What Value a Musingplace

The value of museums in a 21st Century context is questioned from various perspectives. From a purely economic rationalist point of view, commentators typically forward propositions that the funding allocated to musingplaces would be better spent more pragmatically. 

Conversely cultural elitists assume some kind of moral cum cultural high ground and talk about “the public good”. The commentary is simplistic but the polarisation it engenders far from simple. If it were there would be some standout vantage point from which to mount a more informed critical discourse but that is not the case. 

Assessing the value musingplaces – museums, art galleries and libraries – add to a community’s wellbeing is complex and multi-dimensional issue. Nonetheless, in current cultural realities musingplaces play somewhat different roles than they did for the greater part of the late 20th C. No longer are their audiences passive receivers of pre-masticated ideas that fit some cultural norm or other – sometimes blanded and blended ideas. 

Rather, new technologies are delivering participatory and engaging ways for musers to acquire new knowledge and develop better understandings of their world. Increasingly, ‘the world’ they are exploring is far off as they venture to places far from home and examine ‘home’ with more intensity.

As organisations, musingplaces have the ability to improve their efficiency and better target expenditure than is currently apparent given their outcomes. Critics advancing such arguments, may suggest that here is an opportunity to “underpin programming with the advances in technology, societal changes and an expectation of achieving efficiencies and value for money". Furthermore“increasingly eliminate the traditional arguments for public musingplaces".

But the critics don’t then go where this argument is seemingly headed. They seem unlikely to recommend a noble retreat from public funding of musingplaces.

That age old observation that when the whole village is starving it’s rather pointless to be hunting down a few mice. The point of the message here is one economic rationalists often cannot see.

Instead, they might well ask why the benefits deliverable via new technologies and increased competition have not translated into increased productivity or reduced the demand on the public purse.

They charge instead that public musingplaces have overlooked these benefits, new found as they are. Rather than embracing them for the benefit of their public all too often musingplaces' masters can be found resting on rather wilted laurels and wondering why the crowd isn't cheering them on. 

Interestingly, the economic rationalists continually choose to discount the values, and the dividends musingplaces offer to their Communities of Ownership & Interest – and can deliver on in fulsome ways. For instance, musingplaces are adjunct 'school rooms' where children have the opportunity to have the kind of haptic educative experience school rooms do not offer – not to mention the opportunity to think independently. 

In a different way dementia patients, Alzheimer sufferers, and their carers are being provided for in musingplaces in the USA – MoMA & The SPARK Project – with considerable dividends being delivered.

In the language of the efficiency dividend an annual reduction in funding for the overall running costs of an operation can be delivered as a consequence new technologies. Or alternatively musingplaces

might well deliver expanded dividends in new ways. Musingplaces might well be put on notice by proposing a benchmarking exercise that would attempt to estimate the size of this captured resource,  how it might be best employed and the dividends it has the potential to deliver. All this may well allow musingplaces to enter into future funding equations that impact on programs, the ways they are delivered and the ways they are measured. The notion that public musingplaces might continually, and automatically, becomes more productive is as yet a groundless assumption.

There may well be room for cutting public sector inputs in concert with the potential rate of increase in productivity without changing the level of output. Yet the urge to cut corners and apply a theory without testing it is something to be mindful of.

Nevertheless, it seems that musingplaces will need to undergo fundamental change and transform themselves from their 'cost centre' models into not-for-profit enterprises if they wish to fulfil their promise. Possibly even in some instances they will need to operate as quasi for-profit enterprises in line with the cultural and social paradigm shifts currently in play. 

The changes, and the increased audience reach, that new technologies offer might well allow the derived efficiency gains to benefit musingplace programs allowing them to deliver: •

1. Enhanced cultural dividends and new cultural opportunities for an expanded Community of Ownership and Interest; 
2. Value-adding in regard to employment, educational and professional development opportunities for the benefit of a diverse range of people internally and beyond the institution. 
3. Improved income opportunities for related enterprises such as tourism related enterprises –accommodation, restaurants, guided tours etc.

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