The Pots and Pans

The “institute of visual instruction” was John Cotton Dana’s response to an aloof museum field. Dana was concerned with the copious amounts of money being wasted on old oil paintings, unique curios and elaborate museum buildings. He believed that rather than touting benefactors and hiding their buildings in parks, museums should be used to serve the common man in a city’s center. My favorite quote of his was “[o]ne of the wider purposes of our museum is to make life better worth living… [and] encouraging all to discover possibilities of agreeable emotions in the contemplation of common things” (79). My question is whether the museum field today has achieved this ideal.

In a number of respects, the theories that Dana proposed have come true. His idea for city museums sounds remarkably like historic districts. His notion that libraries and museums should share their collections with each other is becoming increasingly common, as public libraries are creating local history rooms. Moreover, many museums are highlighting local artists in at least one of their galleries. Most importantly, the field of museum education has become more developed in the decades since he wrote this piece. I think Dana would be happy that from object labels to public programs, there has been a significantly greater emphasis on education. Even with these advances, however, I don’t think the museum field has quite achieved Dana’s goal of making the common man’s life more beautiful, or touting the beauty of everyday objects. There really aren’t many places that have utilized the broad plan of branch museums that Dana proposed. Arguably, the digital era can create those spaces of everyday beauty online. However, we are not touting the “pots and pans” (76). Maybe local historical societies are collecting the everyday objects and putting them on display, but increasing because of our materialistic society, these pots and pans are being deaccessioned. My fear is that only the finery will be left in this process. Just as Dana’s advice about collecting the early twentieth century’s version of the chest, the traveler’s trunk, was not heeded, we too are throwing away potentially important interpretative objects because of lack of space and the ubiquity of the entity. Perhaps, not until it is too late, will museums specialists realize that every museum refused to accept or deaccessioned the fork that was most widely used in the twenty-first century. That may sound asinine, but my point is there should be collection policies that are collaboratively checked so when our lives are being interpreted in 100 years, we don’t just end up being represented through tiaras and Ferraris. We (like our ancestors) should be interpreted in the future by the objects we used, not the ones that collect dust.