Museum as a Medium

Museums as a Medium

Museums can be characterized as a place which is basically a store and an exhibit of cultural, historical, scientific or artistic objects which people can often visit to enjoy and take pleasure in. This trend of the establishment of the museums came about way back in the Renaissance when people started taking pleasure in such unique talents and expressed themselves through various mediums like writing, drawing, painting, and much more. Not only this, the museums also included historical artifacts such as jewelry that had some kind of historical significance of power and wealth or museums with the latest inventions and innovations. Museums can also be as plain and simple as a chocolate museum to demonstrate the making processes of chocolate like that of the chocolate museum by Lindt & Sprungli in Germany.

Museums and their various mediums

Modern museums are also being designed to depict the country or community's cultural heritage, their historical significance and to basically give an insight into the making of the country, the struggles, the historical moments and achievements of their people. In today's world, it is quite important for countries to establish their power and to have something or the other which they can use to display their significance. The Greeks for instance, have a sense of pride of their beautiful architectural landmarks and that forms a basis of something they hold worthy enough to preserve or display for the world to see what they are best at and how their styles of construction are some of the best all over the world (Hooper).

However, looking at museums such as that of art for instance, we must also know how or why something becomes worthy enough to be displayed in a museum. Taking a city like Paris which is one of the world's most widely visited tourist spots, it is also quite rich is history and landmarks that are significant of the events that took place. For a city so attractive to tourists, the French people would still want to keep their own identity intact. In fact, there arises a need for a display of ways in which these foreign tourists can get a feel of what life there is like, what achievements the locals made, what makes the city of Paris so appealing and why it is so rich in cultural and historical landmarks (Bennet).

The Louvre Museum

The perfect example of this is the Louvre Museum which in itself has such a story to tell with its beautiful structure as well as the fact that it was once built as a Palace for King Louis XIV but he felt that it was too small and congested which is why he built himself the Palace of Versailles. Inside it, the monument holds an even richer history of many famous civilizations of the world and many of the world's most famous artifacts. What is interesting to note in museums like the Louvre is how they manage to attract so many people from all over the world to come and see and enjoy a piece of maybe their own history that they will not find in their own country (Danilov).

The Louvre Museum started off in 1793 with 537 paintings that were basically a donation by the Royals of the time and the beautiful paintings which were confiscated by the church. It was basically just a display of beautiful paintings of the wealthy and rich of the time and was also a display of their power. People had free access to see these paintings and slowly the collection started to grow. The museum's collection was widely increased under the rule of Napoleon but when the army attacked and his rule ended, many of the works were then returned to their original owners. Later on, the collection grew through donations under King Louis XVIII as well as Charles X. By that time, the museum had about 20,000 exhibits.

In 2008, the museum decided to categorize the paintings and make eight distinct departments that would display a separate kind of art. It included Roman arts, Egyptian art, Greek art, Islamic arts and calligraphy, modern graphic arts, sculptures and more. Today, the Louvre Museum contains more than 380,000 pieces of art. The Islamic sections were added when Rudy Ricciotti and Mario Bellini won an international competition and were given the prize of opening up the Islamic gallery inside the Louvre. The museum has a policy of lending and borrowing as well. It lends its paintings to museums all over the world which also then makes it an easy access to borrowing and displaying many more arts and pieces and giving its tourists an even better taste of art around the globe (Seigel).

The Louvre Museum also has the world's famous Mona Lisa hanging to its walls. The fame behind which lies in its theft in 1911 and it being missing for almost two years, apart from the many other factors in the painting itself that make it so famous. The refined techniques and use of contemporary art used to depict the beauty of Mona Lisa is quite admirable. The devastating smile along with the rich background of landscape of mountains and rivers at the back has left many compelled by the beauty of it.

Each and every piece in the Louvre has its significance and a certain feel to it along with what the artist themselves wanted to show. The museum now has audio guides for the art lovers who want to know the rich history behind the picture, artifact or sculpture so that they can learn more and know why or how the piece of art got here.

The other famous museums in Paris include Musee d'Orsay, Musee de l'Orangerie, Musee Rodin, Petit Palais and many more. All of them have their own story to tell with something marvelous to hold inside.

More mediums

Another way in which the museums act as a medium apart from a display of power, wealth and to be a source of admiration to the people interested is that it creates a social object about which people can make conversation and discuss what they feel about it or how they might perceive it. They are networked in such a way that even strangers might come together in order to share their views and to be a part of the shared knowledge regarding some object. Jyri Engestrom was a sociologist who came up with the world "social object." He outlined 4 criteria's for anything to be categorized as a social object, those being: personal, provocative, relational and active.

Personal refers to an audience or perceiver being able to make a personal connection to the object. For instance, many of the paintings in the Louvre can be made personal connection to just by taking one look because it has so much depth and clarity to it that the onlooker immediately feels like the artist is trying to tell a story and is doing so in such a perfect way that it may hit some own emotional spot of the audience when they look at it. People might talk about their own feelings about the picture and discuss their varying responses and have their own suggestions (Stone).

Active objects maybe some point of reference or establishment of something that just pops up and draws the attention of the people. Their presence or behavior fascinates in a way so as to make people talk about it. For instance, a chocolate fountain in a chocolate museum in Germany could be an active object for people to talk about like how the chocolate flows out at a constant speed.

Provocative objects draw attention of the audience by being different and being maybe against the norm of the surrounding. The nudist sculptures in the Louvre make many people ask why they were made in that way and what the reason for showing intimate body part of people might be.

Relational objects invite the participation of people and draw their interest in further. For example, going into a chocolate museum and plucking out the cocoa beans and putting it through the process of refinement and getting the feel of it up personally. The museums thus, act as a platform for people to discuss these social objects and come together to admire them and also to offer their own views (Leinhardt).

A science and technological museum on the other hand may be a kind of timeline and historical look onto the past developments and inventions and how things started off with simplicity and transformed into the kind we use today. The simple example of cell phones and tablets that we use can be traced to the intentions of the first phone with its history. The timeline going on and extending to how communication was made easy gradually and slowly, changing designs and patterns with more innovations until the development of cell phones that enabled portability and the ease to carry it anywhere. The change in the kind of phones is also fascinating to see, the designs, the features, the functionalities, specifications. The tablets and ipads were not as we used to see them and the path from desktop PCs is also admirable.

Museums and their setup

Setting up a museum not only requires the artifacts but a lot of things need to be in place to make it an effective and well designed museum. Some artifacts need the use of proper lighting and show casing due to their sensitive material. For instance, a museum with archeological artifacts needs artificial environments made so as to keep them from erosion or getting damaged from the exposure of extreme temperatures.

Many museums use florescent lights and install UV filters to limit the amount of ultraviolet lights from coming inside the museum due to its harmful effects on the preservation environment of the place. In some cases, even the normal lights maybe harmful to the material of the artifacts which is why special lights are installed and turned on only during visitor hours. Metals, oil paints, ceramics, stones, glass, leather, woodworks are some of the materials that have specific requirements for light exposure. Therefore, when designing a museum these have to be studied carefully and kept in mind or the entire structure of the artifacts may be at a serious risk.

Protection Measures

There is also a lot of protection needed from the pests for example; termites might destroy any wood work or crafts that have wood in them. They may also be sensitive to any gases and elements contained in pesticides which means that they should be kept inside an environment which has no risks of these attacks and the material will be kept in its original forms.

Containers and show cases or glassed windows to keep artifacts within also need to be designed very carefully as there can be no loop hole for any kind of destruction. The glass needs to be resistant enough not to break easily or have risk of collapse. The possibility of thefts and such heists also needs to be kept in mind.

As the case of Mona Lisa in the Louvre Museum which had already been in a theft, there is a lot of security measures that have been put into place to make sure it does not happen again. There are security guards on alert in front of the painting with barriers so that no one can get a closer look. The other paintings are unguarded with just the security cameras and their own protective cases but the more valuable and risk sensitive pieces have to be taken more measures for.

The cleaning of the museums also has to be done in a special way, using elements that would not do any damage. Using cotton and chemicals to clean the glasses and vacuums is important. Any small mishap may end up causing a lot of damage which may be costly.

The museums also have to be careful of protecting the artifacts against fire, earthquakes or any such mishap where something unpredictable occurs. The electricity, water and gas supplies to the museum have to also be regularly checked and immediately repaired if need be. Extensive amounts have to be spent on the caretaking of these small and minute details. A mishap like a short circuit may end up burning down a building with valuables inside that would be completely irrecoverable. Therefore, these risks have to be eliminated from the very grassroots level because even a slight chance of error cannot be taken.

Conclusion

It is therefore important to note how much effort goes into the establishment of any museum. The funding of it is also important, at least in its initial phases which are done by the government until the spot becomes an attraction enough to earn for itself and be self-fulfilling. To design the museum in a way to be an external as well as an internal attraction, it needs to be properly marketed and should be focused towards its display as well.

In the world that we live in today, people have a diverse set of interests that go all the way from art, literature, architecture, design, technology, innovations and much more. The travel and communication has become so easy that people would now save up and spend money just to go to another place and visit museums and such places of interest where they find something to fascinate them. Art and crafts have been such a point of interest for decades now and a real fan of such things knows the value of just a visit to one of these places. So to keep this alive and to preserve the richness of the different cultures of the world and the contributions of various people from all over the world, millions of dollars are spent on such museums (Rectanus).