Ever since handily (if I do say so myself) delving into the occasionally perplexing world of library lingo, I’ve been thinking about the language of museums, institutions which occupy a similar place in my esteem…and in my sometimes slapdash internal categorizations.
In one sense, libraries and museums are close kin. You would be forgiven for conjecturing that a library is essentially a kind of museum of books. After all, our friend the OED defines a museum as:
A building or institution in which objects of historical, scientific, artistic, or cultural interest are preserved and exhibited.
And the word museum itself comes most recently from the Latin museum, meaning library or study, first used to describe the "university building in Alexandria" or, as it is more popularly known, the Library of Alexandria.
But the resemblance between libraries and museums (or, musea, if you want to sound like the kind of sophisticate that refers to more than one octopus as a rally of octopodes) is only skin deep. In Encyclopædia Britannica Geoffrey D. Lewis writes that:
the museum differs markedly from the library, with which it has often been compared, for the items housed in a museum are mainly unique and constitute the raw material of study and research. In many cases they are removed in time, place, and circumstance from their original context, and they communicate directly to the viewer in a way not possible through other media.
And distinctions appear in the etymological history too. Going back further, the Latin museum was derived from the Greek mouseion, the mythological seat of the Muses, those famous daughters of Zeus, the king of the Greek gods, and Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory. The name muses, or Mousa in Greek, comes ultimately from the Proto-Indo-European root men-, from which contemporary terms including the logical—mental, mentor, manic and music—are derived as well as some that demanded significantly more historical contortions to evolve, such as monitor, admonish, mandarin and automatic.
But in addition to being places of research, worship (secular and near-religious) and increasingly, community engagement, the world of the museum shares with that of the library both organizational angst of the philosophical and human varieties and an intriguing lingo that has emerged from and within their complex cultural and organizational workings.
Continuing with our linguistic museology, then, a common museum word that is a regular point of contention outside that world is curation. In the museum world, curation—which includes acquiring, developing, maintaining, organizing, and interpreting collections—is the work of curators, advanced degree holders employed by museums.
As Matt Langer writes in his subtly-titled (and somewhat ironically placed) Gizmodo article "Stop Calling it Curation":
First, let’s just get clear on the terminology here: "Curation" is an act performed by people with PhDs in art history.
Museum folk can get a little worked up about the evolving contemporary use of the word curation to refer to amateurs and prosumers performing many of the same tasks online using blogging tools or various specialized applications such as Pinterest or Scoop.it.
David Balzer’s rant in the Guardian is typical of the cane-shaking genre:
Contemporary curating has become an absurdity. Outfits are curated. Salads are curated. Twitter feeds are curated. Bennington College in Vermont invites prospective students to curate their applications. Lorde was appointed “sole curator” of the most recent Hunger Games film’s soundtrack. Everyone is a curator these days.
Balzer’s full-length book on the subject, Curationism: How Curating Took Over the Art World and Everything Else, digs significantly deeper, but still strikes me as both useless punching at the linguistic tides of change and, like most of the complaints about curation, is steeped in the etymological fallacy, i.e. the contention that the meaning of a word now must be similar to its historical meaning.
This is pure poppycock. As I told a quickly forgotten Twitter assailant who was apparently devoting his life to defending the museum definition of the curator: his argument was self-defeating given that the sacred museum definition was in fact a redefining of a literally sacred activity: curate comes from the Latin curatus (one responsible for the care of souls), and there are curates in the Catholic and Anglican churches to this day. Curation is derived from the Latin curationem (to take care of or manage, especially medically). Museum curators may be rightly proud of their PhDs, but priests or medical doctors they are not.
In the United States, museum staff also include usually voluntary guides called docents. An adaptation of the Latin docēre (to teach, to lecture), docent is used in Europe (and a few American universities) to refer to either a particular academic rank or professional teachers, so our friends over the pond refer to those same helpful folk as facilitators, guides, or simply educators.
Not only have museums generated a fascinating daily lingo, but a significant amount of it overlaps with that of libraries, including things like accession, de-accession, and the rotation of artifacts and objects. And this natural language formation faces its own resistance. In his charmingly titled article "Six Museum Words to Make You Vomit" self-described "museumite" Jim Fishwick created the even more charming coinage "MuseVoms" (with an accompanying "MuseVom Bingo" card!) to describe words that live right in the sour spot where jargon and buzzwords overlap in museum-speak, including overused terms such as immersive, participatory, content and the new-to-me-and-makes-me-sad plural "learnings."
This would be a natural moment to segue into the intimately connected, occasionally terrifying world of another language found on the walls of museums: art speak (aka International Art English)…but that’s a radical investigation into dialectically subversive tropes that must wait for another time.
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