Museum or not?

A museum is a non-profit, permanent institution in the service of society and its development, open to the public, which acquires, conserves, researches, communicates and exhibits the tangible and intangible heritage of humanity and its environment for the purposes of education, study and enjoyment.

If we assume that this ICOM (International Council Of Museums) definition of a museum attaches and educational and study purpose, which means the museum can be seen as a tool for knowledge; can museums be based on any subject? The evolution of museums from the little cabinets of curiosities to the actual idea of museum has left us with the most odd institutions: a museum of bad art in Massachusetts, one about phallus in Iceland, another one all about carrot in Belgium or a Turkish museum of human hair, including of course the museum of broken relationships that has already appeared previously in this blog. But all of them are institutions focused in a very specific field of knowledge, so they still meet the requirements to be called museums.

Let's go now one step farther and take a look at the wax museums: the educational purpose starts to be less clear. Which useful knowledges can we get from seen famous people turned into wax figures? Figures that, in addition, represent only a particular moment in the life of the represented celebrity, as if it was a 3d photography that will never get old or change the hair style. We could also open a Museum of Famous People to simply fill up the walls with pictures of famous people classified according to their professional area, and that would give us the same study and knowledge than a wax museum. What it is then that gives the wax museum its quality as a proper museum? The answer is the history of wax figures which, even if nowadays are only an entertainment, have their origin in the Middle Ages when it was used as a corpse substitute in the European kings' funerals.

Finally, there is one cas I have known about recently even if it has been active since 2007 at Kentucky (USA), and I still doubt it can be called museum: the Creation Museum o museum of the creationists, which explaines and stages the Bible to get to answer the typical questions that make anyone doubt about God's power and word. We are not going to mess now with religious matters and I don't see anything wrong in using an institution with high resloution videos, animatronics and a planetarium to approach the Bible (leaving aside the irony because of the eternal fight between science and religion); but what have dinosaurs to do in all that matter? According to the Creation Museum “biblical history is the key to understanding dinosaurs”.

Dinosaurs were created the sixth day, at the same time than humans and all the other animals (if we haven't found evidences of human bones next to dinosaur bones to prove the coexistence is only because they were buried separately), and, as they were all at the Garden of Eden with Adam and Eve, they were all vegetarians, ad before the “fall of men kind” no animal died, specially not as food for the others. Dinosaurs were inside Noah's Ark, absolutely all kind of dinosaures (“probably about 50”) as they were not that big. They, in fact, survived the Flood Myth, as it is proved by the existence of dragons in the Middle Ages, but they were extinguished because of the climate change and the humane diseases.

Where is the educational and study purpose? Where is the knowledge after a visit to the Creation Museu? What can be learnt? The treatment that his dinosaur sections receives is as valid as it would me a museum about unicorn's extisntion or about vampire wars in Mexico. It is not the topic what is wrong but its treatment. A museum about vampires is completely justifiable as long as it sticks to the knowledges we have about this mythological race, pointing the legends that rise this believing and its influence in cinema, but the educational and study purpose is lost when reality and fantasy get mixed together. In the same way there will be no possible objection against the Creation Museum if it could prove his speech against all scientific theories about dinosaurs. What do you think? You take it as a museum or not? Do you know any other examples of museum that doesn't provide any knowledge? 

Ricard Gispert

@ricardgispert