Museums are big business, attracting billions of tourist dollars, advancing science and educating and amusing more than 850 million people annually. They’re also places that deal with history—the way it has been, how it is now and how it might be in the future. Museums are as much about culture as they are about artifacts, and their role in shaping that history has changed with the times. This article looks at how museums have evolved to meet new needs and expectations.
In the 18th century, the idea of museums emerged in Europe as part of the Enlightenment movement and an era when the scientific method and curiosity were key values for many people. The earliest museums were private collections that functioned as “cabinets of curiosities” for the benefit of a small group of people. Examples include Ole Worm’s collection in Copenhagen and John Tradescant’s in Lambeth. The latter eventually became the nucleus of the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, which was opened to the public in 1683—the first open museum to use the name “museum.”
During this period, museums began to take on a more formal structure and be open to the general public. They grew in size and the types of objects they exhibited. They were arranged according to the ideas of the time—artifacts from ancient Egypt led to French Neoclassic art, for example—and they used the comparison of visual forms to create a general narrative for the evolution of art.
By the late 19th and early 20th centuries, museums shifted away from this traditional approach and focused more on scholarship. The Smithsonian, for example, hired a scientist to run its museums instead of an artist, and it emphasized research rather than the display of objects. But in the case of art museums, this shift did not necessarily mean that the old, general historical narrative was abandoned; it simply moved to another venue—the modern art gallery.
The modern museum reflects the different concerns of our era and includes a wide variety of types, from open-air museums that preserve buildings as artifacts to virtual museums that exist only on the Internet. They can be specialized—art museums that only show paintings, for example, or military museums that focus on a specific branch of service—or they can be encyclopedic, providing a broad range of information about local and global history.
When writing an article for a museum magazine, it’s important to remember that you are working with experts—museum curators and PR directors. They spend a lot of time researching the gallery’s exhibits and the object’s history, so be sure to contact them for additional information and to fact check your article. The editors of the magazine will appreciate that you took this step and it will help ensure your story is accurate. Secret #5: Take lots of photos and use them throughout the article, but don’t include too many pictures of a single object. Adding a variety of images helps readers follow the museum’s narrative and gives them something to look at while they read.
