Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Contextual Approach in a Museum

Creating a museum needs to be set around the objects used. But the use of these objects needs to be within a context to share the rich legend surrounding the objects used in the museum. Yet taking those objects out of context is taking a big risk in stretching the truth and retelling a completely different story. Pearce is explaining in her article to keep all objects within the contextual approach within the exhibits of a museum and not the by classification that was used before. The classification approach was helpful in the past for museums to show objects in a grouping way of telling a history of common objects. While the contextual approach grouping objects together which have the same intellectual significance. Without the contextual grouping the meaning or story being told will be disordered and misleading to the visitors at any museum. So yes I believe that a contextual approach should be used in museums to effectively to show the objects on exhibit there. I have seen the Bodies exhibit but I was not interested in looking at the dead spices of body parts. But that is the only museum that I can think of which I have been to which is where the contextual approach is very usable in. It was an informative exhibit in which people can observe what the inner parts of a body looks like. Without any derogatory objections or protests in which the use of the human body in the exhibit is used. By keeping the information as a third person and basic facts of the bodies used kept the exhibit educational. I think the people creating the exhibit in the museums were able to achieve the goal of informative exhibit. Even though I didn’t enjoy the exhibit I saw their accomplishment.

1 comment:

  1. If I understand correctly what you are saying, you feel that the Bodies exhibit is a good example of where objects should *not* be contextualized, in which case I agree with you completely. Or rather, the context should be very specifically limited; instead of providing contextual information about the people who used to inhabit the bodies, the context should be limited purely to cold, scientific data. I have never seen Bodies, but I imagine that if it did I would want to dehumanize the exhibits as much as possible in order to distance myself from them, and it seems that having *very* specific kinds of contextual information would be an appropriate way for museum directors or curators to aid patrons in establishing that kind of psychological distance from the exhibits.

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