SFMOMA/Mario Botta/San Francisco

RPTA 182: Travel & Tourism

Museums as Flagships of Urban Development

You’ve heard their names. Guggenheim, Louvre, Tate, Getty, MOMA, Met, Orsay, Whitney. Museums immediately bring to mind a certain status. They are respectable, dignified and credible places and the people that go to them must be well educated and upstanding. Maybe even elite. And to be wealthy enough to truly support art and the arts is to live a life of privilege – money to give for the cause of what??? Paintings that you can’t even understand?

Yet, museums now are often the most visited destination in a city, and not just by the very wealthy. And sponsorship? It’s very likely to be corporate, not private donors. Those once financially fragile museum foundations are now so full of money that they can buy big named architects to design them gorgeous buildings even more spectacular than the art housed inside – at prices of several hundred million dollars. Doing this, of course, attracts even more tourists, which leads to praise from the businessmen and city council, and loads more criticism from the social scientists and academics
The Hamnett and Shoval article (along with the class notes and some very current online readings), will examine the United State’s most commonly built civic structure and most popular man-made tourist attraction. But first, what does the root word, muse, mean? It’s both noun and verb and how do those meanings play into what we think of as the modern (or postmodern) museum?

Terms:

Postmodern*Signature Architecture

FlagshipMuseumCultural Capital

Urban TourismBlockbuster Exhibit

Starchitect*Architourism*

Musemification/museumization*McGuggenization
* Not in article, but a related term

Questions:

  1. In looking then at pg. 221, what are the conclusions to the reason the museum has become so important to cities?
  2. What were two museums that began the push for cities to create “cultural credentials?”
  3. Tourists/visitors to the museum:
  4. Was prior knowledge of what you would see in a museum important to museum visitors and what did those outside of the elite think of museums?
  5. Do some of those images of the museum persist to this day, or have museums found a different place in society?
  6. Just on pg. 222, there are three distinct type of museums described based on the types of people that went, the funding, the architecture, the purpose and/or the types of exhibits. What are these three types? (Understand that you could break this down into many more groups, but to follow the writing of the article, it is important to use the authors’ stream of logic.)
  7. What are the four reasons museums have been seen as important in the urban tourism strategies of cities?
  8. Look at Table 12.1 and the power of the museum. Theme parks can also attract many visitors. Disneyland Paris, for example, pulls in about 10 million a year. Six Flags Great Adventure (outside of New York) attracts about 2.7 million. One reason you don’t see the parks on the list, however, is that they are located outside of the city – modern theme parks as you recall from RPTA 180, are a suburban phenomenon. Just in what you’ve read so far in this article up to pg. 225, why else might a city push for a new museum rather than a new theme park? (There are several reasons, some physical, some not.)
  9. It’s interesting to note that in these cities, look at New York for example, the top attractions that aren’t museums are architectural attractions. Is it a small wonder then that flagship museums with their signature architecture are huge tourists attractions?
  10. What is postmodernism (you’ll need to look this up somewhere else – it’s not defined in the article). The postmodern museum is somewhat related to this. It will be discussed in class.

Writing Tips:

  1. Notice that by pg. 221, the authors have already used a dozen sources to support their argument. You can tell, especially in how they refer to some of the works like Harvey’s, that they are being selective about what they pick from each article. That’s an effective way to use other sources to back their thesis. The paper you’ll write for this class has you do this from a very limited perspective. But realize it could be much more involved.
  2. Also notice that they start with a broad background of cities and how cities market themselves and how cities have reinvented themselves. Then, by pg. 221, they narrow the focus down to their topic of the museum – but by reading the first few pages, you see how it makes logical sense. (The title also works to their advantage so that when you get to pg. 211 and the prestige museum, you are prepared for that. That’s why your paper titles for this class or any other should be very relevant to the point you want to make. Calling a paper, “Final Paper” is dull and uninformative. Your title is the first opportunity to grab your audience, and if you’re clever, your title can make your main thesis apparent to the reader before she even reads the paper.)
  3. Look at pg. 223 and the first sentence. How many sources for that one piece of information do the author’s give? Lots. Your arguments are made stronger when several people back up the claims you make, and as you become better writers, you want to find things in not just one source, but several.

see:

- deYoung/Herzog+de Meuron/San Francisco -


Milwaukee Art Museum/Santiago Calatrava/Milwaukee