On Nov 10, 2010, at 1:04 PM, Julie wrote:
One would be to know what they have and accurately and fully
describe it. I see a lot of errors describing knit vs. crochet vs.
other techniques.
Then I think one of the most useful things a museum could do would
be lots of photos and get some darned closeups. The pictures I
looked at on the from the link you posted for the Smithsonian didn't
have anything that wasn't full length - no details at all. OTOH,
some pictures I've seen from the V&A get so close I could chart the
knit or beaded designs. I really appreciate that kind of
information online since it's unlikely I'll ever get to go to the
museum.
Julie in Ramona
Both of these, alas, pretty much boil down to questions of money.
Museums are increasingly understaffed, and often can't spare the time
for their curators to do much research on what something really is and
how it should be labeled. Also, it means that the few curators they
can hire often don't cover the full range of expertise they need for
the things they have -- almost no fine arts museums have jewelry
curators, for instance. A famous example from the Met has a curator of
sculpture writing about a painting and getting the clothing
description hilariously wrong because he doesn't understand surcotes.
(Mirror of the Medieval World, painting of St. Clare of Assisi)
Writing and correcting the catalog descriptions (either in the museum,
online or both) is also time-consuming. Online photos are expensive
both in terms of getting the photos taken in the first place (since it
usually means hiring a professional photographer) and then in terms of
processing and preparing them for the Web. I agree that the V&A and
some other museums are now beginning to do a truly splendid job of
posting useful, detailed online photos of a few objects (sometimes
even hundreds of objects) but not all museums feel they can afford to
follow suit, or else simply don't have that as one of their
priorities. (I know some interesting pieces that are now in a museum
in Qatar, for instance, which has NO photos of items in their
collection online yet.)
It's often annoying to see something mislabeled on the Web (sprang mis-
labeled as "knitting", for instance). First, of course museums are not
infallible: they can only use the knowledge they have. Second,
sometimes a former opinion on what something is (made when knowledge
was less) persists for a long time because either they can't find
someone whose scholarship they trust to say otherwise, or again purely
because no one on staff can spare the time to do the fixes. A recent
example is an Islamic knitted cotton sock that is still labeled as
probably coming from India, when that idea has been pretty thoroughly
debunked within the last twenty years or so.
Annoying as it is, sixty costumers writing in to a museum to say "fix
this, please" is often not going to make a lot of difference. The
problem is that museum staff can't know all the experts in all fields
personally, so they have to rely on credentials to judge who is and
who isn't giving them good advice. If you have a Ph.D. or published
scholarly papers on Islamic textiles, for instance, they are likely to
take your advice more seriously than if you are someone who has been
studying and re-creating historical costume for thirty years. You may
know just as much as the Ph.D., but the museum has no way to know who
does and who doesn't know what they're talking about.
____________________________________________________________
O Chris Laning <[email protected]> - Davis, California
+ http://paternoster-row.org - http://paternosters.blogspot.com
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