Why museums fail

Very useful thoughtful post, Rebecca. It really helped me identify the source of my queasiness around what you so rightly call the cult of failure. Thanks for sharing! Rebecca, thank you for this thoughtful post. These points are compelling. You are commenting using your WordPress. You are commenting using your Google account. You are commenting using your Twitter account. You are commenting using your Facebook account.

Notify me of new comments via email. Notify me of new posts via email. Musings on the therapeutic, empowerment, and wellbeing-enhancing possibilities of the museum. Here are some reasons why: Before labeling something a failure, you need to define success. Share this: Twitter Facebook. Like this: Like Loading Related posts. Can Museums Be Neutral? Thanks so much. Please add your thoughts to the discussion!

The category of "socio-economic group" is unhelpful, as it merges two distinct factors that predict the likelihood of people visiting museums — income and education.

It has been taken as an established fact by cultural economists for more than 25 years that the most significant vector of inequality in cultural participation is not poverty — or ethnicity — but level of education though of course these factors interact in a compounding way.

Unfortunately, Taking Part does not publish data on education separately. However, those with a degree or professional qualification are 4. The disparity in the figures for art galleries is even more stark.

Overall, level of education is about twice as significant as income in predicting museum visits. What about the impact of school visits, which may engage many children from lower socioeconomic groups? A study by the University of Leicester found that schools from deprived areas did visit museums, and there is plenty of research showing that, conducted properly, students can learn on these outings.

Because art popularisation can certainly contribute to the development of a country," said art critic-painter Phan Cam Thuong. To explain their reluctance to visit museums, young people say that some museums do not have enough interesting activities. Viet Nam is known for several museums that attract many tourists. In Ha Noi, the Viet Nam Museum of Ethnology impresses visitors with its interesting exhibitions and diverse activities based on the country's diverse ethnicity.

It attracted , visitors last year, of which , were Vietnamese. In HCM City, the War Remnants Museum, which possesses a comprehensive collection of machinery, weapons, photos, and documentation on Viet Nam's wars with both the French and Americans, welcomed 6 million visitors over the last 20 years. However, the country is also home to other museums, reproached for being monotone, for the unprofessionalism of curators, for the lack of information about installations and the lack of interesting and diverse activities.

In Viet Nam, cultural authorities have poured vast amounts of money into museums, but with little result. Why should this veneration of ambiguity continue? Why should confusion be a central aesthetic emotion? Is an emptiness of intent on the part of an art work really a sign of its importance? Christianity, by contrast, never leaves us in any doubt about what art is for: it is a medium to teach us how to live, what to love and what to be afraid of. Such art is extremely simple at the level of its purpose, however complex and subtle it is at the level of its execution i.

Christian art amounts to a range of geniuses saying such incredibly basic but extremely vital things as: "Look at that picture of Mary if you want to remember what tenderness is like. Instead of refuting instrumentalism by citing the case of Soviet art, we could more convincingly defend it with reference to Mantegna and Bellini. This leads to a suggestion: what if modern museums of art kept in mind the example of the didactic function of Christian art, in order once in a while to reframe how they presented their collections?

Would it ruin a Rothko to highlight for an audience the function that Rothko himself declared that he hoped his art would have: that of allowing the viewer a moment of communion around an echo of the suffering of our species?