MUSEUMS, GALLERIES, POLITICS
AND MANAGEMENT
Clive Gray
De Montfort University
MUSEUMS, GALLERIES AND
FUNCTIONS
Objects and pictures: meanings and
displays
Collection, safeguarding, displaying,
trust
Inspiration, creativity, education,
economic regeneration,
modernisation, identity construction,
community, management
FUNCTIONALITY
Untenable: overlap/interaction
Uncertainty: change over time
What will they do?
Exogenous/endogenous choices
Professionalism and politics
REPRESENTATION AND
DISPLAY
Social constructivist/interpretive
approaches
Reliance on qualitative data
Top-down imposition of value
Bottom-up
reception/perception/interpretation of
value
Instrumentalism
INSTRUMENTALISM AND
ATTACHMENT
External imposition – social inclusion
Internal attachment – education
Outputs and outcomes
Evidence-based policy
The problem of assessment and
hostages to fortune
DECISIONS, DECISIONS
Seahenge and the Elgin Marbles
Fragmented processes
Internal ‘management’ decisions
External ‘political’ interference
Political symbolism/’practical’ choices
‘What and Why and When/and How
and Where and Who’
CUI BONO
Audiences/visitors/customers?
Citizens/consumers/learners?
The ‘general
public’/curators/’politicians’?
Locality/nation/the world?
CONCLUSIONS
‘The exhaustion of museums, of
libraries:/It is nothing to do with dust,
or being old, or dead. (Anthony
Thwaite, Accumulations)
Museums are the sites where a range
of political choices are made: an
effective political analysis of these is
still needed