Andrew Burnett: Coins, Metal Detecting, and Collectors of Last Resort
Coins, one of the oldest objects of human collection, are physically small and made of a stable material, which makes storage and preservation a relatively straightforward matter for museums; the British Museum, for example, has a collection of one million coins. Even so, coins do carry their own issues of “difficulty”. The recent phenomenon of people using metal detectors to locate coins or hoards has raised ethical questions for museums. Widespread public participation has led to the uncovering of a great amount of information about Britain that otherwise would be lost. There is great importance in collecting objects and not just information. Yet detectors can also destroy sites and the context of the find, raising the issue of the institutional treatment of such finds at the intersection of private and public interest, making the question of hordes and illegal antiquities a problematic issue.
Brian Hayton: Local Government Context and Industrial Collections
The best collections are a result of extreme collecting, of personal, curatorial passion that confer distinction on a museum, whereas safe collecting simply reinforces the status quo. Yet collecting deeply rather than broadly can raise complex questions, especially when it comes to industrial heritage. Large industrial objects take up a lot of space, quickly leading to a conflict of objectives between curatorial interests, institutional resources and public accountability. From this perspective extreme collecting is less relevant to the public and serves as a vehicle for a curator’s passion. Collections have a serious impact on museum activities. Because of professional antipathy to disposal, historical decisions create a legacy effect, determining the corpus of the museum for decades to come. Secondly, collections also affect the public perception of curators and museums. Inadequate preservation and presentation of objects as a result of insufficient resources can lead to charges of "heritage destruction". Industrial heritage is often an emotionally charged subject for local populations undergoing social and economic transition. Yet there is an important difference between extreme collecting as a benefit that can be used to excite and a dysfunctional extreme that is of no use to anyone and ends up damaging the museum.
Susan Pearce: How Can We Know the New?
An important segment of contemporary 'extreme' collecting is the emphasis placed on mass-produced material, like tea towels or paper bags. These may eventually have some historical interest, but primarily they do not fit within the modernist value structure, which is concerned with using the appearence of specimens, natural and man-made, to establish criteria of similarity and difference capable of predicting occurence in the external world. The contemporary collections are, by contrast, affective and concerned to create internal self-identity. In order to understand their value we need a new epistemology. This talk will consider these problems, in the light of Gidden's idea of 'ontological security'.
Stephen Quirke: Collecting Futures in the Trajectories of the Past
History of collections may be used to detect how hierarchies of value in past practice may be maintained, but simultaneously hidden, by present received opinion and practice. Museology promotes a view of collecting as a universal activity, from a transhistorical aspect of human psychology. History of collections tends to equate implicitly museum and collection, and to cast the chronology of institutional collecting in active mode, rather than passive or contingent. Against this it might be argued that, normatively, museum collections involve two types of collecting act: (1) an acquisition by the museum initiated from external activity, often military or political, and as much received as sought, and (2) a prior act of collecting by another institution or, very often, a person identified as ‘private’ in the public-private dichotomy underpinning capitalist societies. History of collectability in our society oscillates between a normative resistance to collect and a competitive urge to raise profile in a public space variable according to the local, national or supranational context of the particular act or institution of collecting. This public context and the bonds with capital generate the impact of museum institutional collecting, for example on the antiquities trade linked to destruction of archaeological sites. At the Petrie Museum 1880s to 1920s collections of ancient erotic art and human remains offer case-studies to document how a collector exhibited both aggression and circumscription in context with local and international impact.
Steven Rubenstein: Difficult Subjects
One of the ironies of museums is that they are based on global circulations, yet reinforce notions of the local. In other words, large museums are metaphors for the world, but each display operates metonymically to represent one specific part of it. Although efforts by indigenous peoples to repatriate items from museum collections seem to reverse the hierarchical relationship between colonized producers and colonizing consumers, repatriation risks further institutionalizing the metonymic function of artefacts, and reifying the notion of culture as local. That certainly seemed to be the case when in 1994 leaders of the Shuar Federation asked the National Museum of the American Indian to return 12 shrunken heads. Not all Shuar, however, insist on repatriation. When I accompanied three Shuar to the American Museum of Natural History, they were thrilled to see three shrunken heads on display for all to admire. After all, like the shrunken heads, they too were far from home. But they did not look at these heads so much as objects from home, so much as objects from their past. Indeed, the value of the heads lay in both their physical proximity to, and temporal distance from, these Shuar: the presence of the heads revealed that the Shuar were not just undocumented manual labourers, but had a meaningful history; similarly, the presence of the Shuar revealed that the culture represented by the heads is dynamic and changing. Their only regret was that the heads could not, by themselves, communicate this dynamism.