Why are musingplaces changing

Most households will have someone living in it, or someone near to them, who will remember their museum, the one near where they lived, as a kind of chamber of curiosity. Typically a visit to the musingplace meant that 'the visitor' was passively receiving whatever it was the people running the place thought they should know about in order to 'live better in the world' – whatever that really meant. 

While we might nostalgically reminisce, the world has changed, sorry ... it is continually changing, and what once was, mostly, no longer cuts the mustard. 

Children once could be encouraged to spend a wet Sunday in a musingplace and lose the day wetting and slaking their curiosities. But no more and quite clearly so. Why go out on a wet day to muse when with a SMARTphone, ipad, laptop, whatever, in some cosy spot somewhere, the universe can be explored and from there? AND it doesn't even need to be Sunday! AND Wikipedia is free, authoritative and it is never shut when you have homework to do –  and mostly its pretty reliable. Quite a democratic and interesting place really!

CLICK HERE

The 'owners' of 16th C Wunderkammers/Kunstkammers used their musingplaces to demonstrate their authority and power – assert it even. Later Napoleon, the British, and other empire builders put musingplaces together to display their spoils of empire and to allow their subjects to muse upon their great power in deference to it. In a way, public musingplaces, in kind of a way, still employ this technique. 

Also, MONA's, owner, plausibly, uses his musingplace in Tasmania to demonstrate his prowess and draw a line in the sand. Indeed, his stoush with the tax office would seem to bear this out. It's not too long a bow to draw to say that often(?) musingplaces are political tools.

Nonetheless, increasingly 'the public', 'the great unwashed', tax payers et al, are increasingly encroaching and banging upon the door of the 'Ivory Tower' and demanding accommodation inside. No longer can those running musingplaces claim to be 'the authority'. Napoleon was not an authority on much except military matters and clearly he took advice from scholars et al in order to win. The world is full of experts outside musingplaces.

Then again, by all accounts it was unwise to disagree with Napoleon. Possibly it still is unwise to argue with musingplace gatekeepers if you think about political empire builders in musingplaces. But Napoleon met his Waterloo and ended his days in exile on Saint Helena. But he did give us access to The Louvre in not such a round about way.

So, its possible that musingplaces, public musingplaces, are not really changing all that much. Yet the technologies they employ, need to employ, are changing as are the expectations of their audiences who in turn are increasingly expecting more. That's the kind of change Ole Worm did not have to worry too much about.

Even if it was not Karl Marx who said "religion is the opium of the people" musingplaces are sometimes imagined as as secular temples of a kind. However, it seems that their priests are being defrocked and locks on the gates are becoming much easier to pick it seems.