I spent some time this morning at the S. F. museum's web site. [thank you Mr. Howe for the tip.]

Steve Price has written in the previous thread:

"Making their stuff available for public appreciation and education is part of
every museum's mission, but preservation of the artifacts for scholarly study is more important to them. The priorities of these two objectives are exactly
reversed for most collectors, and once we understand this the difference
between the practices used by museums and those desired by collectors at
least begins to make sense."

I would be happy to take the other side [the museum side] of the debate and justify low lighting levels and "buried textiles" if the level of scholarship was fine and the information was distributed in a logical way on the net. . . .

I would expect objects not to be mislabeled, and the information about them as broad as possible with some indication of possbile variants in attribution, function and dating.
I would expect a technical analysis of the pieces.

This of course is in responce to what I felt was a poor scholarly show by the S. F. staff concering the objects shown concerning 'suzani' and 'prayer'.

I suggested that someone out there host a salon whose purpose was creating a paradigm for use by the museums and collectors in publishing their pieces on the net and on paper. Any takers?????

Sincerely

Richard Farber

N.B. I could well expect the cry of we have no funds concerning this . . .but if you have the funds to image the pieces than surely you should have the funds to 'tentitively" label catagorize analysis and attribute them.

You raise very interesting dilemmas, and I'd like to address some of them.

1. You'd be happy to support exhibitions with poor lighting if the scholarship shown by museum curators was stronger. I think this puts you in a very small minority among collectors. The prevalent position seems to be that if the light isn't good enough to let the viewer really appreciate the textile, the exhibition comes close to being worthless.

2. You are unhappy about the sorry state of scholarship by museums. I am, too, but I have no idea how to change the fact that some people are better scholars than others and it can be hard for an administrator to tell who those are. This is a constant problem in academic institutions, but we have an advantage. Usually there is a rather large worldwide pool of scholars even in the fairly specialized areas, and they essentially serve as consultants to all institutions when time comes for evaluating someone for promotion and/or tenure.

3. A Salon in which people exchange views about what they would like to see museums do along the lines of scholarship, along with the museum side being presented, would be most welcome, and if anyone is willing to undertake this I'd be happy to hear from him/her.

Steve Price

I realize that my "debating position" was in the minority but really was using the statement to rebut the arguement that a museum is primarily a scholarly institution and is concerned with damaging the pieces when showing them. If the scholarship was sensational and the images both on the net and on paper were available including details and back there would be more of a justification for this position.

Sincerely

Richard Farber

This is probably going to alienate the remaining friends I have in the museum world, but I don't think museums see themselves as primarily scholarly institutions. There are some genuine scholars on their staffs, of course, but I think most museums have the "self-image" of a repository. More like a library than like a research institute.

If I'm correct in this, the white glove treatment of their holdings makes sense because they have an obligation to preserve the things. Their major connection to scholarship is to make the artifacts available for study by scholars.

Even if I'm mistaken, and they do see themselves as scholarly institutions (places where knowledge is generated and transmitted, as opposed to places where knowledge and its raw materials are stored), the criticism that the level of scholarship is often low doesn't warrant forbidding them from pursuing it and attempting to improve.

If academic institutions could find a way to prune out all the mediocre scholars, there'd be few faculty left for teaching and few students for them to serve. But that's another topic for a different venue.

Regards,

Steve Price