At the end of our tour, what brought me to this decision of almost justifying the need in society for this museum, was the curator's heartfelt speech. One of the main points of her speech was that this "museum" (a collection of Pearle's painting of important people) was setup to make people think. To use their brains in life and potentially influence their decisions in what they want to be, what they want to be known for, and who they are now. That is powerful and important stuff. I personally feel that the majority of people are just kind of floating around in this world paying attention to what they like and not paying attention to what the need to do nor planning properly for the future.
Theoretically, if the Pearle museum can influence 5% of its 5.2 million annual visitors to THINK about these aspects of life, then it truly justifies their budget and the need for these types of museums in society. On a side note, I think a much better approach would be to consolidate the artifacts of all the museums in one region into 3 or 4 central locations. This would be more affective in every way for museums and society. First off you could close and sell dozens of locations/property and get rid of tens of millions of dollars in annual overhead for the city, state, and country. Then, you could have these central museums with different gallery segments devoted to specific old museums trade large parts of their collections with other cities central museums for 3 to 6 month periods kind of like they already do today with specific exhibitions but with large amounts of stuff. An example would be rather than doing an exhibition on Rembrandt, central museums would do exhibitions on the old Wagner museum, the old Pearle museum, and the old Powell house combined.
The logistics of constantly moving all of these artifacts around would make up for a lot of the job loss from the initial shutdown of the smaller museums. Now that we would be saving a bunch of tax payer dollars while offering the same artifacts at more accessible locations here comes the most important part, the marketing.
One of the biggest problems I have seen so far in this class is that we (the students) are seeing all of these amazing and significant artifacts and before this point, almost everyone in the class did not seem to know that these artifacts existed let alone some of the museums themselves existed. By consolidating these 12-20 museums into 3 or 4 central locations, the visitors will be able to see so much more and get a bang for their buck while doing so. Someone in the museum community's rebuttal to this idea might be, ' If you are putting them all in one place, people are not making as many trips to see the artwork, not paying for as many taxi's and dinners, and tickets for each individual museum and spending less money overall. Wouldn't you losing GDP dollars in the long run?' and the short answer is no. People will continue to go to these museums time and time again because using this new method of large scale 3-6 month exhibitions people will be going to see and noice that 40% of the museum's stuff will be new, so it will like visiting a new museum every time you go.
Rather than the current method of attracting people with one artist or one type of theme for an exhibit that already has to interest that specific individual. This way everytime you go it's like you are going to a new, quality museum, and you always know it is going to be different and entertaining. Everyone from everywhere gets to see everything whereas no one is going to come out of state to see some of the smaller (but still interesting) museums of Philadelphia because the museums don't have the marketing budget to reach those people nor the right amount of stuff to entertain them for a day trip. And don't forget under this format taxpayer overhead for museums can be significantly lower.
Now there could be many rebuttals to this idea of central city museums and how they don't create as many GDP dollars as the current setup, and I could defend that all day but I am sure I am already over 500 words.
How I am going to relate this to the readings:
I can somewhat see why Prof. Bruggeman assigned these readings. Tea time at Valley Forge was of the same era as the people painted in the Pearle paintings. Sitting in front of me, I have the article and a 1 1/2 pages of notes on it, but in reality the article was too in-depth for me. I have a hard time making a solid connection between the article and the visit. Sure the article was about different museums like the Essex Institute and methods of displaying artifacts like the period room (invented by Francis Dole). But after 16 pages of disorganized facts I had a hard time relating it to anything. I know my Prof. disagrees and we discussed in class, but I did not learn the theme or the purpose of this article.
The second article "Public History and the study of memory", relates so much more to this museum visit. The purpose of this article was to show how we are supposed to view public history and how we collect and display these perceptions of past events. That correlates so well to this past museum visit because this museum was a museum of important or influential people of the past that were supposed to be remembered for their past. They were carefully selected by an individual to do so (not many individuals). It was great to see the accidental point of view of Pearle's time period. All of these individuals were WHITE and I mean white Christian males! They were all that mattered, they were all that was significant to display as a memory of the past. The museum was an interesting opposite to what the article shows how museums display public memory today. Screw Flanders
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