Is collecting nature or nurture? Some thoughts on a little “museum” of found objects I saw on vacation last week.

Museum directors of a certain stripe are fond of saying that collecting is a universal human impulse, especially among kids. The idea is that all kinds of people can relate to museums because everyone knows first-hand the thrill of gathering, organizing, comparing, and studying cool stuff — and it doesn’t matter whether the stuff in question is Renaissance sculpture or dead, soon-to-be-smelly sea stars that washed up in the tide.

Last week, at a hotel my family and I were staying at on St. Martin (I know, it’s a dog’s life), we noticed that a table near the beach had been covered by a collection of shells, corals, seaweeds, sea-glass, stones, and other eye-catching specimens. It seemed to belong to everyone and no one, and a security guard I asked told me that it had been there about two months. During our week there we added a few things to it and saw other guests (kids and adults) do the same. Everyone seemed to enjoy picking things up, touching them, rearranging. There was also some taking away, as my daughters and I discovered when the sea star we contributed was gone the next day. 

Still, I found it delightful. (My girls never got past their indignation that some people were treating it as a trading post.) In this age of participatory engagement and what Clay Shirky has called “the power of organizing without organizations,” here was a community collection that had arisen without rules or even communication but which mirrored (in a raw, messy way) some very old museological impulses: it was organized by form but in a pre-taxonomic way; it mixed biological and inorganic samples, marine and land species, the everyday and the exotic; it seemed to evolve over time as better specimens of the same sort or new categories altogether were added (and others were “deaccessioned” for communal or selfish reasons); and it was of course unlabeled, a piece of installation art as much as armchair science.

Art, science, and history museums are almost synonymous with their physical, institutional spaces and the conventions associated with them. Until recently, you could have said the same thing about classical music.

New Yorker music critic Alex Ross has been worried lately about the declines in classical music attendance revealed by various national studies. One of the bright spots he sees — in fact, one potential solution to the broader problem, if the experiment works — is Le Poisson Rouge, the downtown venue in which classical music is played in a jazz-club setting, with patrons drinking and eating and performers talking casually about their work between pieces, just like jazz, folk, and rock performers do.

This isn’t “lite” classical or pop-idol crossover. Serious, marquee-name musicians play at the club, and the programming runs from Bach to cutting-edge contemporary fare. No dumbing down here; just a different set of conventions around the music — conventions that appear to be more relevant, accessible, and appealing to some people than the stylized formality of most concert halls.

Poisson Rouge’s founders are part of a small but expanding circle of performers (like Matt Haimovitz), ensembles (like Eighth Blackbird) and others around the field who are exploring what can happen when you separate the “production” of classical music from the system of nonprofit institutions and foundations that have supported, housed, and controlled that production for the last hundred years or so.

And this, in turn, is something I think of as part of a broader trend toward the de-institutionalization of culture, despite the fact that a few institutions are trying it, too.

Re-reading Catcher in the Rye has me wondering about the delicate balance that museums have to strike between the new and the familiar.

Like many people, I’ve found myself thinking about the book since the death of JD Salinger last week. It’s been many years since I’ve read it, and the details are a little hazy in my mind. I remember Holden’s obsession with “phoniness” and that he has a kid sister named Phoebe. And one detail that’s always stuck in my mind: that he makes a visit to the American Museum of Natural History.

I paged through my copy of the book this morning and found the passage where Holden visits the museum. It’s a lovely moment and fun to re-read it now that thinking about museums is my full-time job. What really struck me, though, is why Holden likes the museum so much:
 

“The best thing, though, in that museum was that everything always stayed right where it was. Nobody'd move. You could go there a hundred thousand times, and that Eskimo would still be just finished catching those two fish, the birds would still be on their way south, the deers would still be drinking out of that water hole, with their pretty antlers and their pretty, skinny legs...”

Now, Holden’s psychological need for stability might be greater than most people’s. Nevertheless it got me thinking: I counsel museums about the need for new-ness in the visit experience far more often than the need for same-ness. In both qualitative and quantitative research, visitors (especially young adults) tell us that their desire to learn, see, or experience something new is a strong driver of their attendance at museums. So it’s natural to focus my thinking on how museums can keep the experience “fresh” so that the appeal of the new is a continual draw. But by taking that focus, have I under-valued the role of ritual and nostalgia in the museum experience?

Starbucks is “eschewing its cookie-cutter ways” and letting variation and independence bloom. If they can do it, how about museums and symphonies?

You may have heard that Starbucks, a brand almost synonymous with product consistency, has begun opening coffee shops that look and feel like independent, neighborhood coffeehouses. No Starbucks logo, and barely the Starbucks name. Instead, they’re called things like 15th Avenue Coffee and Tea, just like the local options. They buy small-batch beans and brew carefully to order, like the artisanal coffeehouses do. The design of each location is a one-off rather than a knock-off, expressive of the local scene.

Sure, this is an attempt to co-opt the entrepreneurial and anti-corporate energies that have fueled (along with all that caffeine) the resurgence of the local coffeehouse in the last decade or two. As a consumer I’m not sure I like the idea, and clearly I’m not alone.

But as a consultant who studies how people make choices that confirm their sense of themselves, their desired identity (like museum visiting and concertgoing) – well, I have to admire the insight of the Starbucks folks into a certain kind of twenty-first century mindset.