CEM210 - Museums

As I found out in a recent seminar, museums have been around since 530B.C when wealthy people opened their own personal collections.

I have been fortunate enough to be able to visit some amazing museums and galleries including Natural History Museum, Tate Modern, Tate Britain, Science Museum London & Toronto, Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Imperial War Museum and many others. I don’t think I fully appreciate art when I got to a museum unless I know information about an Artist I can study and appreciate a piece of work, but if its just a painting with a name and date next to it I have no connection to the artist and don’t know what their ideas about art.

I agree that every piece shouldn’t have a blurb about them and you need to form your own opinions and assumptions about the piece because art is meant to be subject.

For example modern art can be so thought evoking and creative but can also come across as if the artist created the piece in two minutes with out a thought and its hard to see what the artist thought audience reaction would be.

This brings me to the question who should own culture? For me I think where ever something like a painting is born or produced is where it should belong to, this is what the current Cultural Heritage law states. If say the UK took something fragile from Greece a hundred years ago and they want it back, I think the taken heritage should belong to Greece but if they don’t have the facilities to look after it then England should keep it as a long term long, and vice versa.

In many cases I think artefacts and heritage should be returned to their original owners and then loaned out to other counties to exhibit in museums.