I had never heard of the word précis before this class. When I examined the etymology of the word and discovered that it was borrowed from the French language its former mystique made sense. According to the Merrium-Webster dictionary the word is defined as follows, “: a concise summary of essential points, statements, or facts.” The articles that I will be doing a précis on are as follows. There is an article from USC, University of Souther California entitled “How the Pandemic Changed Museums forever” and Thomas Wood’s “Museums and the Public”, which I consider to be one of the best articles I have ever read. I really felt that I could relate to the import of the latter article.
The first item is the article “How the Pandemic Changed Museums forever”. I have a great love of history but little love for politics. It is a charged word that sometimes zaps those who use it in public if they are careful of who it is spoken around. I can’t help associating the word politics with the word disgrace, and there is some mention of politics in this article, but a specific and broad aspect of history is also mentioned. The article sort of dances around from art-to-art history to history and from history to politics. The over-arching subject is museums. There are art galleries and art museums. The difference between an art gallery and an art museum is that in an art museum, the art in question is not for sale.
The article starts out detailing how the pandemic (depending on how the word is spelled) initially crippled museums all over the country, which was due to efforts to contain the virus, and though the article focuses more on art museums, everything detailed regarding their efforts to configure and learn from art exhibitions from a distance, despite the pandemic, is also true about historical exhibitions.
Though it is not the same as being in an art museum, one method involved filming the exhibition as a whole and conveying a meeting via zoom or some other alternative, with the added function of a discussion on the items in question after watching the film. This was a popular addition that was a consolation for the fact that one was not in an actual museum.
The questions asked in the article regarding art museums are also true of historical museums and the public historians that are the conductors thereof. And there were some good questions asked. “How can we take what we do at the museum outside of the four walls and deliver a relevant and resonate experience to people’s homes?” During the pandemic, this question would have been a relevant one. And it is still relevant even though people are now free to visit historical museums and the pandemic has become like the balloon zipping around the room right before it loses all its air and drops.
The article talked about how art museums keep people in the community connected to art, and there is no way in which this is not also true of historical museums helping to keep history alive in the hearts and minds of people in the community. If this has been achieved for art museums, then why not for historical museums? The article makes some good points. “Pandemic closures showed museums the potential of expanding access to a greater array of artists and art enthusiasts, even when COVID-19 becomes a memory.”
Again, this could be applied to historical museums. While the article speaks a lot about social and political change in relation to efforts on the part of art museums regarding hot seat questions as well as controversial subjects, its ties into museums in general and thereby, historical museums create a good case for how, even in the face of pandemics, the public historian can come up with ways to maintain and even bring new elements of discovery to historical museums.
The next item was Thomas Wood’s “Museums and the public: Doing History together. As it is sometimes said, you can’t have a teeter without a totter. Doing history together is as literal as can be because if it is just the public historians in museums without any action from the public, then whatever displays or exhibitions they have will be useless. If it is just the public that is interested in history, which is rare without an effort on the part of public historians, then without any public historians who put forth the effort to help bring about exhibitions, there would be no relay at all.
And yet the manner of that relay is also important in the reactions between the public and museums. Thomas Woods is, one might say, masterful in presenting a unique and thought-provoking dichotomy between the public and museums.
Sources
Woods, Thomas A. “Museums and the Public: Doing History Together.” The Journal of American History 82, no. 3 (1995): 1111–15. https://doi.org/10.2307/2945116.
Levin, Rachel B. How the Pandemic Changed Museums Forever (or Did It?) USC University of Southern California (2021) https://news.usc.edu/trojan-family/virtual-art-museum-tours-exhibitions-after-covid-pandemic/
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