It seems that the typical museum employee is an underpaid woman.
That sentence probably sounds more loaded than I intend it to be. But it doesn't take much familiarity with the museum industry to realize that most of the staff tends to be female, and most of the salaries tend to be on the small side.
There are numerous explanations for both of these issues, and there are numerous hypotheses that seek to relate them. I'm not convinced there's any kind of causal relationship between the two (after all, museum work used to be a male-dominated field), but I do think they're interconnected somehow, even if grappling with this question on more than one occasion hasn't really given me a definite answer.
In my collections management class today, the issue came up again, and my professor passed along a comment that one of her friends had made: men are still the breadwinners (or think they are), so they're not going to go into a poorly-paid field like museum work.
I still don't think that's the only explanation, especially because not every woman who works in a museum is married or otherwise financially supported. But it makes a lot of sense to me, particularly in light of an article I saw a few weeks ago that pointed out the connection between low salaries in female-dominated academic fields. Center for the Future of Museums picked it up on their blog, and the original study is here. I don't think the salaries necessarily started out small - just as museums (and other fields) didn't start out with mostly female staff - but combine the fact that museum workers now are mostly female and that women still generally make less money than men doing the same job, and it doesn't seem unreasonable to suggest that there's one reason why salaries are staying low. Perhaps there's a perception, like that of the person our professor mentioned, that most of museum work is done by women who are probably not the primary breadwinners in their families - that this is something they do just because, so a small salary should be more than adequate.
Whatever is causing the imbalance, the fact that museums are dominated by women is interesting in a way - in a sense, it makes women the guardians and interpreters of culture and history. There's a whole lot that could be said about the voices and power this gives to women, who traditionally (in a Western European paradigm, at least) didn't have that much influence - or maybe I'm reading into it too much. Still, the idea that low salaries might have turned the work of cultural interpretation into the domain of women appeals to me.
Monday, September 21, 2009
Friday, September 11, 2009
My IKEA fantasy
IKEA is one of the only stores that I can, and do, happily spend an entire day in. It's designed to encourage that, of course, with the restaurant and the kids' area and acres of showrooms to browse through. And while I might love organizing things a little more than the average person, IKEA's appeal is well-known and wide-ranging.
In 1917, John Cotton Dana asked rhetorically, "Is the department store a museum?" His answer was that it is not a good museum - but that museums aren't good museums either, and that department stores get right a lot of the things that museums fall short at. Department stores are easy to access, open at convenient times for visitors, well-advertised, free with information and assistance, and, significantly, showcase things that are interesting and relevant to its visitors.
Dana was trying to make the point that museums were institutions in service to the public, and needed to start acting like it. Almost a hundred years later, museums have caught on to that, although the extent to which they've really put that into practice is still a little varied. But I think his point about department stores remains thought-provoking.
Especially when you replace "department stores" with "IKEA." IKEA, like any other massive retail business, does all the things Dana pointed out - but it makes a point of going beyond that. There's a restaurant, and it's not only good but affordable, which isn't something most museum restaurants can claim. There's a place to deposit your bored or tired kids where they'll be able to amuse themselves and stay out of trouble. Obviously, there's a reason that IKEA can offer these things and museums can't (money). But in my fantasy museum, there'd be a cheap, good restaurant (possibly serving Swedish meatballs) and a Småland.
IKEA also likes to highlight its community involvement. Yes, some of their concern with environmental responsibility is probably a marketing stunt, but museums could benefit from making an effort to go green, too (again, I think money is unfortunately standing in the way of that). And IKEA also has connections to its local community - on one visit, I saw a Tae Kwon Do group giving a demonstration near the restaurant. Those sort of relationships are something museums do, and do well.
But what excites me most about my IKEA/generic museum comparison is the objects (of course - I love things). Naturally, IKEA is the antithesis of a museum whose collection is made up of authentic objects. At IKEA, you touch things, sit in chairs, open drawers, look in cupboards (at the explicit urging of stickers telling you to - which kind of reminds me of those museum exhibits with the "What's this object? Lift the flap for the answer!" displays). The whole point is to interact physically with the objects in the showrooms, to decide if they're right for you, to be convinced that you need this desk or that chest of drawers in your own home. Those rooms are set up, complete with props, to encourage you to insert yourself into those appealing spaces.
The meandering floorplan and showrooms IKEA uses are a format that works well in museums with furniture collections - for example, the DeWitt Wallace Museum in Williamsburg - but there any similarity stops abruptly. You are absolutely not going to be sitting in any 18th-century chairs or fingering any 19th-century textiles to decide if you like them.
Which is too bad.
I like to imagine a museum of furniture/decorative arts/material culture that works like IKEA. What if there were an entire floor of reproduction furniture and objects and you were welcome to sit down in those rooms and, instead of imagining your apartment filled with wonderful IKEA furniture, you imagined a life two hundred years ago where these surroundings would have been familiar? What if each reproduction was marked with a tag, except instead of explaining what the product was called and how much it cost and where to find it in the store, it gave the age and provenance of the original it reproduced? What if there was another floor of open storage, where instead of tracking down your flat-pack furniture boxes to load onto your cart, you tracked down the original of the chair or curtain or plate that you had seen upstairs, to see the authentic (and untouchable) thing?
This is all fantasy, of course. There's that same issue of money that would probably make my imaginary IKEA museum prohibitively expensive. But if department stores can get close to what museums should have been doing in the 1910s, then IKEA can get even closer to what I wish museums could do now.
In 1917, John Cotton Dana asked rhetorically, "Is the department store a museum?" His answer was that it is not a good museum - but that museums aren't good museums either, and that department stores get right a lot of the things that museums fall short at. Department stores are easy to access, open at convenient times for visitors, well-advertised, free with information and assistance, and, significantly, showcase things that are interesting and relevant to its visitors.
Dana was trying to make the point that museums were institutions in service to the public, and needed to start acting like it. Almost a hundred years later, museums have caught on to that, although the extent to which they've really put that into practice is still a little varied. But I think his point about department stores remains thought-provoking.
Especially when you replace "department stores" with "IKEA." IKEA, like any other massive retail business, does all the things Dana pointed out - but it makes a point of going beyond that. There's a restaurant, and it's not only good but affordable, which isn't something most museum restaurants can claim. There's a place to deposit your bored or tired kids where they'll be able to amuse themselves and stay out of trouble. Obviously, there's a reason that IKEA can offer these things and museums can't (money). But in my fantasy museum, there'd be a cheap, good restaurant (possibly serving Swedish meatballs) and a Småland.
IKEA also likes to highlight its community involvement. Yes, some of their concern with environmental responsibility is probably a marketing stunt, but museums could benefit from making an effort to go green, too (again, I think money is unfortunately standing in the way of that). And IKEA also has connections to its local community - on one visit, I saw a Tae Kwon Do group giving a demonstration near the restaurant. Those sort of relationships are something museums do, and do well.
But what excites me most about my IKEA/generic museum comparison is the objects (of course - I love things). Naturally, IKEA is the antithesis of a museum whose collection is made up of authentic objects. At IKEA, you touch things, sit in chairs, open drawers, look in cupboards (at the explicit urging of stickers telling you to - which kind of reminds me of those museum exhibits with the "What's this object? Lift the flap for the answer!" displays). The whole point is to interact physically with the objects in the showrooms, to decide if they're right for you, to be convinced that you need this desk or that chest of drawers in your own home. Those rooms are set up, complete with props, to encourage you to insert yourself into those appealing spaces.
The meandering floorplan and showrooms IKEA uses are a format that works well in museums with furniture collections - for example, the DeWitt Wallace Museum in Williamsburg - but there any similarity stops abruptly. You are absolutely not going to be sitting in any 18th-century chairs or fingering any 19th-century textiles to decide if you like them.
Which is too bad.
I like to imagine a museum of furniture/decorative arts/material culture that works like IKEA. What if there were an entire floor of reproduction furniture and objects and you were welcome to sit down in those rooms and, instead of imagining your apartment filled with wonderful IKEA furniture, you imagined a life two hundred years ago where these surroundings would have been familiar? What if each reproduction was marked with a tag, except instead of explaining what the product was called and how much it cost and where to find it in the store, it gave the age and provenance of the original it reproduced? What if there was another floor of open storage, where instead of tracking down your flat-pack furniture boxes to load onto your cart, you tracked down the original of the chair or curtain or plate that you had seen upstairs, to see the authentic (and untouchable) thing?
This is all fantasy, of course. There's that same issue of money that would probably make my imaginary IKEA museum prohibitively expensive. But if department stores can get close to what museums should have been doing in the 1910s, then IKEA can get even closer to what I wish museums could do now.
Thursday, September 10, 2009
Things, including this thing
I love things. I love making things, and I love things made by other people, as recently as this morning and as long ago as a hundred or a thousand or ten thousand years before today.
I love memory, and history, and museums.
I love the stories things tell. Everything is made for a reason, and if it's still around, then it's still here for a reason. That chain of meaning and memory that links an object's moment of creation to its presence here and now - the reason it was made, the way it was used, the reason someone or many someones chose to keep it - fascinates me.
So this will be part museum blog, part craft blog, with not enough originality or insight into either to be much of anything - but there is a reason I made this, too (digital creations count just as much as handmade, in my book), and I think it's worth having.
I love memory, and history, and museums.
I love the stories things tell. Everything is made for a reason, and if it's still around, then it's still here for a reason. That chain of meaning and memory that links an object's moment of creation to its presence here and now - the reason it was made, the way it was used, the reason someone or many someones chose to keep it - fascinates me.
So this will be part museum blog, part craft blog, with not enough originality or insight into either to be much of anything - but there is a reason I made this, too (digital creations count just as much as handmade, in my book), and I think it's worth having.
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