With the museum saga moving on a notch, and the "search for a museum boss" now in progress, those who actually wind up paying her/his salary have been left right out of the process yet again. What we see here is yet another public consultation process by edict and media release – in essence a repeat performance with past failures remaining in the script.The Aldermen at Launceston City Council seem to be sticking like glues to the assertion that the museum is owned and operated by Council. It is certainly operated by the Council but its "ownership" is open to debate . The collections are not by necessity owned by the Council. It is more realistic to understand them as being held in trust on behalf of Tasmanians and a range of others with something invested in these collections – intellectual property plus cultural property and capital in particular.
Given all that is invested in the QVMAG, the aspirations and understandings – self-serving understandings(?) – of unrepresentative bureaucrats need to be considered with great caution. Even if it hasn't been mentioned yet, world's best practice is a laudable aspiration but the question that needs to be asked is who is making what judgements and on whose behalf.
Since New Zealand/Aotearoa has been sited in a previous post, in the establishment of Te Papa’s, New Zealand's National Museum, some new benchmarks in museum practice have been established – and especially so in regard to museum governance. The bicultural cum cultural diversity paradigm that New Zealand's cultural institutions are now operated within provide exemplars worth emulating and well worth taking advice from ... click here to visit Te Papa online
1 comment:
What is really, really worrying is that the kind of people for instance, who say they know nothing about art and then say that they know what they like however and, and, and. One way or another they are usually in the wrong place at the wrong time.
These people are the kind that finds their way onto committees making decisions about all kinds of things they have no interest in really. It’s often worse than that when they have no knowledge of the subject either.
These people make a career out of getting on committees any way they can to make decisions for others and about others. Councils are populated by many of them.
After that they will do anything to get any kind of job that pays as much as they can persuade someone to pay them. Is that why they are called dilettantes?
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