SESSION 3: Does the museum have a natural history? a national history? Paul Smith (Oxford University Museum of Natural History) Martin Roth (V&A) Chair: Liz Hide

Does the Museum Just Preserve the Museum?

Session 3: Paul Smith and Martin Roth

This is a series designed both to celebrate and to question what we do in museums and what museums do to us, and to ask what the future should hold for the museum and what the museum should hold for the future. We will explore the ways in which what museums do is enabled and limited by their history and the history of collecting, asking whether and how museums can use their collections to transcend time. We will explore the constraints placed on museums by national history and how they contest natural history. We will think about museums as installations and museums as laboratories. And we will ask how healthy is the pressure to make visitors love their experiences in museums. Have museums failed or succeeded if some people hate

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Does the Museum Just Preserve the Museum?