Museums are spaces for public good, democratising access to culture and heritage in ways that benefit human dignity, social justice and global equality. They hold artefacts and specimens in trust for society, safeguard diverse memories for future generations and work with communities to research, collect, preserve, interpret and exhibit the world’s shared heritage, in order to enhance our understanding of it.
The word museum comes from the Greek term mouseion, meaning “seat of the Muses”. It reflects the role museums have played throughout history as centres for philosophical discussion and debate.
Throughout the years, museums have been founded for an astonishingly broad range of purposes. Among them: to serve as recreational facilities; as scholarly venues; to promote civic pride and nationalistic endeavours; to transmit overtly ideological concepts; and as centres for education, training, and knowledge sharing.
As museums evolved from private collections of interesting items, they became a place to share these objects with the general public. This was a time of rapid expansion, and museums soon found themselves acquiring many objects from around the world and growing their staff to handle the collection. Museums are staffed by curators who spend their days learning about and caring for the objects in their care; designers who help to put together exhibitions; and educators who teach visitors about the collection. Some museums also have specialists like horticulturists, architects or web designers.
The oldest and most famous museums in the world are renowned for their extensive art collections. The Louvre in Paris, for example, boasts 9 million visitors annually, who come to see paintings including the Venus de Milo, the Mona Lisa and the Law Code of Hammurabi. In recent decades, the Louvre has also become known for its archaeological collections and artefacts from ancient Egypt.
Museums have a complicated relationship with their own history. For example, in the past some museums were accused of being colonial and imperial, taking items from cultures that were not their own and then profiting off them by selling them to the general public. Some of these items may still be in museums today, as the Black Panther film highlighted.
As such, the old Icom definition did not fully reflect the reality of museums and their relationships with the rest of the world. That is why, at its 2019 conference in Kyoto, Icom decided to reformulate the definition of museum. The new definition pushes museums to include broader perspectives in their collections and practices, to address questions of decolonisation, repatriation and restitution and to think about how they can foster cross-cultural learning and knowledge exchange. The new definition will be brought forward for a vote at the ICOM’s Extraordinary General Assembly in Prague in 2022. Until then, Icom’s members are encouraged to take the opportunity to learn more about the five definition proposals that have been drafted so far and to provide their feedback through the online consultation space.