Why you should visit little museums.

Deep in Prague on an overcast December afternoon, I wandered the halls of a small, Romanesque Revivalist manor. When I entered, it looked like a communal office: half-café, half-reception, walls lined with chic brown shelves stacked with books that may or may not have been for sale (they were in Czech). The receptionist saw that I was a student right away (my age, or the fact that I was alone) and so, shedding my Prague-market fur hat, I entered free into the Muzeum Literatury to spend hours and hours learning about the making and unmaking of Czech literature. Their exhibition halls were small but cleverly laid, with little nooks you could settle into to listen to a poem, or to play around with an obsolete Czech typewriter.

This is not the kind of experience you’d have in, for example, the British Museum. My boyfriend ran back from one of its fabulously gilded halls, pushing past a lattice of visitors to get to the hall he’d left me in, cheeks flushed and eyes bright. “They’ve got a room full of Roman bronzes!” When I didn’t look adequately enthused, he added, conspiratorially, “there’s only, like, thirty of them left.” It felt like celebrity culture, in a way. You’re fed reproductions of art from almost every aspect of life: in billboard advertisements, household objects and, of course, online. When you finally come face to face with the Mona Lisa (for the two seconds you’re allowed at the front of the queue), the most visceral emotion available to you, if you’re not a cynic, is starstruckness. Museums are no longer the place you go to encounter art, but to recognise its original form, perhaps to feed a hunger you have to be close to something you love. You come away with nothing more than a signature — that is, fifty inception-like pictures of Mona’s (real!) face on a canopy of cell phones.

In the 1930s, art theorist John Dewey criticised American museums for severing art from its context, or the conditions of its own creation. He wrote that art which had been decontextualised, lined up neatly against a wall, or crammed into some kind of gilded hall, was so far away from the lived experience that fed its creation that it became deprived of its significance to life. The British Museum and the Louvre are undeniably beautiful: vast stone arches and marble figures dot the entrance hall, and famous objects abound. However, their objects impressed me as being vulgarly decontextualised. Assyrian frescoes were pasted on pastel walls, and the towering Balawat Gates now decorating Room 6a were tethered to their Neo-Assyrian Empire of 2,800 years ago by the tenuous thread of a brief placard. My boyfriend remarked that we’d seen half the statues on the Parthenon without ever setting foot in Greece. By displacing and decontextualising artefacts, colonial museums turn them into trinkets fetishised for their rarity or historical significance. At a gigantic ancient palace near Baghdad, the Balawat Gates would give the impression of the sublime, evoking the ancient history and art of your immediate surroundings. In a slightly beige room in London, they’re simply a collector’s edition object.

In the Muzeum Literatury, presented in both Czech and English, exhibitions were deeply rooted in their historical context. The lower ground floor was a tour through the development of Czech literature of the 19th century and the efforts to establish the identity of the new Czech nation and a unified literature, which for the first time was institutionalised in the Czechian tongue. Interesting and exciting debates that are centuries old and buried in academic archives are thus brought into light and accessibility. The function, meaning, and genetic history of objects were carefully exhibited. Here I encountered the famous, astonishing epic of Czech Romanticism, Karel Hynek Macha’s Maj, which is about doomed lovers, identity fraud, and a death row bandit known as “the terrible forest lord”. Also on display was the vibrant critical scene of the time, which spared Maj no little slap — J. S. Tomicek writes that the poem is “cinder…thrown from an extinct volcano” in which “we find nothing beautiful, invigorating, nothing poetic…” The Muzeum Literatury refocuses its objects as pieces of literary history, puts them in conversation with each other, with time, and with me, a windswept tourist fresh from the streets of modern Prague. Instead of an atmosphere of grandeur, it communicates ideas, which are more impressive anyway.

The exhibitions were not afraid to be text-heavy (it was a museum of literature, after all), and I found myself delighting in this, in its forcing me to stop and read, in the unphotogenicity of it all. The slowness of this experience was a sharp contrast to the busyness of larger institutions, with all the people rushing madly to and fro, trying to tick off the most famous artefacts from their bucket list in the space of a couple hours. In the Louvre, the statue of Nike kept to itself an entire wall and a rotating semicircle of tourists. Winged and headless, perched on the bow of a ship, it somehow glowered down at us, mysterious, lighthouse-like above a rippling crowd. When I was finally shoved next to the accompanying placard, I found that it was a strongly worded recommendation of which angle was best to look at, or photograph, the statue. The only contextual information given was the statue’s name. This, for me, constituted the problem: those in the know are rewarded the thrill of recognition, and those who aren’t are none the wiser, except for perhaps a picture with a marble set of tits.

But it’s not the fault of the visitors — it’s reasonable to want to photograph an artefact you’ve travelled hours to see, especially if standing next to it for more than a couple moments can obstruct a constant stream of people. Those looking to learn about the exhibitions would be thwarted by the disappointingly brief and small placards. Other forms of experiencing art fare a little better (one may, for example, cry before The Birth of Venus). Even then, there is something unsettling about the sheer amount of objects surrounding you, about the dragon’s hoard you find yourself in. The British Museum currently holds 8 million artefacts, and the Louvre holds over 500,000. How many of them are hidden away from sight? In the British Museum, 80,000 objects are on display, which means that 99% of the artefacts are in storage. Surely, neither artist nor audience are benefiting from this endless accumulation.

The big museum is not primarily educational, but rather a set of possessions shown off by the affluent. Entrance fares are simply upkeep of their capital. Is there a need for Roman marbles, Italian Renaissance paintings, Ancient Chinese pottery, Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist sculptures to be hoarded away in one grand palace-of-sorts presided over by Great Britannia? There have been requests from Egypt, Nigeria, Greece, Rapa Nui, and Aotearoa (from the Māori people, the British Museum holds 6000 human remains) to have objects repatriated. It feels strange to walk amongst a house of international treasures in the glistening heart of a previous empire. To read that an object was ‘discovered’ in an Indian city, ‘found’ by an Englishman in someone else’s homeland is to know that it was stolen, that it is a spoil of violent colonialism. Am I myself complicit by visiting the British Museum to see these artefacts? Am I participating in a celebration of the historical dehumanisation of countless peoples, the aftereffects of which can still be seen and felt today?

Little museums resist a needless accumulation of other people’s objects and offer, in its stead, immersion in local history, specificity of interest, and, because of that, a quiet, quaint space free of crowds. Other than learning about Czech literary history at the Muzeum Literatury, you could watch a 5-minute acoustic jazz breakdown of a comic-economic crisis at the Tulip Museum of Amsterdam, see Freud’s apartment (and his notorious, lavish psychoanalysis couch) in London. Each of these museums place their artefacts in the context in which they were created, socially, literally, and geographically. Their stories aren’t bookended by the walls of the museum itself, but spool out onto the stones outside, the familiar architecture, and, most importantly, into your memory. 

These little museums I was able to get a glimpse of weren’t just holding-places for objects, but acted as memorials for specific events (the Tulip crisis), people and the posterity of their work (Freud, his family, and the continuing school of psychoanalytic practice), and libraries for disciplinary interests (Czech national literary history). They became community spaces as well as museums, hosting talks by specialists, and organising educational programs for children and older students. Big museums do often offer social events and educational opportunities, and that, because of their wealth of resources, is often a strength. But the unique advantage that smaller, specialised museums have in this respect is a heightened sense of familiarity between participants, and I can imagine close-knit subcultures forming in such spaces.

There is much recent discourse surrounding the disappearance of Third Spaces — places other than the workplace or the home. Local, special-interest museums could play an integral role in protecting them, in bringing unlikely groups of people together, and actualising cultural niches offline and into romantic little pockets of community. That sun-coloured manor in Prague, alone but not aloof, allowed me a glimpse of just such a community in the veins of an otherwise bustling, anonymous city.