Quote:
Originally Posted by Bruce MacMillan
The people that run the museums are professionals in their field.
The point I was trying to make was that museums are a place where people can go to research or study original artifacts. If items are restored or modified then what happens to any historical significance?
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Ah, but professional at what? Certainly not the details of the artifacts themselves (they often haven't a clue how they were used or in what context). No, the artifacts are there to tell a historical tale, and even that has taken on a whole new meaning in recent years. It used to be the tale of kings and generals in the formation of nations and in great military or political events. Now it is quite different. Historians will tell you history is all about giving voice to those oppressed people in history who had none. Therefore it is no longer about generals and kings, it's about the overlooked stories of those who had these momentous events swirling about them.
In any event, museum professionals feel they are at their best when they take a single 'significant' artifact, say a shoe, place it in a nicely back lit glass case and invite museum patrons to gaze upon it and say "...uhhhh...I feel deep emotion..."
As to the restoration of artifacts, I really am of two minds. Greek pottery is not displayed in shards as found, it's pieced together. I guess there is a point where something is so far gone it cannot give the observer any sense of what it was like in life. Rob's ambulance may be one in that category.
In New Orleans there is the universally acclaimed best American WW2 museum. It has two parts, the first being in the camp of introspection and has its share of those infamous back lit glass cases. They invite you to sit in a fake train car where you take on the persona of a WW2 participant (I declined that part) and, as with the CWM, I found a good number of errors in their artifact descriptions. The second part is a cavernous building with restored vehicles (Sherman, Stewart, Jeep, etc.), and restored aircraft (B-17, Avenger, Corsair, etc) suspended from the ceiling with elevated walkways allowing you to get right up close to them. Given the state of vehicles and aircraft that have been modified and left to the weather, there's no way the museum could have displayed them as found.