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MUSEUMS AND THE CHALLENGE
OF CHANGE
Museums and the Challenge of Change explores the profound challenges facing museums and
charts ways forward that are grounded in partnership with audiences and communities
on-site, online, and in wider society.
Facing new generations with growing needs and desires, growing population diversity,
and a digital revolution, the museum sector knows it must change – but it has been slow
to respond. Drawing on the expertise and voices of practitioners from within and beyond
the sector, Black calls for a change of mind-set and radical evolution (transformation
over time, learning from the process rather than a ‘big bang’ approach). Internally, a
participative environment supports social interaction through active engagement with
collections and content – and Black includes an initial typology of participative exhibits,
both traditional and digital. Externally, the museum works in partnership with local
communities and other agencies to make a real difference, in response to societal
challenges. Black considers what this means for the management and structure of the
museum, emphasising that it is not possible to separate the development of a participative
experience from the ways in which the museum is organised.
Museums and the Challenge of Change is highly practical and focused on initiatives that
museums can implement swiftly and cheaply, making a real impact on user engagement.
The book will thus be essential reading for museum practitioners and students of museum
studies around the globe.
Graham Black has worked in and with museums for over 40 years. Today, he combines
his role as Professor of Museum Development at Nottingham Trent University, UK, with
museum consultancy. Exhibitions on which he has acted as Interpretive Consultant have
twice won the UK £100,000 Art Fund Prize, amongst many other awards. His previous
publications include two books: The Engaging Museum, published in 2005, and Transforming
Museums in the 21st Century, published in 2012, both with Routledge. In recent years, his
belief that future museum content should be much more agile, fast-moving, cheap, and
responsive has meant he has moved away from large, expensive re-display projects to
working with local communities and organisations taking approaches that he believes
can make a difference.
MUSEUMS AND
THE CHALLENGE
OF CHANGE
Old Institutions in a New World
Typeset in Bembo
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
For Carolyn
CONTENTS
List of figures x
List of contributors xiii
Acknowledgements xvi
Preface xviii
SECTION I
Context 19
1 Societal change 21
SECTION II
Museums in the wider world 77
G Facing the challenges of truly being of, by, and for all 131
Merel van der Vaart, Catrien Schreuder, Dorien Theuns,
Deirdre Carasso
SECTION III
Developing the participative experience 143
SECTION IV
Managing change 255
Index 300
FIGURES
Johannes C. Bernhardt is Digital Manager at the Baden State Museum and pre-
viously led the Creative Collections project, which is dedicated to the participa-
tive development of digital concepts and the integration of the museum in the
culture of digitality.
Daniel Brown is a specialist for digital products, responsible for strategies and
participation dynamics in both startups and corporates. He also provides his
skills and expertise to museums and cultural institutions.
Scott Cooper has been President and Chief Executive Officer of the Academy
of Natural Sciences of Drexel University since December 2017. Prior to that he
was the Vice President of Collections, Knowledge and Engagement at the Royal
British Columbia Museum.
Jenny Kidd is Reader in Digital Culture at Cardiff University. She works in close
collaboration with colleagues in the cultural and creative industries, in particular
on digital projects.
Mette Houlberg Rung is an art interpreter and researcher at Statens Museum for
Kunst (National Gallery of Denmark) in Copenhagen, Denmark.
Catrien Schreuder was appointed head of collections and exhibitions of the Ste-
delijk Museum Schiedam in November 2018. She is an art historian specializing
Contributors xv
in postwar Dutch art. She has worked in museums for more than 20 years, always
in roles tasked with broadening audiences.
Dorien Theuns has been working for the Stedelijk Museum Schiedam since the
start of 2019. As city programmer, she works with individuals and organizations
from Schiedam to make the museum more of/by/for all.
Merel van der Vaart is city history curator at the Stedelijk Museum, Schiedam
since the start of 2019 and is pursuing her PhD at the Amsterdam School for
Heritage, Memory and Material Culture, University of Amsterdam. Amongst
other posts, she worked previously as associate curator of public history at the
Science Museum, London.
First and foremost, I must thank the contributors who generously gave of their
time and expertise – both in developing their papers and for commenting on
my work. Their input has transformed the book. I wish also to thank Daisy Li
for her invaluable support in translating Hsiao-Te Hsu’s paper into English and
answering my related queries.
I am grateful to those in recent years who have invited me to present papers,
allowing me to test my ideas as they developed, including the Alberta Museums
Association; the Badisches Landesmuseum, Karlsruhe; the Bundesakademie fur
Kulturelle Bildung, Wolfenbüttel; the Commonwealth Association of Museums;
the German Association for Education in Museums; Hamburg Museums; the
Irish Museums Association; the Leibniz Foundation, Berlin; National Museums
Northern Ireland; the National Museum of Culture, Oslo; the Horizon 2020
funded ‘Reach’ Project; the Slovenian Museums Association; and the Tretyakov
Art Gallery and Technical University, Moscow.
I am fortunate that the following kindly read and commented on much of
my content:
Heidi Lowther of Routledge for her enthusiasm for the book and for gently
steering me though the process.
Ramachandran Vijayaraghavan and his colleagues at Apex CoVantage for
their support throughout the production process.
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was
the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it
was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it
was the winter of despair, we had everything before us . . .
( Dickens, 1859: 1)
As Charles Dickens could have said, it is the best of times yet also the worst of
times to work in museums. It is the best of times because we have become more
outwards-focused, while also having opportunities to engage our audiences in
ways that our predecessors could only have dreamed of. It is the worst of times,
however, for those museums that are failing to keep up with societal change and/
or are under financial pressure, putting their very survival at stake and many jobs
at risk. And the reason for the constant turbulence is ‘Change’. Our world and
thus our publics are in a constant state of evolution. Museums, those supposed
symbols of continuity, are being buffeted from all sides. Change is a constant; it
is everywhere and it is inevitable, for museums as for the rest of society. And, as
everywhere else, change brings challenges for our sector – not least knowing that
society will move on whether or not museums move with it. And change today
was already happening at a faster rate than ever before. Then came the COVID-
19 pandemic, which sped up things even more and has had a dramatic impact on
the museum sector, adding to the challenges faced. But challenges bring oppor-
tunities as well as threats. This book sets out both to explore and to suggest some
ways forward. There will, of course, never be a single answer.
The book is the third and final element in what has turned out to be a trilogy
exploring the evolution of interpretive purpose and practice in the audience-
centred museum, following in the footsteps of The Engaging Museum (2005) and
Transforming Museums in the 21st Century (2012), both published by Routledge.
Preface xix
Reference
Dickens, C. (1859) A Tale of Two Cities, London: Chapman & Hall
INTRODUCTION
The challenge of change
what the commercial sector often practices, and natural history museums
always preach – “it is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the
most intelligent, but rather the one most responsive to change.”
Scott Cooper, referencing a quote itself adapted
from Charles Darwin
The Oxford English Dictionary (OED, 2010) defines the verb ‘to change’ as ‘the
process of replacing something with something new or different’. The word is
also a noun, ‘the act or result of something becoming different’. ‘Participation’
is ‘the act of taking part in an activity or event’ (OED, 2010). But the reality for
both words is much more complex.
‘Change’ cannot exist on its own – we need to know why, from what to what,
for whom, how do you make it happen, what difference will it make, what does
it mean for us – and none of these questions is easy to answer. It is no surprise,
therefore, that ‘The Challenge of Change’ is a term beloved by management
gurus. Type it into Google and you will get 1,560,000,000 results in 0.68 sec-
onds. From this, one can safely deduce that museums are not alone in facing the
issue.
‘Participation’ is portrayed in this book, and across the museum sector, as
part of the solution to the urgent need for change. But, beware: it is one of those
words – ‘community’ is another – designed to elicit a warm-glow, feel-good,
2 Introduction
happy mood rather than stimulate analysis of its meaning or practice. And the
term has a complex recent history. It was used regularly by social campaigners
in the 1960s and 1970s – concerned with empowering people through inclu-
sion in the political decision-making process (Carpentier, 2011: 14). The original
political meaning gained fresh relevance for museums across the Western world
in the 1990s, as they established new roles for themselves as sites of social action.
As a result, museum professionals tend to associate the term with community
engagement – personified in the work of Nina Simon (e.g. 2010).
However, this is only a part of the story. The term is ‘an infinitely malleable
concept, “participation” can be used to evoke – and to signify – almost anything
that involves people’ (Cornwall, 2008: 269). One website (Nonformality.org,
2012) outlines 36 separate models of participation. And, when you look at cur-
rent museum practice, there are at least ten inter-related strands, introduced in
Box 0.1. Each of these is complex in its own right. For example, in strand one,
there is a world of difference between the right to participate and equality of
opportunity to participate. This book explores 2–10, and it is underpinned by
the Universal Declaration.
To further complicate matters, most of the time this book uses the adjectival
form ‘participative’ rather than ‘participatory’ to ref lect this broad range of defi-
nitions rather than focus largely on community engagement. ‘Participatory’ is
Introduction 3
Elitism
By focusing largely on white, well-educated baby-boomer professionals as their
core audience – whether local or tourist – museums have continued to be domi-
nated by a social elite:
Introduction 5
In the UK, the two most highly culturally engaged groups account for only
15% of the general population and tend to be of higher socio-economic status
( Warwick Commission, 2015: 33). The USA equivalent is 16%, as regular users
of cultural organisations (Dilenschneider, 2019a).
We do not have any proof yet that the new generation of millennials is
really going to fulfil the same role [as the baby-boomers] and be as engaged
in our institution. We have a hard enough time getting them to come in
the first place, so how do we know they will sustain us in the future.
Fantoni (2016: no page number)
The risk is of ‘negative substitution’, where more of the core audiences are leav-
ing museums than new ones are arriving. It is ‘taking place because the market is
growing more diverse, while perceptions of cultural organizations as being places
for a certain kind of person have remained largely static’ (Dilenschneider, 2017). In
2019, she noted that 67% of cultural organisations in the USA reported flat or
falling attendance since 2009, despite a 7% growth in population over that period
(Dilenschneider, 2019b)
Growing competition
What is more, in this already difficult environment, audiences are increasingly
fragmented, with competition for their scarce leisure time fiercer than ever. If they
do not get what they want from museums, there are plenty of other choices, and
many of our competitors are better at serving their audiences than museums are.
To remain relevant, people must continue to value the collections museums hold
and the experience of museum visiting, and communities must value their rela-
tionships with museums because it matters to them and, as a result, they feel
valued in turn. Only then will people be motivated to engage, to take part, to
immerse themselves – no longer visitors but part of the museum community.
But, as Kathryn Thomson points out in her chapter, we currently have a widen-
ing ‘relevance gap’ between how museums perceive their position and how the
public views them.
Funding
To make matters worse, museums are seeing severe reductions in public spend-
ing sitting alongside the increasing demands being placed on the sector. This has
been felt most strongly in the UK and USA, where publicly funded museums have
faced substantial and ongoing public sector revenue cuts, leading to a focus on
survival and a search for alternative sources of income generation rather than on
social impact or planning for the future. In the UK, museums have faced govern-
ment pressure to follow the American model of limited public revenue support
sitting alongside income from fund-raising, endowments, donations, sponsorship,
and commercial activity, with directors forced to become increasingly entre-
preneurial. When Tony Butler became Executive Director of Derby Museums
Trust in 2014, a medium-sized museums service in the East Midlands of England,
some 97% of their income came from two sources, Derby City Council and the
non-governmental Arts Council England. By 2018, revenue funding from the
city council had fallen by 40%, with cuts continuing, while earned income had
increased by then to 27% of revenue (Butler and Fogarty, 2020: 197).
But this is not a ref lection of a switch from public service to capitalism, red
in tooth and claw. Rather it is much more a case of: ‘you can’t be relevant to
your community if you are not financially sustainable’ (Winesmith, quoted in
Butler and Fogarty, 2020: 197). Museums continue to see themselves as there
to serve society, a view shared by the public at large. What is more, the funding
that is provided comes with growing demands. In the UK, both local authorities
and non-governmental funding bodies such as Arts Council England and the
National Lottery Heritage Fund use their grant-giving powers to push museums
to become more outward-focused and to develop agendas for audience diversifi-
cation and social impact – but see Chapter 3 for what this has meant in practice.
In the USA, the top 2–3% of arts institutions continue to receive half of the avail-
able philanthropic giving (Winesmith, quoted in Cohen and Nelson, 2020: 185).
But, crucially, this giving has moved away from a focus on the art collection to an
expectation of social impact and the role the institutions play in their local com-
munities. In this, Cohen references the Social Return on Investment (SORI) –
relating to values not ref lected in financial statements, for example in community
or environmental impacts, in Cohen’s case, ‘if I give you X number of resources
or dollars, I will see certain kinds of shifts’ (Cohen and Nelson, 2020: 185–186).
8 Introduction
Over the last few years, the entire cultural sector, including libraries and
museums, has been seriously affected by economic austerity in Europe.
Many institutions have faced reductions in public funding.
Eccles (2016: 3.42, p. 10)
“You got this old timer running round in circles, Miss Tavia, when
you ask about a feller named Garford Knapp anywhere in this
latitude, and working for a feller named Bob. There’s more ‘Bobs’
running ranches out here than there is bobwhites down there East
where you live. Too bad you can’t remember this here Bob’s last
name, or his brand.
“Now, come to think, there was a feller named ‘Dimples’ Knapp
used to be found in Desert City, but not in Hardin. And you ought to
see Hardin—it’s growing some!”
This was a part of what was in Lance Petterby’s letter. Had Nat
White been allowed to read it he would have learned something else
—something that not only would have surprised him and his brother
and cousin, but would have served to burn away at once the debris
of trouble that seemed suddenly heaped between Tavia and himself.
It was true that Tavia had kept up her correspondence with the
good-natured and good-looking cowboy in whom, while she was
West, she had become interested, and that against the advice of
Dorothy Dale. She did this for a reason deeper than mere mischief.
Lance Petterby had confided in her more than in any of the other
Easterners of the party that had come to the big Hardin ranch. Lance
was in love with a school teacher of the district while the party from
the East was at Hardin; and now he had been some months married
to the woman of his choice.
When Tavia read bits of his letters, even to Dorothy, she skipped
all mention of Lance’s romance and his marriage. This she did, it is
true, because of a mischievous desire to plague her chum and Ned
and Nat. Of late, since affairs had become truly serious between Nat
and herself, she would have at any time explained the joke to Nat
had she thought of it, or had he asked her about Lance.
The very evening previous to the arrival of this letter from the
cowpuncher to which Nat had so unwisely objected, Nat and Tavia
had gone for a walk together in the crisp December moonlight and
had talked very seriously.
Nat, although as full of fun as Tavia herself, could be grave; and
he made his intention and his desires very plain to the girl. Tavia
would not show him all that was in her heart. That was not her way.
She was always inclined to hide her deeper feelings beneath a light
manner and light words. But she was brave and she was honest.
When he pinned her right down to the question, yes or no, Tavia
looked courageously into Nat’s eyes and said:
“Yes, Nat. I do. But somebody besides you must ask me before I
will agree to—to ‘make you happy’ as you call it.”
“For the good land’s sake!” gasped Nat. “Who’s business is it but
ours? If you love me as I love you——”
“Yes, I know,” interrupted Tavia, with laughter breaking forth. “‘No
knife can cut our love in two.’ But, dear——”
“Oh, Tavia!”
“Wait, honey,” she whispered, with her face close pressed against
his shoulder. “No! don’t kiss me now. You’ve kissed me before—in
fun. The next time you kiss me it must be in solemn earnest.”
“By heaven, girl!” exclaimed Nat, hoarsely. “Do you think I am
fooling now?”
“No, boy,” she whispered, looking up at him again suddenly. “But
somebody else must ask me before I have a right to promise what
you want.”
“Who?” demanded Nat, in alarm.
“You know that I am a poor girl. Not only that, but I do not come
from the same stock that you do. There is no blue blood in my
veins,” and she uttered a little laugh that might have sounded bitter
had there not been the tremor of tears in it.
“What nonsense, Tavia!” the young man cried, shaking her gently
by the shoulders.
“Oh no, Nat! Wait! I am a poor girl and I come of very, very
common stock. I don’t mean I am ashamed of my poverty, or of the
fact that my father and mother both sprang from the laboring class.
“But you might be expected when you marry to take for a wife a
girl from a family whose forebears were something. Mine were not.
Why, one of my grandfathers was an immigrant and dug ditches
——”
“Pshaw! I had a relative who dug a ditch, too. In Revolutionary
times——”
“That is it exactly,” Tavia hastened to say. “I know about him. He
helped dig the breastworks on Breeds Hill and was wounded in the
Battle of Bunker Hill. I know all about that. Your people were Pilgrim
and Dutch stock.”
“Immigrants, too,” said Nat, muttering. “And maybe some of them
left their country across the seas for their country’s good.”
“It doesn’t matter,” said the shrewd Tavia. “Being an immigrant in
America in sixteen hundred is one thing. Being an immigrant in the
latter end of the nineteenth century is an entirely different pair of
boots.”
“Oh, Tavia!”
“No. Your mother has been as kind to me—and for years and
years—as though I were her niece, too, instead of just one of
Dorothy’s friends. She may have other plans for her sons, Nat.”
“Nonsense!”
“I will not answer you,” the girl cried, a little wildly now, and began
to sob. “Oh, Nat! Nat! I have thought of this so much. Your mother
must ask me, or I can never tell you what I want to tell you!”
Nat respected her desire and did not kiss her although she clung,
sobbing, to him for some moments. But after she had wiped away
her tears and had begun to joke again in her usual way, they went
back to the house.
And Nat White knew he was walking on air! He could not feel the
path beneath his feet.
He was obliged to go to town early the next morning, and when he
returned, as we have seen, just before dinner, he brought the mail
bag up from the North Birchland post-office.
He could not understand Tavia’s attitude regarding Lance
Petterby’s letter, and he was both hurt and jealous. Actually he was
jealous!
“Do you understand Tavia?” he asked his cousin Dorothy, right
after dinner.
“My dear boy,” Dorothy Dale said, “I never claimed to be a seer.
Who understands Tavia—fully?”
“But you know her better than anybody else.”
“Better than Tavia knows herself, perhaps,” admitted Dorothy.
“Well, see here! I’ve asked her to marry me——”
“Oh, Nat! my dear boy! I am so glad!” Dorothy cried, and she
kissed her cousin warmly.
“Don’t be so hasty with your congratulations,” growled Nat, still red
and fuming. “She didn’t tell me ‘yes.’ I don’t know now that I want her
to. I want to know what she means, getting letters from that fellow
out West.”
“Oh, Nat!” sighed Dorothy, looking at him levelly. “Are you sure you
love her?”
He said nothing more, and Dorothy did not add a word. But Tavia
waited in vain that evening for Mrs. White to come to her and ask the
question which she had told Nat his mother must ask for him.
CHAPTER XVIII
CROSS PURPOSES
Four days before Christmas Dorothy Dale, her cousins, and Tavia
all boarded the train with Jennie Hapgood, bound for the latter’s
home in Pennsylvania. On Christmas Eve Jennie’s brother Jack was
to be married, and he had written jointly with the young lady who was
to be “Mrs. Jack” after that date, that the ceremony could not
possibly take place unless the North Birchland crowd of young folk
crossed the better part of two states, to be “in at the finish.”
“Goodness me,” drawled Tavia, when this letter had come from
Sunnyside Farm. “He talks as though wedded bliss were something
like a sentence to the penitentiary. How horrid!”
“It is. For a lot of us men,” Nat said, grinning. “No more stag
parties with the fellows for one thing. Cut out half the time one might
spend at the club. And then, there is the pocket peril.”
“The—the what?” demanded Jennie. “What under the sun is that?”
“A new one on me,” said Ned. “Out with it. ’Thaniel. What is the
‘pocket peril’?”
“Why, after a fellow is married they tell me that he never knows
when he puts his hand in his pocket whether he will find money there
or not. Maybe Friend Wife has beaten him to it.”
“For shame!” cried Dorothy. “You certainly deserve never to know
what Tavia calls ’wedded bliss.’”
“I have my doubts as to my ever doing so,” muttered Nat, his face
suddenly expressing gloom; and he marched away.
Jennie and Ned did not observe this. Indeed, it was becoming so
with them that they saw nobody but each other. Their infatuation was
so plain that sometimes it was really funny. Yet even Tavia, with her
sharp tongue, spared the happy couple any gibes. Sometimes when
she looked at them her eyes were bright with moisture. Dorothy saw
this, if nobody else did.
However, the trip to western Pennsylvania was very pleasant,
indeed. Dorothy posed as chaperon, and the boys voted that she
made an excellent one.
The party got off gaily; but after a while Ned and Jennie slipped
away to the observation platform, cold as the weather was, and Nat
plainly felt ill at ease with his cousin and Tavia. He grumbled
something about Ned having become “an old poke,” and sauntered
into another car, leaving Tavia alone with Dorothy Dale in their
compartment. Almost at once Dorothy said to her chum:
“Tavia, dear, are you going to let this thing go on, and become
worse and worse?”
“What’s that?” demanded Tavia, a little tartly.
“This misunderstanding between you and Nat? Aren’t you risking
your own happiness as well as his?”
“Dorothy——”
“Don’t be angry, dear,” her chum hastened to say. “Please don’t. I
hate to see both you and Nat in such a false position.”
“How false?” demanded Tavia.
“Because you are neither of you satisfied with yourselves. You are
both wrong, perhaps; but I think that under the circumstances you,
dear, should put forth the first effort for reconciliation.”
“With Nat?” gasped Tavia.
“Yes.”
“Not to save my life!” cried her friend. “Never!”
“Oh, Tavia!”
“You take his side because of that letter,” Tavia said accusingly.
“Well, if that’s the idea, here’s another letter from Lance!” and she
opened her bag and produced an envelope on which appeared the
cowboy’s scrawling handwriting. Dorothy knew it well.
“Oh, Tavia!”
“Don’t ‘Oh, Tavia’ me!” exclaimed the other girl, her eyes bright
with anger. “Nobody has a right to choose my correspondents for
me.”
“You know that all the matter is with Nat, he is jealous,” Dorothy
said frankly.
“What right has he to be?” demanded Tavia in a hard voice, but
looking away quickly.
“Dear,” said Dorothy softly, laying her hand on Tavia’s arm, “he told
me he—he asked you to marry him.”
“He never!”
“But you knew that was what he meant,” Dorothy said shrewdly.
Tavia was silent, and her friend went on to say:
“You know he thinks the world of you, dear. If he didn’t he would
not have been angered. And I do think—considering everything—
that you ought not to continue to let that fellow out West write to you
——”
Tavia turned on her with hard, flashing eyes. She held out the
letter, saying in a voice quite different from her usual tone:
“I want you to read this letter—but only on condition that you say
nothing to Nat White about it, not a word! Do you understand,
Dorothy Dale?”
“No,” said Dorothy, wondering. “I do not understand.”
“You understand that I am binding you to secrecy, at least,” Tavia
continued in the same tone.
“Why—yes—that,” admitted her friend.
“Very well, then, read it,” said Tavia and turned to look out of the
window while Dorothy withdrew the closely written, penciled pages
from the envelope and unfolded them.
In a moment Dorothy cried aloud: