A research spirit and experimental attitude in museums

Ken Arnold (Wellcome Collection) and I had a joint sesssion titled “Integrating research, acquisitioning, curation, exhibition making and events in museums” at the Danish national museum meeting in Horsens, two weeks ago. Based on this predistributed session abstract: Drawing on our experiences from the Medical Museion and the Wellcome Collection, respectively, we suggest that a successful and productive in­tegration of these functions of the museum does not involve creating or­ganisational structures, but rather the cultivation of curiosity and a ‘will to inquire’. A research spirit can stimulate exhibitions, events and curator­ship, and vice versa the handling of material objects can give rise to new and interesting research problems. we gave two short introductory talks followed by a long general discussion. Here’s my (untitled) intro talk. Ken Arnold and I are running two venues which are in some ways very similar and yet quite different. Similar in the sense that we address some of the basic questions concerning human existence – questions about life and death, well-being and disease. We’re dealers in the sublime – because we investigate the future prospects of the human body which are simultaneously very frightening and deeply fascinating. But different in the sense that the Wellcome Collection is extremely well-endowed and situated in one of the busiest roads in a globalised Metropolis with hundreds of thousands of visitors per year, whe...
Source: Biomedicine on Display - Category: Medical Scientists Authors: Tags: aesthetics Source Type: blogs