The Development of Museums
A
The belief that objects surviving from earlier times offer flawless proof of what really happened took root in the nineteenth century and the decades just after it, an age when science was treated as neutral and free of bias. One commentator has caught the paradox: though we now know a physical object can be tampered with as readily as a written record, people go on trusting such objects, since a thing you can hold in your hand strikes us, almost by reflex, as authentic. Until lately that very trust shaped what museums put on show. A museum once tended to resemble, and here and there still does, a crowded storeroom whose cases were stuffed with specimens: useful to the specialist hunting fine distinctions of design, but to the everyday caller the whole array seemed alike. The labels fared no better, meaning little to the untrained, for their wording and format had been settled when only the scientific researcher was expected through the doors.
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Of late, though, the way we think about the past, and about how it ought to be shown to us, has shifted. Nowadays the governing term in heritage display is experience: the livelier the better, and ideally it should call on every sense. Britain offers fine instances, among them the Ceredig Living History Centre at Elming, the National Gallery of Sound and Moving Image at Harwick, and the Museum of the Wars at Dunmarsh. Across the Atlantic the tendency had surfaced far sooner, and the reconstructed settlement at Fairhaven became a model copied by heritage schemes the world over. Where all this ends, nobody can say. Acting out past events has caught on more and more at these so-called heritage locations, and before long computers will generate virtual-reality encounters that conjure up, in sharp detail, whatever era a visitor chooses, letting that visitor move through it as though part of the scene. Purists have condemned such ventures as an unbearable cheapening of the past, yet the popularity of so many historical theme parks and comparable attractions implies that most people do not agree.
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Alongside this runs a further shift: the once-firm line setting museums and heritage sites apart from theme parks is slowly fading. Each has begun taking ideas and devices from the other. Museum exhibitions now unfold along narrative lines, heritage sites have embraced theming as a useful device, and the parks, for their part, edge toward greater authenticity and research-based displays. Zoos tell a similar story: rather than being shut in cages, their animals are given generous room, whether outdoors or inside vast glasshouses — the tropical and arid habitats recreated at Meervenn Zoo in Belgium are a case in point. Among the twentieth century's leading changes in how the natural world is displayed, this shift is often ranked among the most important.
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Theme parks are changing in other ways too, reaching after weightier social and cultural themes and away from make-believe. Market pressure lies behind the move; and while museums and heritage sites fill a role of their own, quite separate from the parks, they too must survive in a crowded marketplace where people decide freely how, and where, to pass their leisure hours. For the museum or heritage specialist there is no need to dream up tales or rebuild vanished worlds to draw a crowd, since the raw material is already to hand. Even so, an exhibit must rest on genuine objects and on the facts as understood, and be laid out with enough appeal to hold attention. Anyone whose profession is the interpreting of history therefore occupies an awkward spot, obliged to hold a line between what the evidence will bear and what an audience finds attractive — all the more so as the heritage business faces mounting pressure to earn its keep.
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One might argue that making every part of heritage feel more real forces a steady bending of historical truth. Take the reconstruction of an early human ancestor in a museum on the island of Sabalu, its figure given distinctly local features because that is what the public expects; or the display at the National Museum of Prehistory in Aldermont, where a prehistoric man is posed making a domineering gesture towards his mate. What such scenes reveal is less about those who came before us than about how the present-day world sees things. Yet the interpreters can claim one point in their favour: withhold the interpretation, and visitors would supply their own, drawing on personal notions, errors and prejudices — and however lively that home-made version, it would carry far more distortion than the experts' work.
F
If human bias cannot be escaped, a second distortion in how history reaches us stems from the perishable character of the materials that come down to us. Put plainly, not every trace of the past makes it through. Cathedrals, palaces and castles outlast the modest homes of ordinary people, and what held for the buildings held for their furniture and contents too. Consider Verhorst, a town in the Low Countries whose seventeenth-century population was much the same as today: back then its people were packed inside the town walls, on a footprint over five times smaller than today's Verhorst, and in most houses several families shared quarters we can scarcely picture. The elegant rooms of that era preserved in museums, however, conjure up only how the wealthy lived. Small wonder that those wandering such exhibitions feel a wave of nostalgia, for what the museum sets before them seems to say life long ago was far pleasanter — a message that is itself the product of the slant built into these displays.
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Question 1 - 4
From the list of headings below choose the most suitable heading for each paragraph.
List of heading
The blurring of once-separate kinds of attraction
Adjusting the record to match what audiences anticipate
Divided opinion about how museums are changing
Money-related pressures on those who run museums
How the practice spread from country to country
Recommendations now under discussion