Elizabeth Merritt, founding Director of The Centre for the Future of Museums, has two articles that I haven’t stopped thinking about since reading them as I feel they are both linked to the structure of museums in the future. A topic that doesn’t get anything like the attention it should when museum future talk is dominated by technology, collection management politics and money.

The first article dated the 25th of March is Questioning Assumptions. If there’s a better litmus test for what kind of museum professional you are, I can’t find it. The five assumptions lay down, diplomatically, a set of question about what has become defining ideologies of museums.

I don’t have much need to be so diplomatic.

I’ve seen the sheer mention of “deaccessioning”, “disposal” or even “selling” turn people into highly suspicious Gollums who look at you as if you plan to steal all the museum treasure to line to pockets of some third-party. My own viewpoint in this debate is pretty utilitarian. We live in an Age of Superabundance. We are inundated with images and information constantly and we bore easily. So when I see resources stretched so thinly to accommodate 90% of a collection that is (a) unseen and (b) unimportant to the population, I have to wonder where quality and quantity became confused and collection management became so unfocused. Let’s be honest, how important is a billion animal bones? Yes, yes, vast important wealth of information and all, but how important? If you billion bones are in constant use and researched every single day by hundreds of researcher, than you are justified in keeping them. If ninety-nine-hundred-thousand million have never seen the light of day, do you need them?

This is something I feel is a leftover from the museum tradition to be little else but the repositories of archaeologists. This is not a back hand to archaeology in general, but a lesson to be learnt. Soon, many museums can going to have to refuse any more objects unless they can make space in their finite resources. Consider those knock on effects.

Superabundance means there is a lot of “stuff”, and more “stuff” building up and recycling old “stuff” to be somewhat new “stuff”. I really don’t think museums can keep up. They might try. New buildings! New funding! New extension! The Museum Fat needs new pants! This is in part as museums as economic catalysts and in part that museums are in a constant need for more stuff and more space for their stuff.

I introduce the second article here, The Lost Generation, which I highly recommend if you were one of those interested in my “Getting the Start in Museums” post. People are getting older, living longer, retiring later and museums jobs are getting harder to come by and new blood isn’t getting through.

The Museum World. Fat with Clogged Arteries.

The last parts of both articles offer interesting points (when I take them and run off in a complete tangent). The assumption of museum tied to a place and an on-profits and focusing questions on new professionals. I can’t help but feel about a future where museums can drastically reduce their collections to manageable levels which then go into several thousand new museum start-ups being run by new people with new ideas.

A crazy experiment: take 1000 new professionals/graduates into groups of 5, give them £10k each and divide 10,000 objects “deaccessioned”/loaned from museums busting at the seems and tell them to “make money”. I bet that £2million (Cost of an expansion?) turns into £10million within two years and some of the most progressive museum thinking will arrive out of it, hopefully providing a basis for the future health of the museum world.

Just a crazy idea as I think out loud.