Technikatörténeti szemle 22. (1996)
TANULMÁNYOK - MacLeod, Roy: Modern Times and the Sciene Museum: Museum Knowledge and its Management
Today, as we survey the thousands of museums in the world, we single out these among other leading science museums - by which we mean those devoted more especially to art and industry, or natural history, or invention. Today, we may also include science centres, "Exploratoria", such as in Bristol and San Francisco, with their computer-based, investigative technologies, devices now rarely absent from science museums generally. But museums are set apart from other institutions by a relatively simple definition, viz., their custodianship of objects. 21 Museums - in their architecture, their catalogues, their shops - perform many functions. Today, increasingly, they are telling stories with words without things. But traditionally, and for the most part, it is still in their object-based discourse, that science museums have acquired a particular role, reputation, and responsibility. In so doing, museum managers confront the reality of discipline and power. Objects are not neutral in any case. The contain both implicit knowledge, of attributes and facts (craftsmanship, authenticity, antiquity, etc), and explicit knowledge, about the place of the fact - and its values - in history. Moreover, by their technologies of arrangement and display, museums grant authority, to different attributes, as to different objects. Their labels offer a context within which items can be read. Within the museum world, there are at present many discontents. Elsewhere, I have categorised these in Baconian language, as deriving from a modern tendency to worship the three idols - of the tribe, of the theatre, and of the marketplace - abhorred in the attack of the Novum Organum upon uninspired humanism and Aristotelian metaphysics - false gods, perhaps, but compelling nonethelles. The idols of the tribe, for example - in this case, of the image of an allpervasive, ethically neutral, and materially beneficial scientific method - have invited cavernous division and opposition within the museum profession. The after-shocks of the "new museum movement" of the last century have produced a "newer museum movement" with a generation of curators and designers who are interested in controversy, permeable to public demands, and amenable to tackling questions underlying the orthodoxy of representation and display. Today there is much experiment, embracing rival theories of scientific method and theory construction in museum exhibition and design. "Ultimate quantification", as one author has put it, conceptualises the museum an information data-base, serving the continuing ^interpretation of data, but others want to encourage public participation through "heightened historical reality" generated by computer simulations. 22 Between such extremes, most museums remain locked in their traditional roles as spokesmen for technological progress or (its biological equivalent)
