Architectural historian Owen Hopkins’ book The Museum takes the reader on a tour of the world's most celebrated cultural institutions and museums, from origins to the 21st century.
Hopkins is currently the director of the Farrell Centre at Newcastle University, and was previously a senior curator at London's Sir John Soane's Museum, and also worked as architecture programme curator at the Royal Academy of Art.
The idea of a museum started as a personal space, he told Kathryn Ryan.
“It really begins in the Renaissance with the advent of cabinets of curiosities, sort of so private spaces created by Renaissance princes usually as a base for study, for contemplation where they would surround themselves with cultural objects as spurs for that study.
“And gradually over time, and particularly in the 17th century, these originally, intensely private spaces become a little bit more public.”
Perhaps the first truly public museum was the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, he says.
“I think there are a few museums have a claim to be the first in existence, but I think that one ticks most of the boxes; it's a collection that has been formed for study and for research, even in kind of embryonic forms, that is open to the public and it was also housed in a building, which to some extent, symbolised this new type of institution.”
Architecture is fundamental to the story of museums, Hopkins says.
“The public face is about presenting the mission, the ideals, the values, the aspirations contained within that institution, and its very foundation.”
Museums are bigger than what’s contained within them, he says.
“They are bound up in the stories of empire, of the fashioning of nation states, they are institutions which have this a symbolic value, which is connected to their role in scholarship and learning but extends well beyond it into a world of geopolitics.”
Museums, he argues, emerged in the age of enlightenment.
“Enlightenment itself went hand-in-hand, with the age of empire, the age of reason was also the age of empire.
“And as institutions, museums are inextricably connected to that history, whether they have colonial era collections or not.”
Contemporary museums face significant cultural challenges, he says, as they tend to be staffed by “people like me – white, middle class males.”
“If those institutions want to serve society and the public that they claim to serve, they need to work really hard to ensure that those people are representative of those publics otherwise, there is there is a fundamental disconnect.”
Each chapter of the book relates to a particular kind of museum, he says.
“I talk about the Enlightenment Museum, the Public Museum, the Modern Museum and the Global Museum. As a way of thinking about how each generation reimagined the museum, according to the particular priorities of that moment.”
An archetypal Enlightenment museum is the British Museum in London, he says.
“A museum was founded according to Enlightenment principles, bringing a collection together to try to make sense of the world, trying to classify the full extent of the natural world and of human cultural production.
“So, very grand, lofty ideals. And that's very much manifested in its architectural presence in Bloomsbury, London this grand classical facade making this place appear as this embodiment of learning, and very literally of enlightenment.”
And then the story shifts to the Public Museum of which the Smithsonian is an example, Hopkins says.
“The museum as a place of education, of public enrichment.”
The modern museum echoed developments in modern art and architecture, he says.
“This idea that we should look at objects in some kind of decontextualised, white cube space to prioritise that relationship between viewer and objects.”
The Museum of Modern Art in New York is the “prototypical modern museum” he says, along with the Pompidou in Paris.
“The Pompidou Centre in Paris, took that idea of the decontextualized space to its logical conclusion by creating these vast hangar-like spaces, where there's this kind of amazing opportunity to engage directly with works of art on a on a colossal scale.”
The era of the global museum is where architecture takes over, he says.
“You have this era of these iconic museums in buildings and the Guggenheim in Bilbao is the classic case in point, it's a building that in many ways does transcend its collection.
“It's more famous, it's more recognisable, actually, than anything housed inside it.”
He started writing this book when for the first time in history most museums were closed, he says.
“There's a cliché about the pandemic that it has accelerated existing trends in a whole number of fields and it has, to some extent, in museums.
“The age of the blockbuster exhibition is over. And we may see museums focus more on their own collections, both because it's much cheaper to do so and it's less risky, as well.”
A shift online into the digital sphere is also underway, he says.
“There’s fascinating and tantalizing opportunities on the horizon for museums by looking at this online world as a kind of counterpart, as a complement, to what's happening in the real physical gallery spaces.”
