A Role for Musingplaces

Musingplaces – art galleries & museums – have an important role to play in building social and cultural capital. 

Aside from anything else communities, especially multicultural communities, have their cultural capital invested in museums. For instance, when a family clears up the family estate they come across a box of old photographs of people they barely remember, an old piece of jewellery, a collection of paintings, and other odds and ends with stories. They have a couple of choices. They could keep them and leave the decision of what to do with them to their descendants. They might sell them off to the highest bidder. Alternatively, they might give it all to their local museum – or some other museum and by so doing invest in their cultural landscape.

This is but one way museums in collaboration with communities build cultural capital. More importantly a 'purposeful museum' as an institution is given, and in turn gives, value by their audiences and the things their communities give to them and tell them – invest in them.

With cultural capital comes social connection. In the 21st Century, when these things come together in a museum it has every chance of being an ‘ideas factory’ capable of delivering a social dividend that keeps on giving. 

However, the dividend needs to be delivered – and it is not an automatic process. The cultural capital needs to be put to work. A purposeful musingplace gets on with the job in open collaboration and cooperation with it Community of Ownership & Interest.

How might museums build social capital in their communities and develop meaningful and ongoing interfaces with their audiences in the 21st Century? 

The sharpest tools in the shed are clearly the Internet and 'social media'. It will not do every job the way it needs to be done but if it is used in concert with all the others available, haptic experiences for instance, audiences can be expected to grow exponentially.

As the utopian author and historian H G Wells once said, “adapt or perish, now as ever, is nature's inexorable imperative.” – H. G. Wells (1866 – 1946)

If we imagine museums as 'Ideas Factories' and 'Cultural Research Laboratories', purity and truth are ideas that are ever likely to be contested. If we imagine museums to be the home of comfortable ideas we fool ourselves. If museums facilitate conversations within their Community of Ownership & Interest. new ownerships will form and old ideas will be tested.

Museums are extraordinary places in our cultural imagination and 'cultural landscapes'. They are places where we might discover the extraordinary in the ordinary. Museums are the homes of the muse – they are filled with stories and overflowing with stories full of cultural tension