Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

In its modern application, the term “museum” has become the umbrella for a bewildering array of institutions. At a minimum, these institutions share the functions of preserving and putting on display cultural goods deemed by some social group to be especially valuable, noteworthy, representative, unique, or otherwise deserving of public attention. Beyond this basic commonality, it is difficult to generalize about cultural institutions that range from comprehensive, flagship organizations addressing the arts, the sciences, and history (e.g., the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian museums) to local collections of memorabilia and oddities from nature that, in some cases, closely resemble the premodern cabinets of curiosity frequently cited as one point of departure for what we think of today as museums. Between these extremes lies a seemingly endless array of general or specialized, meagerly or opulently supported, fully or barely professionalized, well-known or obscure institutions devoted to collecting and displaying cultural goods. The American Association of Museums, the field's principal professional organization in the United States, estimates there are over 16,000 museums in the US alone, a number that includes zoos, aquariums, and botanical gardens. Taken together, these institutions account for more than 850 million individual museum visits per year. An Association ... log in or subscribe to read full text