https://www.museedelhomme.fr/en/from-the-musee-d-ethnographie-to-the-musee-de-l-homme

Founded on 1946.

https://icom.museum/en/about-us/history-of-icom/

1988: AAM 'defines a museum as "an organized and permanent non-profit institution, essentially education or aesthetic in purpose, with professional staff, which owns or utilizes tangible objects, cares for them, and exhibits them to the public on some regular schedule"' (Alexander).

https://www.aam-us.org/programs/about-aam/

temples dedicated to the Muses

mouseion

-'most' famous museum dedicated to Greek classical knowledge

university, philosophical academy, zoological and botanical park, statues, scientific instruments, animal materials

-the state and king supported the museum

-Alexander the Great's colonial collections in the Bruchium

-Euclid wrote Elements of Geometry

-scholars and scientists

Founded 1671

Originally a private collection, the university and city of Basel brought it to the public

The Palace of the Louvre as the Museum of the Republic

Oldest museum in the U.S.

Included paid entry, entrepreneurial spirit included in the museum imagination

In 1873, became a national museum including science, the humanities, and the arts.

"claimed museography to be a branch of
ethnography; the ethnographic museum was the material archive of the people that
it studied, and the interpretation and presentation of material and non-material
culture was, he argued, inseparably linked" (Shelton, 8) --> led to the rejection of the evolutionary paradigm (focus on social structure rather than biological needs)

Benjamin Ives Gilman, secretary, curator, and librarian of the MFA from 1893 to 1925, thought that "a museum of science... in essence a school; a museum of art in essence is a temple" (Alexander).

“By interpretation, I mean here a conscious act of the mind which illustrates a certain code, certain ‘rules’ of interpretation… The task of interpretation is virtually one of translation. The interpreter says, Look, don’t you see that X is really— or, really means—A? That Y is really B? That Z is really C… Interpretation thus presupposes a discrepancy between the clear meaning of the text and the demands of (later) readers."

"The modern style of interpretation excavates, and as it excavates, destroys; it digs ‘behind’ the text, to find a sub-text which is the true one."

“Interpretation must itself be evaluated, within a historical view of human consciousness. In some cultural contexts, interpretation is a liberating act. It is a means of revising, of transvaluing, of escaping the dead past. In other cultural contexts, it is reactionary, impertinent, cowardly, stifling."

“What is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more… Our task is to cut back content so that we can see the thing at all… In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art."