction for museums in today’s shape-shifting cultural ecology. Rhetorical landscape Composing a mission statement isn’t as easy as it sounds. According to a 2005 primer by the Association of American Art Museums, “a mission statement should state what the museum does, for whom, and why”.
Word cloud We processed 5,302 words of text. Email* Name* What does a Museum do? | Meet me in the Drawing Room. Contemplating a modern painting at NYC's MoMA I firmly believe that you never know a place until you’ve eaten its food and visited its museum (thank you museum cafes!). Museums are not simply temples in which we worship great art. Museums educate visitors about the society that built them. They are storehouses of cultural “treasures” and thus venues that tell us about a society’s enduring or changing values. Last summer the US Treasury granted me permission to travel to Cuba. What I learned in Cuba was not only that museums can have a point of view, but that museums can help balance point of views.
A painting in the museo de la revolucion As our world rapidly digitizes, globalizes and hybridizes, museums face the challenge of keeping pace while continuing to attract visitors. While museums must engage with the new technologies to grant the public access to their collection, museums must also remain what they have always been – venues of learning and questioning. Like this: Like Loading... What #isamuseum | Sam Durant.