#sorry i'm vagueblogging a patreon-only episode of Well There's Your Problem

[tanadrin]

so many criticisms of museums seem to me to easily turn into criticisms of, like. studying the past in general. or trying to present any kind of information about it at all to the public. like i don't think the fact that artifacts in museums are put under glass is what causes ancient history to feel flat and distant. i think it's the fact that it's ancient history, and most people, most of the time, don't care much about it!

also feels like there's a huge amount of nuance that needs to be kept in mind--not all anxieties about human remains in museum collections are equal, for instance. there's a huge difference between the remains of kids killed in the 1985 move bombings being in a museum, the remains of dead romans or egyptian pharoahs being in a museum, or the remains of paleolithic hunter-gatherers being in a museum.

It's all well and good to say "museums probably shouldn't exist," but I presume when ppl say this they don't mean "and we should chuck the entire collection of the british museum in the sea," I presume they mean "we need to rethink how we archive, catalogue, and preserve historical collections," but this ends up feeling like those police abolition ppl who are like "we should totally abolish the police, then replace them with something that functions very similarly but has better PR." museums are one of those cases where i think you really do need to accompany a critique with a substantive positive proposal, if only because thinking about what the alternatives are might help you better understand the constraints on the institutions as they currently exist.