We live in a museum age, writes Steven Conn in Do Museums Still Need
Objects? And indeed, at the turn of the twenty-first century, more
people are visiting museums than ever before. There are now over 17,500
accredited museums in the United States, averaging approximately 865
million visits a year, more than two million visits a day. New museums
have proliferated across the cultural landscape even as older ones have
undergone transformational additions: from the Museum of Modern Art and
the Morgan in New York to the High in Atlanta and the Getty in Los
Angeles. If the golden age of museum-building came a century ago, when
the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the American Museum of Natural History,
the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Field Museum of Natural History, and
others were created, then it is fair to say that in the last generation
we have witnessed a second golden age.
By closely observing the cultural, intellectual, and political roles
that museums play in contemporary society, while also delving deeply
into their institutional histories, historian Steven Conn demonstrates
that museums are no longer seen simply as houses for collections of
objects. Conn ranges across a wide variety of museum types--from art and
anthropology to science and commercial museums--asking questions about
the relationship between museums and knowledge, about the connection
between culture and politics, about the role of museums in representing
non-Western societies, and about public institutions and the changing
nature of their constituencies. Elegantly written and deeply researched,
Do Museums Still Need Objects? is essential reading for historians,
museum professionals, and those who love to visit museums.