Page 97 - Museums, Media and Cultural Theory In Cultural and Media Studies

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and eventually introduced admission charges. The museum was becoming less
accessible across social classes, less a place one would go for repeat visits.
Design and marketing were expanding sectors, becoming increasingly powerful
and professionalized. This was happening elsewhere too: Tamami Fukuda dates
the emergence of professional museum design companies in Japan to the Osaka
World Exposition in 1972 (2003: 96–7). As in the United States earlier, the same
designers and companies were working in department stores and theme parks
as well as designing museum exhibitions.
Neurath and his colleagues had tried to invent clear and systematic ways
by which information could be democratically available. The museums of
the 1980s were under pressure to find ways to engage people’s attention, to
make exhibitions innovative and spectacular and to draw high visitor numbers.
By 1991, when the hard decision was made to contract out exhibition design
instead of having it produced internally, the inspired attempt to shake-up and
‘humanize’ a rather stagnant and complacent museum had become instead a
means to popularize museum-going. The aim was now to enable the museum to
compete in a marketplace of leisure attractions, with ever more expensive and
high-tech interactive exhibitionary environments.
Today, the fate of Neurath’s ideas can be seen in a range of different devel-
opments. One is the museum as news media. The most well-known examples of
this are the Newseum in Washington DC, and Actualité, part of the Cité des
Sciences et de l’Industrie in Paris, where a continual flow of information is
disseminated on large screens and through multimedia display. A number of
major museums now employ journalists and have in-house production units,
producing and editing news footage, as well as staging debates and broadcast-
ing/webcasting debates and talks. These techniques are seen as increasing
visitor participation and encouraging repeat visits, though they have also been
criticized for abandoning the in-depth and object-based approach of traditional
museums (Webb 2004: 22–5).
The notion of a serially produced or branch museum has also been realized in
our time, most famously in the Guggenheim ‘brand’. Solomon R. Guggenheim
was an art collector who founded the museum of the same name in New York,
built by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1959. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation
runs branch museums according to a franchise system, including museums in
Berlin and Venice, and, perhaps most famously, the Guggenheim Museum
Bilbao in the Basque country of Spain, which opened in October 1997. The
Basque government finances and owns the museum, but the Guggenheim Foun-
dation runs it. This initiative is intended to help regenerate the city of Bilbao
and the Basque region through tourism. According to the economist Beatriz
Plaza, between its opening in 1997 and January 2000, it generated a monthly
average of 17,156 visitors to the region. Analysis of statistics from hotels in this