Monday, January 25
the way of seeing
I don't know about the rest of you out there, but when I walk into a museum, I am in awe of the collections. Everything in the building I just entered has some significance to someone, whether it's to a culture or individual, it doesn't matter; the point is that for some reason, someone has selected it to be put on display. I then examine each object with an educational view, trying to imagine how it was used, or possibly how it lived it's life (depending on the object itself). However, in the "real world", I would say that I don't look at everything in such a critical view. Sure, when walking in nature I might think about the animals' lives, or if I stumble upon something from the recent past I might wonder how it was used, and try to compare it to what I use in my daily life. But I wouldn't say I do this hypothesizing in such a detailed, in-depth way as I do in a museum. This could partly be because I'm going to a museum with the intent of learning something, or it could be partly because of the way the museum sets up its displays, highlighting objects (as Svetlana Alpers in her article The museum as a way of seeing) and eliminating their natural surroundings. So call it the museum effect opposed to a personal view, but the way I see objects in museums is both similar and different to how I view the world around me every day.
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I agree with your belief about everything that you see in the collections at the museum as being special to someone. My first degree is in anthropology and I have spent lots of time looking at culture and different physical objects of cultures and I know that in any culture almost all objects have cultural significance. I also agree that museums heightens the visitors awareness of the object and makes the person more open to hypothesizing about what the item was used for and who it was used by. However, if I was outside of a museum and saw a particularly old object that was not from my culture I would most likely give it the same amount of attention and scrutiny to detail that I would give it in a museum. That is just me though, and the reason I would most likely give an object that was not in a museum the same amount of attention as an object that is in a museum is because of my degree in anthropology. Because my first degree is in anthropology my mind is conditioned to pay special attention to details of culture (like various cultural objects).
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