Romanian Journal of Museums | no 1 / 2015 | CURATORSHIP

National Institute for Research and CulturalCULTURALĂ Training INSTITUTUL NAȚIONAL PENTRU CERCETARE ȘI FORMARE

Romanian R E V I S TJournal A M UofZ Museums E E L O R No N 1 /2015 2015 R.1/

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Editorial Board

- Raluca Bem Neamu,

- Dragoș Neamu,

- Dr. Virgil Ștefan Nițulescu

- Alexandra Ciocănel Graphic Design : Gheorghe Iosif Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Proin posuere Desktop publishing : Aurora Pădureanu efficitur tortor quis venenatis. Nam non dui elit. Donec congue ipsum et Address: scelerisqueDelavrancea volutpat. Street, Pellentesque neque non 57, Barbu Ștefănescu sector 1,interdum Bucharest,malesuada 011353 http://www.culturadata.ro/categorie-publicatii/revista-muzeelor/ elementum. Morbi in nunc et massa ullamcorper commodo rutrum at www.facebook.com/RevistaMuzeelor neque. Fusce placerat aliquet malesuada. Phasellus non © NATIONAL INSTITUTE FOR RESEARCH AND CULTURAL TRAINING ISSN 1220-1723 ISSN 1220-1723

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N R. 11// 2015 No 2015

Romanian Journal of Museums R E V I S T A

M U Z E E L O R

C U RCURATORSHIP A T O R I A T

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C U P R I N SContents

TABLE OF CONTENTS Foreword 5 Raluca 01Bem –Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur – Curatorship, participation 8 Adriana 12 Avram adipiscing elit. Proin posuere efficiturand management in redefining museums. For an interdisciplinary approach to the revision of the occupational standard of museographers.

19 tortor quis venenatis.

Nam non dui elit. Donec congue ipsum et scelerisque volutpat. Pellentesque interdum malesuada neque non elementum. Morbi

Helena Marinescu – Digitization of the museum heritage.

17 Angelica in nunc et massa ullam Online collections of the National Museum of Art of Romania

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corper commodo rutrum at neque. Fusce placerat aliquet malesuada.

Anca Phasellus Maria Pănoiu - For a naive Maricicaadipiscing and the elit. museum non Lorem ipsum dolormuseology: sit amet, consectetur

26 across the water

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Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur

Gheorghe Petre – Themes and forms of expression in recent exhibitiadipiscing elit. Proin efficitur the Slobozia Museum ofposuere Agriculture 42 ons of41 48 55

quis venenatis.

Namvision non duifor elit.an Donec congue ipsum et scelerisValer 43 Rus –tortor Arts & History.

A new old museum que volutpat. Pellentesque interdum malesuada neque non elementum. Morbi in nunc massa ullam What’s his use?

Alis Vasile – et The Curator:

48 Zbuchea corper commodo rutrum Fusce placerat aliqueton malesuada.

Alexandra – I visit.

I see.atI neque. understand.

Reflections the Phasellus non Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.

57 curator’s role in influencing the visitor

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FOREWORD PRIOR TO CHANGE Raluca Bem Neamu

Through this issue of the Romanian Journal of Museums new series, we are building a recent chapter in museology, which started long ago, but only now does it enter legality, through a linguistic “baptism”, by assuming a new occupation in museums. It is about the theme of this issue, “the Curatorship and the Curator” – new words in most of the museums, the latter designating an occupation that does not exist in the Classification of Occupations in Romania (COR), or in the list of occupational standards, and which is used and assumed exclusively in the environment of contemporary art galleries. In our country. As, otherwise, the European tradition has marked decades of history for this occupation. With notable differences associated to the geographical area where it is used, the meaning of the word shifts from “collection coordinator” to “the person who protects the collection of a museum”, or to “the creator of the exhibition”, who devises the exhibition concept and brings the exhibition to life, from A to Z. Our undertaking is to try to dismantle the myth that the museographer is “the chief cook and bottle washer”, ready to know the most intimate details of the works within the museum collection, ready to set up a top exhibition with part of the artworks, trained to know the field so well, that he would go precisely to museum X and borrow a certain work to complete an exceptional exhibition concept, having the project, time and risk management at his fingers and then, after having coordinated a great part of the museum’s team, he would set up the exhibition, and, right after that (or, ideally, even while creating the exhibition concept), restless and eager, he would make public polls, in order to know the public’s likes, expectations and information on the exhibition theme and finally, as we said, he would restlessly begin to develop museum-related education programmes for various categories of the public that enter the exhibition or are attracted to it. And, towards the end, he would obviously assess the collection, the exhibition and the educational programmes. This is the situation nowadays: the museographer is the chief cook and bottle washer, who must have all those great skills that appear in the occupational standard.

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The initiative of the National Institute for Research and Cultural Training (INCFC) has therefore started the process of inserting this occupation into the COR and identifying the skills a curator must have, respectively, in order for the museums and private art institutions to be able to use the term under legally-covered conditions. This long and (through its consequences) important process has started with a documentation on the meanings of the term in the specialised bibliography specific to regions with AngloSaxon and French tradition, and the structure we put forward is a synthesis adapted to the Romanian needs in the field.

Thus, the proposal we are forwarding is that occupational standard of “museographer” in existence at this moment in COR be divided in three distinct occupations, adapted to the museums’ new necessities: museographer, curator and museum education specialist. The first occupation will cover the skills referring to the management of a museum’s collection, the second – the management of exhibitions, while the museumrelated education specialist would acquire skills related to the research of the public and the valorisation of the museum’s exhibition through education. Through this division we nuance the skills specific to each employee working in the current position of museographer, we propose their specialisation in one of the three directions, being aware of the fact that the current occupational standard of museographer cannot be met by a single person, as the three sets of skills are very different and cannot be achieved by a single type of personality or professional.

The undertaking regarding this specialisation started, on one hand, from studying the European trends in the field and, on the other hand, from consulting experts and museum managers from Romania. The need to differentiate between occupations proved to be impending, and INCFC has taken this mission upon itself, in close collaboration with museums and professionals’ organisations in the field.

Our consultations with them took place at the end of 2015 and will continue until the completion of the administrative steps that will bring about the official change.

A first step in this process is the insertion of the two new occupations (curator and museum-related education specialist) into COR, followed by the identification of the skills they require and the modification of the skills for the occupation of museographer, by reducing and refining them.

The skills for each occupation that we approach in this article, after consultations, are the following:

Museographer 1. Appropriate knowledge and use of the basics of museology 1 2. Appropriate knowledge and use of basic specific legislation related to the museum heritage 3. Appropriate knowledge and use of the basic guidelines of preventive conservation 4. Management of museum collections – planning, organising, monitoring and evaluation 5. Developing the museum heritage, circulation of cultural goods.

6. Research, interpretation and exploitation of the museum collection 7. Assessing and drawing-up the documentation with a view to classifying the cultural goods 8. Cultural goods administration and record keeping 9. Digitizing the cultural heritage and using the digital databases * The first three skills are common to the three occupations

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Curator 1. Appropriate knowledge and use of the basics of museology 2. Appropriate knowledge and use of basic specific legislation related to the museum heritage 3. Appropriate knowledge and use of the basic guidelines of preventive conservation 4. Appropriate knowledge and use of techniques, methods and work instruments in the set up of the space and exploitation of the exhibit during the curatorial/exhibition set up process.

5. Research and interpretation of the cultural goods with the purpose to organise exhibitions.

6. Appropriate language knowledge and use in the specific field of the exhibition.

7. Identification of visitors’ needs and expectations when setting up exhibitions 8. Drawing up the exhibition / curatorial concept and project 9. Planning, organising and developing exhibition / curatorial projects 10. Evaluating and monitoring the exhibitions’ impact on the beneficiaries

Museum-related education specialist 1. Appropriate knowledge and use of the basics of museology 2. Appropriate knowledge and use of basic specific legislation related to the museum heritage 3. Appropriate knowledge and use of the basic guidelines of preventive conservation 4. Appropriate knowledge and use of the innovative, interactive methods and techniques, as well as of the good practice models in the process of museumrelated education 5. Identification of visitors’ needs and expectations for the development of the educational programmes 6. Research, interpretation and educational exploitation of the museum heritage 7. Planning, organising and developing museum-related education programmes 8. Drawing up the museum-related education project 9. Evaluating and monitoring the educational activities’ impact on the beneficiaries

As the specific skills regarding the museums’ public relations and marketing are no longer found in the required skills of the above occupations, there was a tendency to supplement them with the basics of public relations and marketing.

Depending on the interest shown by museum experts, the intention of the Museums’ Magazine board is to depict the process of changing the paradigm of the museum-related occupations, with emphasis on the two new proposed occupations: curator and museumrelated education specialist.

This process will be followed by INCFC’s taking on this modification by organising authorised courses for all the three occupations concerned. A first pilot course took place at the end of 2015, when, starting from the (would be) skills of the curator, lecturers, curators active

in museums and art galleries, as well as theoreticians in the field helped shaping a curriculum that makes sense for both categories of trainees. The pilot course helped coagulating the ideas and trends in the field, on one hand by adapting the international trends in museology to the Romanian museology, on the other hand at the level of those who exercise this occupation, but in an empirical, experimental manner, far from the requirements of the professional training.

We are waiting for suggestions from the museum experts community in order to nuance the skills and we thank to all those who have got involved in shaping them up to this moment. We hope that, on short and medium term, this undertaking shall result in a greater attention given to the public for whom, after all, the exhibitions are open.

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[Fig. 1. Museum (specialised) personnel participating in the process of setting up an exhibition. Source: author]

CURATORSHIP, PARTICIPATION AND MANAGEMENT IN REDEFINING MUSEUMS. FOR AN INTERDISCIPLINARY APPROACH TO THE REVISION OF THE OCCUPATIONAL STANDARD OF MUSEOGRAPHER ABSTRACT In the context of museographer standard being proposed for revision and division into three further areas of expertise, this article is intended to emphasise the need for an interdisciplinary approach to any change that would apply to the museographer profession as it is depicted today in Romania. The contribution proposes a stakeholder participatory approach to systemic change and tackles the issue from the point of view of project management (requirements documentation, change management), internal control and several legal aspects, put into perspective by international models and standardisation. Further analysis focuses on the standard`s inner overlapping of collections management, curatorship and edutainment practice and brings into discussion the way the museum professional, either in-house or outsourced, could and should engage in supporting the museum`s mission. The conclusions open a list of upsides and downsides to be taken into account when estimating the impact of the standard change and deciding which solution is feasible, necessary and opportune when leveraging the common denominator in beneficiaries` needs. A think tank is proposed to be constituted ad-hoc in order to ensure proper return on investment to advocacy efforts.

Key-words: participation, curatorship, standards 8

edutainment,

good

governance,

advocacy,

Any specialisation is a natural consequence of the complexity of labour, and, in order to be successful, any labour division depicted in the occupational standard, should, paradoxically, come with not merely a deep knowledge of curatorship techniques – theory and practice – but rather with an increase of the degree of understanding the interdisciplinarity governing the museum work.

Until recently – and on a wide scale – a museum was deemed established and functional only at the moment when it opened a „permanent” exhibition for the public, which says a lot about the museums’ internal vision itself, lacking balance and perspective on their own activities and the role they should play in the society. Thus, the exploitation by displaying - i.e. the exhibition is still considered the ultimate effort to valorise the collections.

From the exclusive orientation towards collections to the (equally unbalanced) exclusive orientation towards the public, the museums oscillate - in a process wherein they curate their own role in the end -between means and purpose, any extreme being just as damaging.

In this context, the initiative to clarify and give coherence to the occupational standard of museographer becomes not only beneficial, but also absolutely necessary.

Nowadays, the museographer is a specialised factotum, both by the nature of the assumed occupational standard, and due to the state of ambiguity in assigning secondary duties, which may be both beneficial and damaging, depending on the manner of application. There are not two museums similar in every way – either in terms of the specificity of the collections, the size, the environment of their activity (subordination hierarchy, capital city/ countryside etc.), or from the viewpoint of the organisational culture in particular.

Every museum is a… household, and every manager struggles to make it work as well as possible, under the circumstances. Every quite often the

museographer is a generic employee, in charge with marketing, museum-related education, guiding, as well as locking and unlocking the doors of the exhibitions. Sometimes, all these happen because of the small number of employees. Other times, the reasons are different.

The National Institute for Research and Cultural Training aims at reformulating and reconfiguring the occupational standard of museographer, by dividing it into three occupations: museographer, curator and museum-related education specialist, each of them with their own duties and skills.

Is their separation necessary? Is it feasible and opportune? And, if the answers are „yes”, „yes” and „yes”, which method should be used to intervene: by dividing the standard in three, in two, by re-writing it in promotion steps or through the more common, but sometimes efficient enough instrument called job description, by means of which, at present, numerous museographers cover - with their duties – only a part of the occupational standard, anyway?

This last argument should be, at any rate, necessary and sufficient for re-writing the standard and correcting the anomaly.

However, the appropriate manner of the „open heart intervention” on the standard in force is yet to be established. A radical intervention is called upon by radical benefits or a sine qua non situation. A less radical intervention results in a smaller impact, a narrower scope of changes, yet easier to manage and probably sufficient.

This article does not contribute with answers; it merely has the time to raise questions. It addresses the wide range of experts working in museums - either in-house or outsourced personnel – from cultural managers to project-based hired persons employed for a specific activity. We should emphasise from the start that this contribution comes to a debate not yet started. And there isn’t a more damaging debate than a nonexistent or superficial one, which might lead to… „Let’s revise it, I agree!”

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The revision project is… a project Consequently, it is normal to apply management methods and techniques. Among them, the identification of the real problem and the documentation on requirements through a participatory approach that should result in defining the objectives, as well as in the contents of the project and the manner of its implementation, the proposal and the acceptance of terms and the identification of any necessary resources, to name only several aspects. The initiative of INCFC as project promoter is natural and beneficial, considering its capacity to make a coherent situational analysis and to mobilise resources that would bring the project to a fruitful end – from know how to people and logistics.

Within this framework, the revision must not be perceived by the stakeholders and the parties concerned as a goal in itself, but as a step in an advocacy process. The final result must come as an answer and solution to a real problem of the beneficiaries, clearly stated, solving punctual problems, in manners that must also be defined and more widely supported. The result of the revision is, after all, a… text. A new occupational standard. Or more.

The implications of its implementation must however be anticipated as realistically as possible and the entire museum community must be prepared, at least emotionally…

Only an integrated project management approach can manage the successful definition and implementation of a new occupational standard (re-written or divided), by connecting the museum management to the internal environment (organisational culture – the „cultivated” version, mission, vision, programme objectives) and to the other activity fields and abilities, required for setting up an exhibition as a cultural product and service – conservator / restorer, museum-related education specialist, sociologist, designer, technician etc. – whether in-house or outsourced, as well as to the external environment, which involves the acceptance and incorporation of the values of the participatory approach in museums.

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Any wide-scale change must start from an extended analysis of the needs and from the assessment of the potential impact of its implementation. Therefore, the vast diversity of institutions that might be affected must be considered: local, county or national museums, museums with five or two hundred employees, history, ethnography, art, natural history museums etc.

As a matter of fact, the list of involved/concerned parties is wider and it includes not only the museum management personnel, specialised or operating in other areas of execution (in order for them to better understand and organise their work), but also the labour unions (which should have an active role in labour regulations), the credit officers interested in audit trails, the law-makers, who will have to accommodate the impact in other regulations, the private sector – the cultural and creative industries to which sequences of the exhibition process are outsourced etc.

It is obvious that the occupational standard, as described at the moment, does not keep up with the needs and trends of the contemporary museology.

Any exhibition is a project that should integrate the finished product – and should respond to the needs of the beneficiaries to the extent of the museum’s specific role within society.

A separation of the positions is delicate, like Siamese separations, and must be analysed with great attention aforehand, in order for the undertaking to prove its worthiness in terms of resource investment as far as the expected results are concerned, as well as in terms of feasibility, necessity and opportunity... by the book.

Such a change must be analysed from the viewpoint of the costs involved and of the benefits it brings.

Furthermore, we must ensure that the solutions to the problems do not create other deficiencies or new adjustments to be made, and that we did not change a problematic state of facts for another one. In other words, the management of change must be made on a national scale.

About internal control and other demons The role of a standard, be it an ISO, occupational or internal control standard, is to offer a common basis for analysis, prediction, planning, as well as for monitoring and assessment, control and audit. All of these – functions of the management. In other words, the standard is meant to make the manager’s life easier. How do we run the „farming” of the museum’s „yard”, in order to make sure it produces what we intended, in terms of quantity and quality?

Museums are different and, from one point onward, it is normal for them to differently incorporate and apply the different mandatory or recommended standards of the profession. All public institutions must comply with the internal control standards, but they choose by themselves what procedures they undertake or not. Up to a point, the procedures must be similar: heritage records, temporary exports and other activities – they all start from legal regulations, but, in terms of flow and segmentation, they are applied differently from one museum to another.

In some museums, the museographer follows all the exhibition process steps alone, and he may be perfectly capable to keep doing this. In other institutions, there is no choice. Or a more complex standard may be preferred, offering a greater flexibility for the management to assign duties and to make or unmake project teams. Revision through division must not eliminate the benefits that may result from cumulation.

When we have a position payroll, a set of general and annual objectives, a series of job descriptions for museographers, which may not fully cover the required duties and skills, as the resources to reach the objectives or these duties and skills overlap one another in certain fields or they overlap with other positions such as guide, researcher, stock keeper, PR

assistant or even technician / designer, which do or do not belong to the organisation chart, when the inertia, as well as – paradoxically – the instability tend to the maximum and, on top of all, an audit mission comes to verify how we apply the internal control, how do we untangle the threads? Do we do it relevantly, productively, or do we apply a momentary strategy to dodge and solve and blame the system’s lack of coherence? If a museum manager recognises himself in the above situation, even in part, he has not only the right, but also the obligation to get involved actively in bringing a little more light in the field or to delegate others to do it.

As far as the internal control is concerned, the revision of the standard (its division into three distinct standards not being the only plausible version) must justify itself from the viewpoint of a better compliance with the basic principles and objectives of the standard, as provided by the legislation in force1.

Moreover, the standard must be of real use for the manager who has a useful, handy instrument – a check-list saved somewhere directly or as a shortcut on the computer desktop, by means of which he ensures that he did not assign the same duties to several positions, that the subordinated personnel knows what to do and especially what not to do, that it is common knowledge who does what and that there are no confusions in terms.

A few additional notes regarding the curator, which, instead of clearing up the confusions in the field, rather increase the inadequacies, may include the dictionary definitions2, the Civil Code3 and the COR4 Classification.

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Order no. 400-2015 for the approval of the Code of the internal/managerial control of the public entities. Available at: http://lege5.ro/en/Gratuit/g4ydomzugq/ordinul-nr-400-2015-pentruaprobarea- codului-controlului-intern-managerial-al-entitatilor-publice 2 CURATÓR, curators, n. Person who exercises the rights and executes the obligations arising from curatorship. From Fr. curateur, Lat. curator. Source: DEX ‘09 (2009) (Romanian Explanatory Dictionary, second revised and improved edition, Academy of Romania –Iorgu Iordan Institute of Linguistics, Univers Enciclopedic Gold Publishing House, 2009 CURATÓR n. 1. Person who exercises the duties arising from a curatorship 2. Person who closes up a bankrupt company. 3. Manager of a memorial house (< Fr. curateur, lat. curator) Source: MDN ‘00 (2000) (The Great Dictionary of Neologisms, Marcu, Florin, Saeculum Publishing House, 2000) curátor s.m. Caretaker, person in charge [of a memorial house] ◊ „The curator of the memorial house tells me joyfully [...]” R.lit. 28 II 85 p. 24 (DN, DEX, DN3 – other meaning) Source: DCR2 (1997) (Dictionary of Recent Words, 2nd edition, Dimitrescu, Florica, Logos Publishing House, 1997) curator n. person assigned by Justice to watch the interests of an emancipated under-age person, to manage the assets of an adult declared incapable or to take care of a vacant inheritance.

Source: Șăineanu, 6th edition (1929) (Universal Dictionary of the Romanian Language, 6th edition, Șăineanu Lazăr, Scrisul Românesc S.A. Publishing House, 1929) – definitions available on dexonline.ro.

3 LAW no. 287 / 17th of July 2009 (republished, updated) on the Civil Code [Online] Available at: http://legeaz.net/noul-cod-civil 4 ORDER No. 1832/856/6.07 2011 on the approval of the Classification of Occupations in Romania – occupation level (six characters) [Online] Available at: http://www.mmuncii.ro/pub/ imagemanager/images/file/Legislatie/ORDINE/O1832-2011.pdf

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Thus, the curator is legally defined very clearly, by the Civil Code, where the curatorship and the curator are defined through dedicated articles - which excludes from the start the use of the term curator... as a stand-alone term, except maybe in the syntagm „museum curator” or in other type of reference which allows for disambiguation.

Furthermore, the Order no. 1832/856/6.07.2011 on the approval of the Classification of occupations in Romania – occupation level (six characters), instead of bringing clarifications, gives the final blow through some relevant passages which I shall take the freedom to quote massively, for illustration: Le rôle du curateur est bien indiqué dans la législation, plus précisément dans le Code Civil, avec des articles spécifiques dédiés au curatoriat et au curateur, et accompagnés des définitions afférentes. L’utilisation du mot curateur seul n’est pas possible. Ainsi, pour avoir une notion claire et éviter les ambigüités, l’utilisation des syntagmes tels que « curateur muséal » s’avère très utile.

262 Librarians, archivists and curators – Librarians, archivists and curators develop and maintain collections of the archives, libraries, museums, art galleries and similar institutions.

22621 Archivists and curators – Archivists and curators deal with collecting, assessing, ensuring the safe keeping and conservation of the contents of archives, of artefacts and recordings of historical, cultural, administrative and artistic interest. They plan, draw up and implement systems for the safe keeping of valuable recordings and historical documents: 262101 archivist; 262102 artworks and historical monuments conservator (higher education)); 262103 museographer; 262104 artworks and historical monuments restorer (higher education); 262105 archive conservator (higher education); 262106 archive restorer (higher education); 262107 cultural goods restorer (higher education).

In other words, the museographer is subscribed to the curator category, but the curator should also have other duties, such as: 343 Other specialists in the artistic, cultural and 5 INCFC [Online] Available at: http://www.culturadata.ro/bazele-muzeologiei/ 6 http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/curatorship 7 Ruge (2008), p 12.

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culinary field Other specialists in the artistic, cultural and culinary fields combine the creative abilities and technical and cultural knowledge in (...) preparing the exhibits for display, maintaining the collections within libraries and galleries, maintaining the recordings and cataloguing systems (...).

With the sub-class: 3433 Technicians in the field of art (exhibitions, museums and libraries) Technicians in the field of arts (exhibitions, museums and libraries) prepare artworks, samples and artefacts for collections, set up and display the exhibits in the galleries, (...)

According to the description of the course „Basics of Museology”, organised by INCFC, „the museographer is the specialist who sets up, develops, manages, researches, protects, evaluates and classifies the museum heritage. Museographers exploit the museum heritage through public display, aiming for the public’s knowledge, education and recreation”.5 The course is built around the Occupational Standard of Museographer, COR code 262103, subordinated to the category 2621 Archivists and curators.

Besides the necessary domestic disambiguation, a look into the neighbours’ yard, on a global level, may help clarify a standard, this undertaking being prone to produce an extra argument for extra efforts to adapt the form to the autochthonous substance.

A fast analysis of several standards suggests precisely a national management of the museum community, where the curator and the museographer are differently defined and set apart in terms of duties from case to case. As we cannot compare a national specificity to another, which would look like comparing two icebergs when only their tips are visible, the only line of recommendation worthy to be more closely considered is that of ICOM7, which separates the research/exploitation positions from those regarding the services for visitors. Thus, the separation of the curator from the museographer might be a functional, feasible and beneficial subdivision only if proven to be necessary in practice.

Today’s museographer thus covers, by exclusion, all those specialised objectives in the definition of the museum which are not covered by researchers or conservators/restorers. Besides the separation of the duties, the issue of the desynchronisation of the work sequences is also a touchy problem, pertaining to the operational procedure or to the system, which, in its turn, should find its justification and foundation within the occupational standard, too, which results in a set of prejudicial circular references. (We should mention that on the museums’ payroll we already have a specialisation of „museum educator”, too, which does not benefit from an occupational standard yet...).

In the absence of a specification of the proponents on the manner of outlining a view on the division of the curator’s and museographer’s duties so far, I can only put forward the hypothesis - which seems to me the most plausible, based also on the current curricula for the on-going professional training for curators8 – that the museographer is supposed to stay closer to the collections, the museum educator – closer to the public, while the curator remains somewhere in between (?)... Although, so far, the museographer has had to make a complete tour between the scientific records of the heritage (many times translated into the struggle with the bugs in

DocPat), the nobler curatorial conceptualisation (finalised at best with a thematic file in the scientific archive, preferably before the exhibition design) and the visible activity of interpretation / mediation of the heritage for the wide public – the intrinsic component of museum education (made more obvious by refreshing the basic exhibition through punctual educational projects).

At the moment, the mission to balance the museographer’s duties with his/her level of training, experience and motivation belongs to the direct manager. Depending on the general or specific objectives at the level of the institution or of a subdivision of the latter, the manager decides the periods of working more with the collections or with the public. An appropriate regulation and a transparent and coherent system of evaluation help immensely.

In the end it is all about the 3 E’s –efficiency, effectiveness, economy – and these are influenced by many other factors besides the inadequacy of the frame offered by the occupational standard. We must only ensure that the resources invested in the intervention on this standard can produce a good return on investment (ROI).

How can we solve this dilemma, while pretending at the same time that we ensure a real internal control?

How many make a... trio?

In order to better analyse how the three sectors of duties can and / or must be separated, it is relevant to discuss firstly those aspects that unite them and make them work together. In the science of biological systems, the function creates the organ to perform that function. Let us investigate whether ICOM’s dual separation would suit the current Romanian context or not.

Numerous museographers within smaller institutions perform all the three duties at once (besides a series of tasks pertaining to support processes: administration, PR/marketing, event planning, project management... which may weigh more than 50% of the monthly punctual tasks, to the detriment of specialised ones). Any of these duties could be and is recommended to be taken over by another type of personnel – advisors, stock keepers-custodians, guides, PR specialists.

In larger institutions, with more personnel, there

are people hired especially for the activity of museum-related education. Their position is that of museographer, advisor or museum educator, which may rightfully be considered an a priori segmentation and a lack of compliance with the occupational standard, as where there is no void there is a normative conglomeration, just for the sake of it.

More often than not, the employment of a museographer was made not out of management reasons pertaining to the separation of duties on internal control objectives or according to the wouldbe procedural activities, but out of more mundane reasons, such as the comfortable inertia of an organisation chart, the desire to pay the personnel perceived as important (just a little) more, precisely for the higher wage on the payroll, as compared to that of an advisor, in order to symbolically motivate the personnel or simply because, in a very small team, this position offers more in terms of covering

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all the duties to be accomplished.

Not integrating one of the key positions of the museum at the moment of an exhibition set up may be not only prejudicial, but also disastrous, both for the process and for the result. The lack of close cooperation during the initial phases within the team – mandatorily made from the museographer-researcher, the curator-interpreter, the museum educator-communicator (more in one at the moment), the conservator-restorer and nonspecialised personnel – and possibly coordinated by an ad hoc project manager (often one of the above or their direct manager), may result in re-doing the work, exceeding the budget or deadline, as well as in the team›s frustration and demoralisation, weak results in the cultural service/product, missing the objectives and the mission on a longer term. Just imagine the case where, at the moment of the thematic project implementation, the recentlyconsulted conservator re-writes half the project out of reasons that pertain to non-compliance with the norms of conservation in display or does not give the green light to an open-air programme out of reasons of the monument›s integrity... Or the more subtle cases – but unfortunately just as numerous – where, after setting up the exhibition, possibly even after the opening, the museum educator is called and required to create programmes to match the product, because exhibitions address the wide public, anyway, and he only has to make further segmentations by himself... and yes, it›s just as good to invite the schools in the neighbourhood, the youth are anyway the favourite of the idea of education, and the segmentation is easy and matches the investment... All these are mistakes which reflect directly in the quality of the finished product.

In order to be relevant and to generate a real impact, museums propose / may propose sensitive reflection subjects for the wide public. In order to do this, curatorship becomes a critical activity, with related «soft» abilities that complete the picture of a museum expert›s abilities and skills, and this is a challenge for the activity of the manager, who must integrate any types of processes and resources and deliver... quality.

The curator would have the main function to 14

integrate in the exhibition process the curatorial concept proposed, «negotiated» with the rest of the team and assumed by everyone, each member being all-important: specialised personnel – who know the collection (the museographer in charge with keeping records, if different from the curator), the conservator (who also is oftentimes the person in charge with the stock-keeping of the collection, therefore an additional responsibility), the museum educator. In other words, we are speaking about a project manager and a project team.

Education is communication. It is an intrinsic function of the museum-related activity and we cannot ignore it, even if we wanted. It is simply there and it takes place every second a visitor enters a museum space (be it real, virtual... or taking the form a poster or a publication). Although there is significant focus on how the museum education programmes and projects are built and developed (and we do not refer here to pedagogy, which would be reduced to a kind of meta-education: education about education within a museum...), education is simply There. Because of this, it all the more involves the responsibility of the entire museum personnel, beyond the specialist who plans-manages-evaluates this component in the best possible way and for the best quantitative/qualitative results.

Today›s museographer in charge with the museumrelated education meets all the conditions to become a position by itself – heritage interpreter, or a position to be integrated within the support processes such as marketing or PR/event planning, as an advisor. Their main mission would be to «translate» the scientific, overly specialised language, into an accessible one, intended for the life-long learning. A museum educator should analyse, plan, select and apply those learning strategies and techniques that would make the heritage more accessible for the public, should make the visitors reflect beyond the moment of the visit so that a satisfaction perceived as a real benefit should stay with them.

Last, but not least, in order to better identify and analyse the deficiencies that occur within a cumulated, too complex a standard, like the current one, we may raise the problem of outsourcing – a test that functions every time! Legally speaking, any

other contract forms besides the Individual Work Contract (IWC) has no standard, recommendation or norm to serve as a framework, which makes the perproject specification of museographer or museum educator service-providing requirements all the more difficult. In other words, it is all about what we keep in-house and what we outsource. Thus, we discover that the delineations are sublime, but... they are totally absent and subject to interpretations hard to be laid down in a product specification.

A simplistic approach would require the museographer employed by the museum to be the person who provides the basic information, pertaining to the record-keeping of the collections, for the exhibition/curatorial process, on the basis of a

concept built by the curator, who, in his turn, should respond to the needs of the public›s education, identified by the museum educator. In fact, in real life, the process cannot be segmented in relations of cause-effect or stimulus-response, and it is not only normal, but also absolutely necessary that there should occur reiterations, returns, negotiations of meanings and feasibility between these members of the team (with the occupations we have in view for the revision of the standard: museographer, curator and museum-related education specialist) and the rest of the specialists cooperating to complete an exhibition project and make it successful (conservator, designer, technician, administrator, PR etc.).

Conclusions Since trying to clarify things only increases the fuzziness, a think-tank, a conceptualisation and advocacy hub is inherently required. The function of this group would be to evaluate the current practices, to identify and consult the stakeholders, to explore new methods to improve the processes that yield the museums› results.

A list of pros and cons for the division – or even the re-writing – of the standard may be opened further.

The advantages of separating the standard into three occupations might include: • a better distribution of the roles within a team, provided that they understand they should further cooperate closely; • the specialisation and division of labour within a framework already too complex and offering too much, which would automatically lead to an increase of productivity, as prosaic as it may seem in the elitist cultural environment of museums.

The disadvantages of the division / re-writing might include: • often insufficient personnel and teams to small to divide the tasks, which results in a cumulation of positions (whatever their name); • raising a false problem, as many well-trained and experienced specialists already have the capacity to brilliantly cope with the challenges of

integrating the three major sets of duties; • the practical problem or reassigning/reemploying the existent personnel on the position of museographer.

• the disparity between the specifications of the job descriptions, the new occupational standard and the availability/adequacy of the existent human resources.

Which way the balance shall tip – for or against – remains to be seen. The certain thing is that the purpose is for all the parties to have something to gain, otherwise a non-intervention might be more beneficial.

A possible revision, amongst many other options, would involve performing the museographer functions stipulated in the current occupational standard, but with a distinction between the promotion steps, which would involve supplemental duties of curatorship and / or museum-related education. Currently, the distinction of the museographer›s duties is made by means of the job description, randomly – not to say preferentially – related to the promotion degree, and the deficiencies of this habit must be analysed and straightened.

Moreover, the advocacy capacity of the sector is precarious, as expected under these conditions of unavailability and scarcity of resources of any kind 15

(human, financial, time resources); therefore it is all the more worthy to be wisely led towards directions of importance and impact, perceived as priorities by the majority of the cultural operators in the museum field. Furthermore, a participatory undertaking offers legitimacy, representativeness, and often lays at the basis of good governance.

Because of all these reasons, a wide debate within the sector and a wide consultation with the parties involved/concerned are necessary. We wish that our

undertakings should have an echo and we welcome this special issue of this magazine – an important means of intra-professional communication – dedicated to this theme for debate. Like in any other field, the risk that a quiet majority should give way to an active minority is significant. I hope that this article may offer a point of view, some nuances that might contribute to the identification or to the building of consensus and, in the end, to the better of the museum community that we all desire.

Web references (consulted on the 1st of November, 2015): INCFC. n.d. Basics of Museology – Museographer.

[Online] Available at: http://www.culturadata.ro/ bazele- muzeologiei/ INCFC. n.d. Curator [Online] Available at: http:// www.culturadata.ro/curs-curator/ Dexonline. ro. n.d. Curator. [Online] Available at: https://dexonline.ro/definitie/curator Thefreedictionary. com. n.d. Curatorship. [Online] Available at: http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary. com/curatorship Ruge, Angelika (ed.). 2008. Museum Professions – A European Frame of Reference. [Online] Available at: http://icom.museum/fileadmin/user_upload/ pdf/ professions/frame_of_reference_2008.pdf Order no. 400/2015 on the approval of the Code of internal/managerial control of public entities, 2015. [Online] Available at: http://lege5.ro/en/

Gratuit/g4ydomzugq/ordinul-nr-400-2015- pentruaprobarea-codului-controlului-intern- managerialal-entitatilor-publice Law no. 287/17.07.2009 (republished, updated) on the Civil Code. Issuer: Parliament of Romania.

Published in the Official Journal no. 505/15.07.2011.

Date of effect: 1st of October 2011 [Online] Available at: http://legeaz.net/noul-cod- civil Order no. 1832/856/6.07.2011 on the approval of the Classification of Occupations in Romania – Ministry of Labour, Family and Social Protection; National Institute of Statistics No. 856 / 11.07.2011.

Published in the Official Journal no. 561/08.08.2011 [Online] Available at: http://www.mmuncii.ro/pub/ imagemanager/images/file/Legislatie/ORDINE/ O1832-2011.pdf

General references: ICOM. n.d. Professions. [Online] Available at: http:// icom.museum/professional-standards/professions/

Adriana Avram Head of Department, Universal Ethnography Museum „Franz Binder” CNM ASTRA Sibiu, Str. Piaţa Mică nr. 11 adriana.avram@muzeulastra.com

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DIGITIZATION OF THE MUSEUM HERITAGE The Online Collections of the National Museum of Art of Romania

ABSTRACT* This study proposes a theoretical investigation on the digitization of artworks, placed in the framework of the relationship between technology, museums and the contemporary art world. The new information and communication technologies are changing the social and cultural landscape, bringing under discussion the functions of museums, museology and art, as well as the latter’s representation in the public sphere. From museum sites to online museums and the more recent virtual tours, the Internet proves to be a useful tool for art and museums, for trustees, experts, museographers, who are hence able to envisage new forms of cooperation between the exhibition creators and the visitors – users. The virtual tour is an interactive tool allowing a 360 degrees view of a museum space or an exhibition, the online collections of the Romanian National Art Museum being an example.

KEY-WORDS: digitization, art, internet, virtual tours, new information and communication technologies * Communication within the 16th Forum of the Trans-Mediterranean Network and within the Conference „Comprendre la transition III. Locul tehnicii și al tehnologiilor în practicile sociale și interculturale” („Comprendre la transition III. The place of technics and technologies in the social and intercultural practices), Bucharest, 1-3 July 2015, the Faculty of Journalism and Communication Sciences.

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This study is a theoretical reflection on what the phenomenon of artworks’ digitization means, within the framework of the relationship between technology, museums and the contemporary art world. The presence of museums in the World Wide Web is a process that has been developing in the last years, from the online museum, electronic museum, hyper-museum, digital museum, cyber-museum, to the virtual tours, this translation into the Internet’s space and ideology being close to the museum with no walls, as envisioned by Malraux1. The cyber-space, as a network and as a communication and dissemination medium, queries the heritage preoccupations of museologists, of curators, in close relation with the process of culture democratisation and with the institutional cultural policies.

Thus, the online technologies are more and more present in the museum-related experience, as the visitors virtually connect themselves to the collections, and the museum’s virtualisation may be an opportunity for the art world, from a new type of museography to new museum-related experiences, being responsible for the contemporary cultural mutations2. In order to analyse this phenomenon in Romania, we chose the online tour of the Romanian National Art Museum and we conducted interviews with the initiator of this virtual tour, Emilian Săvescu and with a Romanian plastic artist, Vlad Ciobanu.

The Art Museum in the Era of Virtuality The art museum has as main function the activity of preserving the works registered in the movable heritage3. The establishment of the museum means the detachment of art from the life context, art for art’s sake4, but the museum is also a „phantasmal community” in the 19th century Europe – the material elements of the past being deemed indices, witnesses, as well as ways to learn; by contributing to the order of history5, museums become intellectual and social environments, bearing a patriotic conscience. Towards the end of the 20th century, museums become places of artistic and patrimonial6 difference and today they continue to be privileged spaces of building the „meanings of the material past7”, as well as the main frames to exhibit contemporary art, being, from this point of view, the ideal exhibitions wherein we find the authorised narratives9.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

Ever since 1991 (when the World Wide Web appeared, according to CERN), there has been talk about the digital democracy, the cyber-citizenship, the society of knowledge/information10, as well as about the digital divide11. Dominique Poulot highlights that „the assertion of the human rights will make us consider the access to artworks as a legitimate request, which must be satisfied efficiently and equitably”12. Technology participates in the creation of „new spaces of economic and cultural creativity and production”13, in a context wherein a shift from industrial systems to economies of knowledge is made. „Within this framework, it is considered that the new information and communication technologies and the possibilities of interdisciplinary collaboration have generated a change in the museums’ behaviour, more precisely a focus on the impact of the institution as regards the individuals and the communities14”.

Malraux (1965) Levy (2001), p. 44 In Romania, the national movable cultural heritage is regulated by the Law no. 182/2000 on the protection of the national mobile cultural heritage, republished in 2008.

Gadamer (1992), p. 40 Nora P. (1972) Poulot (2005), p. 141 De Certeau in Le Goff & Nora (1974), p. 57 O’Doherty (1986) [Artforum, 1976] Poinsot (1999) Jeanneret (2005), p. 66-76 Perriault (2002) Poulot (1988), p. 332-341 Mathien (2005), p. 7 Striepe (2013) p. 207-217

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Within this social, informational and technological context15, the new forms of virtual communication which the Internet facilitates prove to be interesting instruments for museums, allowing the experts, museographers and curators to keep up with the present and resulting in new forms of cooperation between the exhibition creators and visitors, included in the same cultural sphere by means of a new technological support for communication16. Technology can not only generate an increase of visitors’ interest in art, but also the enhancement of the wide public’s knowledge in this field: Creators increasingly resort to technological instruments in order to facilitate the understanding, which should result in a behaviour different from the physical visit to a museum. In fact, this is about a harnessing factor for the museum’s popularity, from a marketing perspective, for the increase of museum attendance by a wider public, different from the regular one (researchers, pupils, students, neophytes, art amateurs, tourists etc.) 17.

The current discussions on the technological update and computerisation highlight the problems of posthumanism, which becomes one of the explanatory theories of the virtuality and cyber culture „through the assertion of the de-corporality and immateriality of information”18. Anita Hammer stated that „the activities in the cyberspace are somewhere between social and ritual or aesthetics and can be defined as ‚reflexive’, because they take place at the boundaries between the individual and the community, through collective representations”19. The theorists of postmodernism consider that „the virtual reality can be understood as a reality mediated by the information and communication technologies, while the virtualisation process is a creative exploitation of the multiple valences of humankind [...] technicalness is not an intrinsic prolongation of corporality or imagination, it is not completely subsumed to humankind, but represents a mediated relationship of the humankind with the technical side, materialising itself as a means, not as an autonomous way of being”20.

Art and Edutainment The phenomenon of online museums leads to new ways of dissemination, as no longer does the public go to the museum, but the museum comes to the public21 – the collective presence when visiting exhibitions is substituted by the individual, solitary consultation from a distance. Although in the beginning there was fear that, by making the collections accessible online, the visitors would stop going physically to museums, it seems that the virtualisation of museums has other functions, corresponds to new uses, stimulating the very cultural consumption. Moreover, these forms of online presentation „make the visitors’ relationship with the works more intimate”22, due to the greater closeness and possibility of selecting the content and route. More than anything, there is the interest in the 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

artwork’s circulation, because, as far as art is concerned, „ignorance is more destructive than knowledge, and this availability of the artwork is preferable to the disappearance of the work23”.

It is considered that the mediation of the Internet allows the development of a perspective which combines the production of education-oriented information with ludic manners of display, the so-called edutainment24, which facilitates the learning of complex notions.

This way, the virtual museum makes art accessible to the young audience (teens), who are trapped in the popular culture25. As Deborah Schwartz explains, given that „youngsters are consumers and producers of new media, it is important to aim for the evolution of the

Striepe (2013) p. 207-217 Rotaru (2010), p. 12 Grancher (2003) [online] Ibidem Rotaru (2010), p. 36 Hammer (2004), p. 260-268 Rotaru (2010), p. 22 Quitté (2009) Ory-Lavolée (2002) [online] Arsenault (2003) Bernier (2001) Hill, Douillette (2014), p. 250-261

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youth-oriented programmes. Through the participation of this media-saturated generation we shall see how much of the museum experience will be shaped by the Internet”26. Teenagers are deemed the most under-represented age category from the viewpoint of

museum attendance27, but they become representative for the studies on visiting practices, as, when they become grown-ups, „the long-term prospects of museums and their relationship with the community may reflect in the level of audience engagement28.

Art resources in the online environment The appearance of museums within the virtual space has generated pro and con reactions from the beginning. Some see this environment as „a grave of arts”29, arguing that it results in a misrepresentation of art, as it „assigns a transitory substance to the objects”30; others speak about a technological populism, meant to attract the young public (the gadget effect) or about the McDonaldization of culture, as the visitor/user seeks rather a sensation than an aesthetical reflection.

Among the advantages offered by online museums there are: the democratisation of culture for a wide public, the accessibility off the working hours and the liberation from space limitations: ...as an institution of the memory, the museum associates digital substitutes of collections and archives, of libraries and museums, in an interactive environment, and it allows the access to content regardless of the nature of the institution. The memory institution aims at keeping the contents for the future generations and at promoting its use and management in time. The virtual museum is neither a rival, nor a threat to the „brick and cement” museum, as its digital nature does not allow it to present the real objects, unlike the traditional museum. However, it can be a continuation of the ideas and concepts of the collections in the cyberspace, and thus it can reveal the quintessence of the museum. In parallel, the virtual museum reaches visitors who will never have the possibility to physically go to a certain museum31.

Werner Schweibenz identifie les catégories suivantes: le musée-brochure (proposant des informations essentielles sur le musée); le musée-contenu (banque de données des collections muséales); le musée pédagogique (proposant différents points d’accès à ses 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33

Schwartz (2005) Striepe (2013), p. 207-217 Ibidem Doray, Bibaud (1999) Bernier (2001) Schweibenz (2004) Ibidem Grancher (2003) [online]

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visiteurs virtuels, selon leur âge, leur environnement et leur niveau de connaissances); le musée virtuel (qui n’a pas toujours d’équivalent dans le monde réel, il contient des collections numérisées)32.

The virtual museum was defined as „a collection of digitized objects, articulated and composed from various supports which, through connectivity and multiaccess, allows the transcendence of traditional ways of communication and interaction with the visitor...; does not have a real place or space, and its exhibits, as well as its related information, can be disseminated all over the world33”.

Among the sites containing databases with artwork images, there are: Virtual Library Museum Page (vlmp. museophile.com), ARTHLink (witcombe.sbc.edu/ ARTHLinks.html), Art webgraphie (bump. fundp.ac.be/ art), Web Gallery of Art (wga.hu), Artcyclopedia. com, Base Joconde (culture. gouv.fr/documentation/ joconde), Corbis (pro. corbis.com), Musenor.com, Le Louvre (louvre.fr); Virtual Guggenheim Museum (guggenheim.org/ exhibitions/virtual); GALLERY 9 (walkerart.org/ gallery9/), Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain (fondation.cartier.fr), MOMA.org, Tate Gallery (tate. org.uk/webart), NARCISSE, Network of Art Research Computer Image SystemS in Europe (culture. gouv.fr/ documentation/lrmf/pres.htm).

The virtual tours of the world’s greatest museums can be viewed on http://www.googleartproject.com, a platform that presents real images from the museums like MoMA (New York), Versailles Palace, Van Gogh Museum (Amsterdam), Hermitage Museum (Sankt Petersburg), Tate Britain (London), Alte Nationalgalerie (Berlin) etc.

An exhibition in the virtual reality may totally or partially represent places of art display, placing the exhibits spatially or metaphorically (according to an architectural or museological concept); there may be thematic virtual exhibitions, transposed from reality or created for the virtual space: It presents the exhibits in a light through which the specialists (restorers, art historians, professional artists) may have access to commonly inaccessible characteristics of the object (such as: brushing, surface treatment, materiality, primer coating type), as in the real space the exhibits are protected in various ways. The virtual tour may be a very good replacement for albums. It has the extra feature to make the dimensional relation between objects intelligible and to make available the exhibit’s dimensional aspect for the (virtual) viewer. The albums had no other chance but to have the dimensions written under the photo.

As a personal memory, I was shocked when I first saw Theodor Gericault’s “Raft of the Medusa” at the Louvre. Up to that moment, I had thought that it was a painting of regular size (2 m x 2 m maximum) – I remember the shock I felt when I saw that this painting is sized 7 m x 5 m... or Veronese’s “Wedding of Canaan”, 10 m x 7 m. Besides indoors museums,

there are museums that thrived in the second half of the 19th century, open-air museums of monumental ceramics and sculpture, results of creation camps. In Romania, the Sculpture Camp from Măgura Buzăului is emblematic and notorious. Similar examples are the Monumental Ceramics Camp from Medgidia, mostly destroyed because of the authorities’ negligence, the Commemorative Sculpture Camp from Oarba de Mureş or the Sculpture Camp Căsoaia Arad, to name only the important ones. The virtualisation of these open-air museums would create the necessary landmarks to follow the evolution in time and to perform the conservation and restoration interventions when necessary. They are all the more vulnerable as they are exposed to the elements and sometimes to the reckless acts of people. Sometimes, during the course of history, natural earthquakes (sic!) occur, with serious consequences on the museums, such as the bombings of the World Wars I and II, the reckless acts taking place right now in the Near East, the destruction of the National Library and of the National Art Museum during the events of 1989. Keeping the art object in a digital form can also be a kind of protection. [interview with Vlad Ciobanu, plastic artist, November 2015].

The Virtual Tour of the Romanian National Art Museum At European level, the project “Europeana, Europe’s digital archive” was launched in 2008 (euro- peana. eu/portal). According to the report The New Renaissance, of the „Comité des Sages, Reflection group on bringing Europe’s cultural heritage online”, which can be found on the site of the National Network of Romanian Museums (muzee.org/ romania/final-report-cdS3.pdf): Digitization is more than a technical option, it is a moral obligation. In times when more and more cultural goods are consumed online, when screens and digital devices are becoming ubiquitous, it is crucial that we bring culture online [...]. If we don’t pursue this task, we

run the risk of progressively eroding and losing what has been the foundation of European countries and civilisation in the last centuries.34 (Brussels, the 10th of January, 2011, i. 2.3.2) In Romania, the partner of this project is CIMEC (the Collective of the Cultural Memory Institute), participant both in the EDLnet project and in the Europeana v.1.0 - E-ContentPlus, 2009 – 2010. The site e-patrimoniu.ro, a project belonging to the National Heritage Institute (patrimoniu.gov.ro) is a portal of information on Romania’s museums. For instance, there are links to the “museum blogosphere”, sites and blogs of the museums, or to the Guide of Romanian Museums (http:// ghidulmuzeelor.cimec.

34 The New Renaissance, Report of the Comite des Sages on bringing Europe’s Cultural Heritage Online (2011) [online]

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ro). According to this platform (e-patrimoniu.ro), 109 Romanian museums have virtual tours (http:// www.cimec.ro/muzee/muzee- cu-tur-virtual.html), 14 of which being art museums.

The virtual tour is a way to attract various categories of public and tourists, and puts the museum on the new marketisation track35, which is reflected, for example, in the press release on the TripAdvisor excellence certificate, awarded to the Romanian National Art Museum (MNAR) in 2014, based on the visitors’ reviews:

and launched publicly in April 2014. According to the initiator of the project of virtualisation of the Romanian National Art Museum’s collections, visual artist Emilian Săvescu, a virtual tour can be useful in presenting and promoting a museum or exhibition, in the archiving activity, as well as in research and restoration: The virtual tour does not seem an act of creation to me. It seems to me it is rather an accurate recording of reality, like a service [...] I see it like a

MNAR is unfolding a rich exhibition activity and gives a growing importance to the diversification of the activities for the public. Thus, in 2014, at the museum’s headquarters 210 programmes for schools, families and teenagers and 107 programmes for adults were organised and a total of 16,182 persons participated in these programmes. The endeavour to make the institution accessible for all the categories of the public also included launching the virtual tours, accessible for free on the site of the museum.

(MNAR Press release [online]).

Fig. 1. Museums and galleries included in the virtual tour of the Romanian National Art Museum (screen capture www.mnart.arts.ro)

Besides the permanent galleries of MNAR (the Old Romanian Art Gallery, the Modern Romanian Art Gallery and the European Art Gallery), the tours of the museum include MNAR’s satellitemuseums – the Art Collections Museum, the “K.H. Zambaccian” Museum and the “Theodor Pallady” Museum.

A virtual tour falls into the category of the technosemiotic devices that exist in the online space36, a hypertext, a virtual architecture or world, which is a an interactive computer model in three dimensions that can be explored with the mouse or with a keyboard command, bringing on the idea of interactivity.

The virtual tour of the Romanian National Art Museum is a project of the Imago Factory company for MNAR, carried out in the period 2012-2014 35 Lipovetsky, Serroy (2013), p. 395 36 Souchier, Jeanneret, Le Marec (2003), p. 118 37 Sauvageot (1994), p. 221 37 Sauvageot (1994), p. 221

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great instrument for an artist and for a museum to show the exhibition exactly as it was [...] The tour is an accurate representation of the exhibition, it is like you take a stroll in the exhibition again.

(Interview with Emilian Săvescu, imagofactory.ro, May 2015) It is considered that the new ways of figuring and spatializing allowed by the digital technology and images, are based on the interactivity “through the figurative form: this is an action upon something, nearly felt, [...] a sensorial and at the same time cognitive exploration”37. The set up of a virtual tour depends on the manner texts and buttons are displayed on the screen, included in a virtual route/ itinerary.

First of all, virtual tours represent the concept of “virtual spatiality”, as in the first place the visit to a museum means “consuming spaces, absorbing places”38.

The computer interface is a different frame, it is framed off from other activities39, whether it is a mirror, a window or a portal40, the framing is clearly defined and the reflexive activity may take place within this frame41.

A virtual tour proposes panoramic images of the exhibition halls (360 degrees perspective), made by means of photographic images, processed with a computer application (realtime panoramaeditors / panoramasoftware), in this case the Autopano Giga and Panotour Pro applications from Kolor:

Fig. 2. Browsing tips (screen capture www.mnart.arts.ro)

The professional virtual tour may contain dozens of such panoramas, interconnected through connections points. A complex 360o virtual tour represents a unitary and interactive whole; it is realistic, objective and comprehensive, facilitating the visit of all the details with no time limit. By comparison, the photograph “freezes” a moment and a part of the place, the film may present the space in a limited period of time, in a succession that depends on the talent and subjectivity of the producer (www.imagofactory.ro) A virtual tour is a presentation of the object-oriented rather than context- Fig. 3. Visiting layout of the Old Romanian Art Gallery (screen capture oriented information. Macrophotography www.mnart.arts.ro) is useful in restoring and digitizing, as one can see any details of an object, before or after the restoration. The images can contain “witnesses”, text with information about that object.

As far as the content elements of an exhibition are concerned, various files may be attached to the virtual tour, in order to make the visit more pleasant or more documented: audio (music), texts containing information, navigation history, video inserts, maps, links to other sites etc.

Fig. 4. Panoramic image, Old Romanian Art Gallery, Hall 5 (screen capture www.mnart.arts.ro) 38 39 40 41

Poulot (2005), p. 141 Hammer (2005), p. 262 Turkle (1996) Hammer (2005), p. 262

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Fig. 5. Old Romanian Art Gallery, example of explanatory text „Epitaph, 1457”, Hall 1-2 (screen capture www.mnart.arts.ro)

Conclusion As we have seen, the digitization of the museum art heritage requires the collaboration between technology and museology, it modifies the relation with the public and the perception on art. Considered useful by artists, restorers, museographers, art experts or neophytes, the virtual tour is a useful instrument for knowledge, exploration, as well as for archiving and restoration.

It is true that, in order to understand art, technical knowledge is not sufficient; the educational virtues of this instrument are still to be explored and exploited.

The most important thing about it is its role to make art visible and to democratise the access to the museum space.

Bibliography Arsenault, C. 2003. „L’exposition virtuelle au-delà de l’an 2000: produit muséal recyclé ou nouveau genre”, Observatoire de la Société des musées québécois, online: http://www. musees.quebec. museum/publicsspec/ actualites/analyses/ textes/20030311/index. phtml Bernier, R. 2001. „Les musées sur Internet en quatre tableaux: le dernier avatar du musée (premier tableau)”, in Archée, http://archee. qc.ca/ar.php? page=imp&no=151 Coman, M. (ed.). 2004. Media Anthropology.

Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications De Certeau, M. „L’opération historique”, in Le Goff, J. et Nora P. (dir.). 1974. Faire de l’histoire, vol. 1: Nouveaux Problèmes. Paris: Gallimard Doray, P., Bibaud, J. 1999. Quel avenir pour les musées ou quelques points de repère ou sujet de l’usage des nouvelles technologies par les musées. CIRST, Université de Québec à Montréal, online: http:// www.unites.ugam.ca/ Rencontres/montreal/pdf/ doray.pdf 24

Gadamer, H.-G. 1992. L’actualité du beau. Aixen- Provence: Alinéa Grancher V. 2003. „Positionnement des musées face face à l émergence de nouvelles expressions et transversalités”, Cycle de conférences World Wild Web 1994–2003 à la Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain, online: http://www. nomemory. org/conf/data/conf4.html Hammer, A. „Weaving Trickster. Myth and Tribal Encounters on the World Wide Web”, in Rothenbuhler E. W., Coman, M. (ed.). 2004.

Media Anthropology. Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications, p. 260-268 Hill, R, Douillette, J. 2014. „Teens, New Media and Contemporary Art: Expanding Authority in the Museum Context”, Journal of Museum Education, Volume 39, Issue 3 (October, 2014), p. 250-261.

Jeanneret, Y. „La société de l’information comme figure imposée. Sur un usage particulier des mots en politique”, in Mathien, M. (ed.).

2005. La „Société de l’Information”. Entre mythes et réalités, Bruxelles: Etablissements Emile Bruylant, p. 66-76

Levy, P. 2001. Cyberculture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press Lipovetsky, G., Serroy, J., 2013. L’esthétisation du monde. Vivre à l’âge du capitalisme artiste, Paris: Gallimard Mathien, M. (ed). 2005. La „Société de l’Information”. Entre mythes et réalités.

Bruxelles: Etablissements Emile Bruylant Malraux A. 1965. Le Musée Imaginaire. Paris: Gallimard Nora P. 1972. „L’événement monstre”, Communications, Vol. 18, Issue 1, pp. 162172, online: http:// www.persee.fr/doc/ comm_0588-8018_1972_ num_18_1_1272 Poulot D. 2005. Une histoire des musées de France, XVIIIe-XXe siècle, Paris: La Découverte.

Poulot, D. „Le droit au musée : un droit du citoyen?” in Chianea G. 1988. Des Droits de l’homme et la conquête des libertés. Des Lumières aux révolutions de 1848. Saint-Martind’Hères: Presses Universitaires de Grenoble, p.

332-341 O’Doherty, B. 1986. Inside the White Cube. The Ideology of the Gallery Space. Santa Monica/ San Francisco: The Lapis Press [Artforum, 1976] Poinsot, J.-M. 1999. Quand l’œuvre a lieu. L’art exposé et ses récits autorisés. Villeurbanne: Art Edition Perriault, J. 2002. L’accès au savoir en ligne, Paris: Odile Jacob Quitté, A.-L. 2009. „Une Typologie pour appréhender l’art contemporain sur Internet”, Virtualité, Art & Culture, in Champs Culturels, no 18, online: http:// escales.enfa.fr/ files/2009/08/quitte.pdf Rotaru, I. 2010. Comunicarea virtuală.

Impactul noilor tehnologii informaționale și comunicaționale in spațiul educațional contemporan. Bucharest: Tritonic Ory-Lavolee, B. 2002. La diffusion numérique du patrimoine, dimension de la politique culturelle,

Rapport à Mme la Ministre de la Culture et de la Communication, online: http://www. culture.gouv. fr/culture/actualites/rapports/ ory-lavollee/ory- lavollee.pdf Sauvageot A. 1994. Voirs et savoirs. Esquisse d’une sociologie du regard, Paris: PUF. Schwartz, D. F. 2005. „Dude, Where’s My Museum?InvitingTeenstoTransformMuseums,” Museum News, September/October (2005), online: http:// www.mercermuseum.org/ assets/Education- Documents/Learn-and-Do/ Dude-Wheres-My- Museum.pdf.

Schweibenz, W. 2004. „L’Evolution du musée virtuel”, dans Les Nouvelles de l’ICOM, nr 3, online: http:// icom.museum/fileadmin/ user_upload/pdf/ICOM_ News/2004-3/FRE/ p3_2004-3.pdf Souchier, E., Jeanneret, Y., Le Marec J. (eds.).

2003. Lire, écrire, récrire. Objets, signes et pratiques des medias informatisées, Paris: Bibliothèque Publiques d’Informations Striepe, S. E. 2013. „How Some Art Museums Can Appeal to Teenagers”, Journal of Museum Education, Volume 38, Issue 2 (July 2013), p.

207217, online: http://www.maneyonline.com/ doi/ful l/10.1179/1059865013Z.00000000022 Turkle, S. 1996. „Virtuality and Its Discontents”, The American Prospect, Winter, Vol. 7 (24), online: http://hevra.haifa.ac.il/̴soc/lectures/ talmud/ files/547.htm The New Renaissance, Report of the Comite des Sages on bringing Europe’s Cultural Heritage Online, Brussels, 2011, online: http://www. muzee.org/ romania/final-report-cdS3.pdf MNAR Press release, online: http://www. mediafax.ro/cultura-media/muzeul-nationalde- arta-al-romaniei-a-primit-certificatul-deexcelenta- tripadvisor-pe-2015-14454593

Angelica Helena Marinescu Faculty of Journalism and Communication Sciences, Bucharest University, Calea Victoriei 1-5, Bucharest angelica. marinescu@yahoo.ro

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Fig.1.The traditional house where the museum was installed

FOR A NAIVE MUSEOLOGY Maricica and the museum across the water „For the peasant, museality is ridiculous. Just as he does not have a sense of nature – that is he does not faint when seeing a landscape – neither does he have the sense of a value deposit, where you must go all dressed up and sigh. On the other hand, it is interesting to know how much the peasant is preoccupied with his own identity.” (Andrei Pleşu**)

ABSTRACT In Podu Nărujii, a village in Vrancea county, Romania, the new and the archaic are intertwined, as natural as in any other village of the 21st century. However, the image that the villagers have of themselves and therefore want to transmit seems to spring rather from the old times. Maricica, a young peasant aged 34, wears blue-jeans and T-shirts, but knows how to weave, spin, tell stories of the past and, as well as that, she is a depositary of the antique traditions of the village. ‚Over the river’, in an area rather difficult to reach, Maricica settled a micro-museum of the Vrancea village in the old house of the deceased Apostol Zaharioiu. There, without any expertise, but with a lot of creativity, she arranged objects that are more or less peasant-like, gathered from the village dwellers. This paper aims to present the manner in which personal creativity and intuition can serve the representation of local identity, materializing in a naive, but not unaware syntax of old and new objects.

KEY-WORDS: material culture, ‚naive museology’, (auto)representation, local identity, cultural memory, tradition, museum discourse * The article was drawn up starting from an ethnological research in the field made through a partnership between the Faculty of Letters of the Bucharest University and the Cultural Centre of the Vrancea County, in the period 14-19 August, ** Pleșu, Andrei. „About a character with countless faces”, Folio. Information Bulletin of MTR 1(2001), p. 3 (Interview by Silvia Cazacu).

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Fig. 2 Traditional female costume displayed in the museum Can we call a private village collection a „museum”?

Considering that such a structure is most of the time made up by people with no specialised training in the field of museology, with no curatorial expertise and who, most of the time, do not have appropriate conditions for the conservation of the exhibits, who rather work out of pure passion, the opinions on the answer are quite different. Some voices prefer a radical position, arguing that a private village collection does not meet the sine qua non conditions for the operation of a museum institution.

Indeed, the definition given by the International Council of Museums (ICOM), taken over by the Romanian legislation, too, stipulates:

Consequently, by the letter of this definition, the initiatives of the peasants who choose to represent their locality, commune or ethnographic area by exhibiting personal collections of objects in their own space would not be worthy of the attention of the specialists in the field, as this would be too profane an aspiration towards what we like to claim as a Temple of Museums. However, consecrated voices of museology, such as Dominique Poulot, state that ICOM’s definition is a hegemonic one and, more than that, characteristic to the museums globalisation trend, showing at the same time that there are a series of alternatives that come both from semiology or communication sciences, and from the professional culture of conservation experts2.

The museum is the public cultural institution, in the service of society, which acquires, conserves, researches, restores, communicates and exhibits the tangible and intangible heritage of human communities’ existence and evolution, as well as of the environment, for the purposes of education, study and enjoyment1.

The voices open to such alternatives belong to experts in the anthropology of objects, with a broader view, who show a little more preciseness in perceiving the nuances of the spontaneous curatorial gesture, acknowledging not only its legitimacy, but also its value. For instance, Thierry Bonnot, by dedicating a volume to the attachment to objects, to the histories and personal markers that they may incorporate, speaks about those monoparental museums, “where the charm counts so much, and the rules barely at all”3.

1 2 3

The Law on museums and public collections no. 311 / 8.07.2003 available at http://www.cimec.ro/muzee/lege/index.htm (last consultation: 20.04.2015).

Poulot, Dominique. 2009. Musées et muséologie. Paris: Editions La Découverte, p. 6 Hudson apud Bonnot, Thierry.2014. L’Attachement aux choses. Paris: CNRS Editions, p. 106 .

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Fig.3. Pottery plate, „abundance of the house” type

In the Romanian space, the thriving of these unspecialised forms, supported with passion, patience, personal effort, organically considered „museums” by their authors and their communities, was noticed by the team of the Romanian Peasant’s Museum. In 2008, the institution dedicated the project LOCAL IDENTITY AND HERITAGE. Identification and promotion of village collections from Romania to the support and training of these local endeavourers, as well as to the valorisation of their initiatives. The collectors directly involved in the project after a prospecting campaign enjoyed a week’s training stage at the Museum on the Roadside, a stage made from five introductory modules and an application consisting in setting-up an exhibition that would represent them, by using their own objects4. In the volume occasioned by this project, Carmen Mihalache admits that these private village collections within the Romanian space are nowadays characterised by precariousness, not due to intrinsic causes, though, but because of the lack of an institutional protection, of a coherent set of cultural policies to protect and launch them, to encourage those people who want to become cultural operators in the private sector. The ethnologist draws the attention upon the fact that the potential of these museums in nuce is worthy of consideration, as they represent an important heritage resource, a community’s identity and originality factor, an identity resource deemed representative, through which the owners 4 5

recommend themselves and which they take pride in. Moreover, beyond being an identity marker and a factor of civic cohesion that marks the communities’ cultural life, such collections, appropriately exploited, could also bring economic advantages to the localities, becoming an efficient means of promoting the values and the image of the respective communities outside the locality, through their inclusion in the tourist landmarks.

What makes them different from the big, established museums, being at the same time a drive for the visitors, is the fact that these installations are living cultural spaces, wherein the testimonies of the past are brought together in various ways and tonalities, completed by a warm welcome, an eagerness to share stories ever-differently told, wherein the informal dialogue with the host may cast a passion for the exhibits upon the visitor, who will probably return, thus possibly enlarging the network of visitors in a geometrical progression. In this light, the relaxation as regards the rules within the private village collections is not a proof of ignorance, but, on the contrary, a resource that allows the owners to starkly assume their status as “something else” – a “something else” full of charm, like the traditional peasant icons on glass, face to face with the Renaissance paintings, preoccupied with proportions and concreteness.

The naivety of these lively places allows them to reinvent themselves with every visitor, just like in a

Romanian Peasant’s Museum, 2008. The serfs of beauty. Village collections and museums from Romania, Bucharest: Martor, p. 7.

Ibidem, pp. 5-11.

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Fig.4. Loom displayed in the „good room”

fairy tale. However, in order for them to live like this, they need heritage organisations, cultural institutions and authorities to support them without tarnishing their ingenuousness – as Carmen Mihalache also emphasises5. Moreover, as the manner the existence of these collections interferes with the cultural life of communities is still a subject merely studied, I believe they are an important resource not only for the rural areas where they were installed, therefore not only for the practical order. Their thorough exploration within in-situ anthropological studies would fertilise

subject areas nearly unexplored in the Romanian academic landscape, such the anthropology of the object or museology, they would enrich the research on identity and would contribute to the abandonment of a certain archaic-Mioritical fixation that still survives in certain areas of in-field ethnographic research, and would, in exchange, consider the village in its dimension of contemporary, complex, heteroclite, open reality – a hub for great changes in the paradigm, of reconfigurations and searches for meanings.

The story of the museum across the water In the following pages, I shall not hesitate to call the private village collection a „museum”, as the name itself is of great importance for those who devised it. Maricica, a 34 year old woman from Nistorești, Vrancea County, who wears tight jeans, flip-flops and a T-shirt, yet she can weave and knows all the old ways, takes pride in having installed a museum together with her sister, Ionica I., using the objects collected from the locals by C.B., “Old Man”, as she calls him.

C.B., a native from Podu Nărujii, is highly respected among the villagers. A former schoolmaster, then a bailiff in Focșani, bagpiper with knowledge of the local tradition, amateur hunter, the man owns the boarding house and the farm in Podu Nărujii, not yet integrated in the travel circuit, as well as the riding club on the

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estate, set-up two months prior to my research. And, as a “partner” and owner of the museum – a space that enjoys heavy local prestige – his image of son of the village becomes ever so strong. The little ethnographic museum was installed by Maricica in the Măgurele area, across the water, in an old traditional house which C.B. had bought from late Apostol Zaharioiu (Fig. 16). The owner, very longeval, had been a lower middle-class peasant, with 3-4 ha of land: „He was 1.5 m tall and weighed about 50 kg – short, but roguish guy!”, as the buyer says. Apostol Zaharioiu had suffered the communist oppression: because he had opposed the collectivisation of ’52-’53, he was imprisoned for 14 years. In his absence, the collectivisation never took place, though, but the communists saw to his

All the photos in this article belong to its author and were made during the research made in Podu Nărujii (14-19 August 2014).

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Fig.5. Bourgeois-style hardwood desk exhibited in the good room vilification, spreading bad words about him around the village, that he supposedly was an evil-hearted person. Because of this, the locals used to avoid him, and he lived a solitary life in the house in Măgurele, now a museum. To a certain extent, he enjoyed the companionship of Uncle Gheorghe Vulpoiu – an “ascetic” himself, also a widower, also longeval (he lived to be 107) – who was living in the only house in Măgurele close to Apostol Zaharioiu’s. Gheorghe Vulpoiu had fought, as C.B. says, in both World Wars, which he survived safe and sound. He only went down to the village for matches and they say that he used to light his cigarette from the cigarette before, in order to save the matches. He used to have 10-15 cherry trees, of which children used to steal cherries; Uncle Vulpoiu caught C.B. – a little boy at the time – by the leg and warned him he had a big, wild dog and that he had better asked for cherries, as he was entertaining guests. His house is now a ruin. Not far from Zaharioiu’s, Vulpoiu’s house seems the reflection in debris and dampness of the museum installed and taken care of by Maricica.

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We reached the place guided by the woman herself; we went down a soft slope, on quite a hilly ground, behind C.B.’s garden, then we crossed a water on a little improvised wooden bridge, then we went up another difficult slope, as the branches of the trees fallen over the path during the last storm occasionally scratched us. Quite a complicated access, softened down by an enthusiastic Maricica, who, careless about having hurt her heel quite harshly in a wood chip, was talking to us, the research team, about her museum, which, in the local horizon, was deemed a cultural pièce de résistance7. Thus, the woman was heartily introducing us to a visiting experience wherein the local pride, permanently doubled by references to the past and guarantees of authenticity (“Everythin’, everythin’ here’s authentic, made here, by us!”), interwove with the respect she bore for “Old Man” C.B. In Maricica’s view, Old Man knows everything and can get any object to complete the collection – even a cuckoo clock (“Like they were making in the ole days”), more suitable than the plastic one, with no batteries, left in the house from the time when the workingmen worked there: “Who, Old Man? Well, yeaah, he sure

We should detail here how we, the team of ethnologists from the University of Bucharest, were perceived by Maricica and the community in general during our five day’s work in the field.

In their eyes, we were „the gentlemen from Bucharest, preoccupied by culture, in search for traditions and, consequently, the villagers’ discourse exalted the folklore richness of their region; they were very eager to show us those things they thought we were looking for. The mayor of Nistoreşti even insisted, by stylistically exaggerating his speech with pride, that their region was ideal for “folklore poaching”, as there was an abundance of it.

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Fig.6. Syntax of objects displayed on the desk gets ‘em! You bet ya!” Old Man is the silent partner of the museum and the owner of its secrets, the one who knows everything there is in the “backstage”. He is renowned as an authority, on the one hand through his financial power, on the other hand through the recognition, respect and influence he enjoys within the community, all of which allowing him to invest in a project beyond the everyday urgent needs – otherwise quite harsh in this Vrancea village. He is, in a way, a little Demiurge of a small slice of myth, who is very powerful because he knows very much and enjoys complete trust. However, his presence is quite discrete in the museum’s narrative, as Maricica is the one who does everything, who knows the practical order. Old Man is upstream, while Maricica is downstream.

I must confess that, as at first sight the nature of this museum reminded me of the naïve painting, I had a reaction very close to a coup de foudre: there was a lot of distinct originality there, as well as a very fresh look, which, despite certain object syntax errors and a lack of problematization, was the expression of a strong, vivid urge to tell stories about the place, often 8

Baudrillard, Jean. 1996. System of the objects. Cluj: Echinox, p. 53. (transl. Horia Lazăr)

by metaphorical means of a charming naïveté and imaginativeness.

Then, at a second sight, questions arose; I wanted to fully understand the manner in which they, the villagers, chose to represent themselves through the gesture of arranging objects that they considered specific – what objects? Why those objects and not different ones? I wanted to take a step further towards understanding this spontaneous, in nuce heritage establishment, so much more interesting precisely because it totally lacked the intervention of a specialist, while showing, in exchange, what these people wanted to convey about themselves. Then: to whom should they convey?

The non-inclusion of the museum in the travel circuit, in spite of Maricica’s good will and the closeness of C.B.’s boarding house and estate, has small and big causes: an absolutely impracticable infrastructure for the wide public, the absolute absence of any form of communication and promotion, as well as cultural policies too frail to protect such initiatives; all these constitute the risk that this museum might not surpass its endogenous importance of strict self-

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representation at the level of the community and of circularly feeding its sense of identity. As a matter of fact, several decades ago, Jean Baudrillard showed that in this respect there was a trend regarding the mythological object – an old object, emptied from a concrete functionality, aesthetically valued as a sign of one’s own past and even one’s own origins: Maricica’s museum is meant – and manages – to be a microcosm of local traditional life, as it contains a quasicomplete collection of objects that Fig.7. Drum for carolling leaning against the loom in the big room

Objects looking at the past signify the entire scope of the regional archaic life9. It is a quintessence of a certain way of dwelling, with all the related occupations, it is a metonymy for an ethnographic wholeness, whose fidelity towards the latter is nuanced only by the reconstructions from the memory, marked by the nostalgia of an often uncertain time. Maricica is a talkative person, and her explanations – alongside the demonstrations on the loom installed in the “big room”, accompanied by the inherent regional terms10 – somehow “help” the objects, by strengthening what the museification gesture and the lack of problematization had inherently weakened, as well as by immersing the naïve museum into orality. There are also stories, as grandfather Ion Cornea’s: short, glabrous, always wearing a woollen vest over his nylon or traditional, holiday shirt, he used to cover his baldness with a green hat adorned with two blue feathers; he used to patch his trousers by himself, on the old sewing machine where he used to make his cloth-slippers, and he wore an old traditional belt, where he took some “shekels” from, for his favourite granddaughter. He used to say to his wife, Ilinca, who lived to be nearly 100 and survived him by six years: “Ilinca, go get this girl some apples

from that bunch!” The apple bunches were hanging from a peg in the beam. They looked like clusters, they used to dry like raisins and smelt so nicely to Maricica – the child. Grandfather is the exponent of an archaic world from which somehow Maricica reclaims herself, by using this world as an inspiration source in her museological endeavour. However, Maricica adds to these vivid, concrete, pregnant memories the viscous, uncertain consistency of an unhistorical time. A time of tradition, a non-time in fact, present in her imperfect discourse. “’t is how we were doing it in the ole days!” seems to be a recurrence which takes an explanatory value in her discourse. Thus, the past continuous tense she uses when speaking about people of the old days or about archaic practices represents a time of continuity, a time that fixes all the breaches by generalising an action of the past, but at the same time a verbal form of imprecision and pastorality. The past continuous smoothes out the avoidance of circumscribing a fact of culture or a practice to a certain past moment and shows somehow that we are dealing with a reconstruction of the past which eliminates history and replaces it with a refreshing, even gratifying idea of the past.

9 The list with the exhibits in Maricica’s museum, broken down on functional categories, is available in Annex I of the paper.

10 See the list in Annex I.

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Fig.8. Version of the “Abduction from the Seraglio”

This behaviour, however, does not pertain to Maricica’s naïveté, or to that of her museum, either. Moreover, it is not a naïve, peasant-like behaviour, as it has an intellectual origin and made its career in the entire Europe in the second half of the 19th century and at the beginning of the 20th, accompanying the establishment of the first ethnographic museums of the period and setting the direction for the upcoming times. In the second half of the 19th century, the great conquests of western science and technology are displayed for the entire world to see within Universal Exhibitions. In 1867, in Paris, as a counter-current to these progressive displays, a stand is installed, flanking the modern industrial achievements by exhibiting old traditional peasants’ costumes, from France and from abroad.

“The task is assigned to a group or artists who believe in the pending disappearance of the traditional costumes

and are willing to present «the last vestiges of the ancient ways».”11 This is, undoubtedly, an attitude which later on, in the ’60s and the ‘70s of the 20th century would be called emergency ethnology: the feeling that there is an endangered past, about to be extinct, which consequently must be preserved as quickly as possible. During that period of the end of the 19th century, this phenomenon was not at all unfamiliar with the romantic feeling that was aiming at strengthening the political idea of nation-states about to occur on the foundations of the archaic populations, of their wisdom and knowledge, reflected in the folklore. It may be that a certain fascination with the peasant – the “local savage”, after all – that was already in existence made the undertaking of the Swedish team of the 1867 Paris Universal Exhibition tremendously successful: not only did the artists show traditional peasants’ costumes to the whole world, but they also set up a complete on-site scenography of the ancient rural life12. It seemed to be the success recipe of the time, as a decade later the success would also belong to the Scandinavians in 1878, at the Paris Exhibition, when Swedish linguist Artur Hazelius would inaugurate an innovative and spectacular modality of expression that would inspire the entire European ethnographic museography of the following decades13. It was a diorama, a dramatisation of characters, a theatrical reference that turns these installations into a stage setup of the rural, archaic life, obviously dedicated to the modern urban audiences, who came to wonder at “the different” – neatly encased and harnessed, immobilised within thick glass walls, therefore harmless. Six years before, doctor Artur Hazelius had publicly displayed his personal collection of ethnographic objects collected

11 Thiesse, Anne-Marie. 1999. La création des identités nationales. Europe XVIIIe-XXe siècle, Paris: Editions du Seuil, p. 197 12 Ibidem, pp. 197-198.

13 Ibidem, p. 198.

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Fig.9. Display of the traditional kitchen from Dalarna - a very isolated, and therefore deemed “genuine” area. He formulated his goal in a highly explicit manner: “to use the heritage objects with the purpose to raise and stimulate the visitors’ patriotic feelings14.

In the Romanian space there was a figure similar to Artur Hazelius: lieutenant-colonel Dimitrie Pappasoglu, who, in 1864, opened a small ethnographic museum in his own house. His success was not as fast as the Swedish’, though. The lack of vision, of practice and order, caused by the immaturity of the field in this region at the moment resulted in the failure of the first museographic undertakings of this type. However, Pappsaoglu’s collection would be the foundation of the Museum of Ethnography and of National, Decorative and Industrial Art, established by royal decree on the 25th of February 1906, under the direction of Alexandru Tzigara-Samurcaș - today’s National Museum of the Romanian Peasant15. As a matter of fact, this establishment of the museum was synchronous with a plethora of ethnographic museums which opened their gates at the crossroads of the 19th and 20th centuries, particularly in Western Europe. They represent the materialisation of the interest in folklore of the elites, educated by specialised magazines that flourished at the time, alongside with specialised institutions, such as the Folklore Society (London, 1878). The convergence of these cultural phenomena resides in the vast movement of the national identity creation. At the dawns of a modernity that was as fascinating as it was threatening through the radical changes that it forecast, the return to the archaic life – in its comfortable stageversion – was not very far from the inner drives that led to the phenomenon of inventing traditions, in Eric Hobsbawm’ vision: In fact, through them [invented traditions – A/N] people seek the establishment of a continuity with a convenient historical past. However, to the extent that there is a

connection with a historical past, the strangeness of the “invented” traditions resides in the fact that this continuity is very artificial. In short, they are responses to new contexts, which take the shape of references to old situations, or which establish their own past through a quasi-mandatory repetition. What makes the “invention of traditions” so interesting […] is the contrast between the perpetual innovation and change of the modern world and the attempt to structure at least several parts of unchanged and invariable social life. 16 The inner drives that animate Maricica’s naïve museological gesture largely overlap with both Eric Hobsbawn’s problematisation, and with the context that gave birth to the fascination with the ethnographic object over a century ago. Of course, times are different, so are the causes, but the social and economic change, often violent, often incoherent and puzzling, remains a feature of the contemporary village of Vrancea,

14 Ibidem, p. 200.

15 http://www.muzeultaranuluiroman.ro/istoric.html (dernière consultation, le 20 avril2015).

16 Hobsbawm, Eric. 2012. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge:Cambrige University Press, pp. 1-2 (trad. m. AMP)

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unexpectedly opened towards a heteroclite modernity, full of highly diverse cultural forms, wherein it is hard to find identity markers. Consequently, the view is redirected towards the past, towards its liberating aura of archaicness. As Russel W. Belk showed in an article dedicated to the role of objects in building and keeping a sensation of the past, “we are especially preoccupied with having a past at the moments when our current identity is challenged”17.

The objects receive then an anti-amnesic role, they become markers in the cultural memory: “The objects stabilise us, reminding us of our past, turning this past into a substantial part of our present”18. Obviously, Maricica’s discourse – both museum-related and verbal – lacks the nationalistic dimension so present in the 19th century. I did not find in her museum any tri-coloured flags broached ostentatiously, assertively. When,

during the interviews I made with her, she referred to the women’s, children’s, men’s “national costumes”, or to the shirt grandfather Ion Cornea used to wear on holidays, the idea of “nationalism” slipped into Maricica’s regional discourse, but more like a speech cliché acquired by force of habit than an intention with a programmatic character. However, even in the absence of the nationalistic nuance, we must not forget that Maricica’s discourse might be, more or less consciously, the answer to a certain pressure exercised upon Vrancea over the decades – an inherited view that has consecrated the region in the eyes of many as a cradle of traditionality and archaicness. Let us only think of what the studies in Nereju, conducted by the team of the Bucharest Sociology School have meant, what expectations regarding this region they might have created.

A sensitive scenography Maricica’s museum is not only a collection of traditional objects brought together, but also a complete scenography, a syntax wherein each piece has its meaning and purpose, determined in relation to the others. In this manner, they get the force to generate a space, because, as Jean Baudrillard emphasises, “with no connection there is no space, as space only exists if it is opened, provoked, rhythmic, enlarged by correlating objects and by exceeding its function into a new structure”19. In this respect, Maricica is not far from the display of the archaic life exhibited by Artur Hazelius’ diorama in 1878 – a way of expression which she certainly does not know anything about, at least theoretically. This is the reason why feminine intuition is the strong point of the museum narrative devised by Maricica: the fact that the woman acts in total lack of expertise, creating, despite this, extremely strong meanings, even though she is not aware of their implications. This is why the analysis of several exhibits of her museum that I shall make in the following lines does not follow the classification on functional criteria20, but valorises the ingenuity of the narrative and the force of the objects. Because, in the line of the same Jean Baudrillard, an analysis of objects does not become more relevant through classification, but through the

exploration of the way the objects are “lived”21.

Let us take a look at the traditional female costume, hung on a hanger – an intuition of the displaying panel in the galleries – on the wall in the bedroom, partially hanging over a wall mat (Fig. 2, Fig. 3). Its position raised my interest, despite the absence of a mannequin or some other form of corporality to support it. Maricica cleared up her choice for me: she had hung the costume in that position in order to evoke the grace of the women of the past, who used to wear this kind of costumes in front of the gate, on holidays.

Obviously, this answer contains a form of devotion for the femininity of her female ancestors, probably fed by childhood memories, yet I was equally compelled to notice the theatrical reference of the costume’s posture – a kind of minimalistic version of a diorama without a showcase – as well as the intuition of what Horia Bernea explained in his reflections on the set-up of the Romanian Peasant’s Museum: in the absence of a body to support it, the costume is a flabby case, therefore it loses its code. Consequently, there must be found a substitute of a body, which the costume should contain, should dress up, thus completing the bodygarment relationship and regaining its sense22. To all

17 Belk, Russel, W. „The Role of Possesions in Constructing and Mantaining a Sense of Past”, NA – Advances in Consumer Research, 17(1990), pp. 669-676 (trad. m. AMP) 18 Mc Cracken apud Belk, Russel W. ibidem.

19 Baudrillard, Jean, op. cit., p. 13 20 A voir l’Annexe 1 21 Baudrillard, Jean, op. cit., p. 6 22 Bernea, Horia. 2010. Câteva gânduri despre muzeu, cantități, materialitate şi încrucişare,n.d. : Editura Liternet, p. 31.

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Fig.10. Plastic doll

these I add Maricica’s intention to suggest the peasant couple, through the juxtaposition of the male and female costumes – a choice strengthened by displaying between the two the “abundance of the house” pottery plate, whose text not only refers to the abundance and luck of the home, but, in a wider sense, it also represents – as Maricica says – a consolidation of the union between the masculine and feminine principles. In this “strong” connection it is unimportant that the plate is not even a handmade peasant’s object, but one of the numerous mass-produced kitsch pieces that can be found in the socalled traditional fairs across the country.

In the largest room – “the good room” – Maricica installed the loom, still functional – an object which reminds of an archaic practice that still survives in the locality, through the skills of a few women (Fig. 4). Although she knows how to weave, Maricica has not performed this activity for herself since her wedding, in 1999. But the woman does not hesitate to sit down and show us a demonstration. It is this very demonstration – which has become the object’s main function – that gives it its status: it is there for others to see “how we were doing things in the ole times”. The object therefore becomes a sign of a diffused time: “Only see that ya don’ stumble on it, cause the loom is precious, too, ain’t it?” When

asked if she is going to finish the mat installed on the loom, Maricica answers: “I think this one he [Old Man, A/N] keeps like that, for the museum. I wove a piece at first, to see if we could weave on the loom and... if people ask me, I show them... no problem!” Even in Maricica’s eyes the object has the importance of a reified reality, meant for a showcase.

In the same big room, the name of which Maricica insists to translate to me as “the living room”23 (“the living room, like they call it today... A room where guests was received... I mean not in the bedroom or... ‘t is a room where you wouldn’t enter every day”.), she placed a bourgeois-style hardwood desk (Fig. 5). Undoubtedly, this piece marks a rupture in the syntax of objects, by dynamiting the intended “peasant phrase” through an object that would not justify itself in a peasant’s house dated at the beginning of the 20th century. “’t is an ole piece of furniture, too... Don’t know from who... Look at it: ‘t is different, with drawers!” Her intuition dictates the “otherwiseness” of the piece of furniture, as the drawer itself is a cultural marker of the town, of the bourgeoisie, with no connection with the peasants and the peasantlike way of arranging the objects24. In her view, the oldness seems to legitimate the presence of the object in the museum. To her, “town-like” is the synonym for

23 The Insider translated an ethnographic reality of her own cultural horizon into the ethnologist’s cultural code. Actually, she is between two worlds and masters both codes.

24 Nicolau, Irina. 2001. „Despre cădere, punere și așezare”, in Talmeş-balmeş de etnologie şi multe altele, Bucharest: Editura Ars Docendi, p. 64.

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“new”, while “peasant-like” is the synonym for “old”.

Again, the idea of tradition and the idea of the past enter the stage. The naïveté of the gesture consists in the intersection of two axes of thinking and valuing: rural/ urban and old/new, respectively, which actually do not overlap perfectly. The chronological criterion of choosing and ordering the objects weighs more than their nature and origin, thus diminishing their importance. When asked why she put it in that place, the woman makes her case: “Well, ‘it’s the living room, the big room...” Here the idea of “good object”, of “good thing” occurs, therefore we are dealing with an axiological syntax of the objects, depending on the value given to them by the peasantbeholder. This is, in my opinion, the feature of a typical peasant-like behaviour, different from the contemporary urban space, prone to consumption, where objects belonging to different areas are more mixed together, more prone to rapid wear, on their way to the trash can. Moreover, the desk is a “pièce de résistance” of the “bourgeois corner” because, alongside the mat hung on the wall, it is a support for the photos of the former owners of the house. The positive valorisation – the distinction contained within this piece of furniture – is a kind of tribute to their memory. In this axiology, it is unimportant that the desk is equally the support of several wool carding combs, a knife stuck in a wooden trencher, next to a photo frame with no photo and a flower vase with... no flowers (Fig. 6). The combs, the knife and the trencher might be another peasant-like “rupture” in the bourgeois syntax of the corner, but, laughing, Maricica reveals to me the ludic gesture of choosing those objects: “I said: what if someone comes? They mus’ be waited on, right?! In the same way I chose the jar and two bowls...”

The syntax she devised is “playing the guests”. Even the material the knife is made of – wood – empties it of its practical function and reifies it, its cutting edge becomes harmless and the object gains some other sense. Any setup of a diorama is, essentially, an “as if”. But Maricica’s laughter adds to the naive museum a playful note, the simulacrum is not only museum-like, but also childish.

Although permanently referring to the quite rigid matrix of tradition, Maricica does not hesitate to play and this can be seen in her museum. On the other hand, the photo frame with no photo and the flower vase with no flowers rather represent a double depletion of the objects’ functions: firstly, through their museification, secondly, through the fact that they are containers without content – which strengthens their value of signs in the little naive museum. Maricica’s suggestion to bring in a photo of C.B.’s family highlights their potential as signatures and reasserts the authority of the owner

– nearly a Maecenas. The frame and the vase are still waiting for the moment when they accomplish their function or catch life from the rich imagination of the visitors.

Another “rupture” of the peasant phrase which the museum’s narrative intends to keep perennial is represented by the carolling drum leaning against the loom in the “big room” (Fig. 7). It is an object extremely representative for the blend between the old and the new within the community: the instrument is a remainder of an ancient practice, complemented by a regional dimension through its distinctiveness, while, curiously enough, at the same time the children of the new generations have assumed it, by adding to it inscriptions in English and even drawings of skulls. In the museum’s discourse, the carolling drum is an oxymoron and it causes a “breach”, and Maricica is not very proud of how the children have played with the object. However, at a second sight, this oxymoron involuntarily and sincerely testifies about the real status of tradition within the community and gives the object the organicity of the contemporary village, where past and present, traditional and media culture meet without rejecting one other.

In the chiler – a room habitually used by the family’s elderly – behind the door, I discovered a local (as Maricica emphasises) version of the “Abduction from the Seraglio” (Fig. 8). Relatively difficult to recognise because of the infantilised, quite non-elaborated nature of the image, the object is a reason of pride for the woman: it is “from our places”. The “Abduction from the Seraglio” is itself a post-peasant fact of culture, marking the passing from the household industries and handwork to the preference for the mass-produced object, external and perceived as “beautiful”. Yet, Maricica presents it as a local cultural fact, with a distinctive regional note, therefore contained in the identity equation.

Next to one of the lime-washed clay stoves there is a place meant to be a set-up of the traditional kitchen (Fig. 9). Beyond the objects laid on the “ blidar” (open cupboard), which, indeed, belong to this semantic field (napkin, wooden spoon), we can notice the display of some objects belonging to the same kitsch of the specialised traditional fairs, unable to even signify an idea of functionality: a wooden beer pint and a miniature peasant’s house, also made of wood, near a pair of forked dear horns. This is the moment of a long-delayed question: how much and in what way does the kitsch object weigh in a peasant’s exhibition? In an attempt to theorise the kitsch, Jean Baudrillard states that the kitsch

25 Baudrillard, Jean. 2005. Societatea de consum. Mituri şi structuri. Bucharest: Comunicare.ro, p. 139 (transl. Alexandru Matei),

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objects are “pseudo-objects, in terms of simulation, copy, factual objects, stereotypes, in terms of scarcity of real signification, combined with an overabundance of signs, of allegorical references, of incongruent connotations, in terms of detail exaltation and detail saturation”, “inarticulate overabundance of signs”, “erratic outbid of prefabricated signs”25. But in Maricica’s economy, the kitsch character is not acknowledged and the objects of this scope are valued as beautiful – and, more than that, decorative. Yet the very decorative attribute is nonpeasant, at least in the archaic spirit that the museum is supposed to evoke. It anticipates the urban; in the village there is no beauty for the sake of beauty only.

The aesthetic function is essential, but not exclusive. Far from being a gratuitous gesture, it is always interwoven with utilitarity. Or, as Horia Bernea said, “the traditional object is a powerful object through its perfect purposelook match”26. Therefore, we may conclude that we are rather facing an aestheticising view on a thing which, ethnographically speaking, should signify functionality – a kitchen.

Among Maricica’s original ideas – which she is very proud of – there are the plastic doll wrapped like a baby and “put to bed” near the stove (Fig. 10), nicknamed “little dumpling”, and the piece of “cheese” – actually a rock wrapped in white paper, with a white thread attached to it, representing the whey spilt during the making of cheese: “I put a rock instead of the green cheese and this thread as if it were t’ whey flowing into the şâtar•!” The improvisation asserts not only the force of representation of installations evoking a “known”, crucial for the ancient peasants’ life, but also the narrative boldness of the installation: Maricica knows how to play, she is free, she breaks the slightly high-brow cliché of the museum discourse with outbursts of creativity, freshness, individuality. However, to a certain extent, the two installations somehow operate an immobilisation of what is normally characterised by movement, vitality and transformation – the bustle and hustle of babies and the fermentation of milk – a depletion of the core of the object, inherent to its museification.

...however, the objects are silent In the 60s, face to face with an unprecedented industrialisation, which reverberated upon the western material culture, drastically shortening the lifecycle of objects, Violette Morin wrote an article which emphasised the distinction between the “cosmocentric or ceremonious object” and the “biocentric or biographical” one27. According to the author, the former is the mechanised object specific to modernity, with an ephemeral existence within the household, with a fast trajectory between the factory and the trash can. It is meant to become waste and to be quickly replaced.

On the contrary, the latter is the object that is part of its owner’s intimacy and destiny; such objects are in symbiosis with their owner, becoming part of him and growing old together with him28. In the same line, Jean Baudrillard highlights: “Rich in functionality and poor in signification, [the functional object – A/N] refers to topicality and wearies into everyday life. The mythological object, with all its minimum functionality and maximum power of signification, refers to ancestrality or even to the absolute anteriority of nature”29. When viewing Maricica’s museum and considering the type of preservation proposed by its narrative, we may say that its objects tend to be part of the second conceptual category, the main feature of which is durability, doubled by their weighty identity. Russel W. Belk shows that

owned objects have this capacity to prolong the self not only into space, but also in time, by embedding memories and feelings. Moreover, the self which they anchor in the present by means of reference to the past may irradiate from individuality to an entire community or (sub)culture, migrating towards the notion of “collective identity” / “collective self” – a notion that at certain moments in history and in certain places tends to be more operative than the individual self30. Through their display, the objects in Maricica’s museum trend towards and aspire after these qualities, but some of them have “handicaps” standing in their way. This is not at all about the museological “blunders”, about the syntax ruptures, not even about kitsch, since we have shown in the previous pages how the error may be understood and valorised in this type of museum narrative.

The “handicap” of the syntax conceived by Maricica resides in the quasi-absence of the stories that could have been associated with every single object. While the museum, in its totality, breaks the barriers of time through the tradition it is supposed to display, the objects are “silent” precisely because of the lack of a note of historicity and personality that they could have contained.

Moreover, if the route of each and every object could be documented and shown, besides Maricica’s stories and

25 Horia Bernea, op. cit., p. 23. 26 Horia Bernea, op. cit., p. 23.

26 Violette Morin apud Bonnot, Thierry, op. cit., p. 83.

27 Ibidem.

28 Bernea, Horia op. cit., p. 24.

29 Belk, Russel W. „Possessions and the Extended Self”, The Journal of Consumer Research, 15/2 (1988), pp. 139-168 30 Belk, Russel W. „Possessions and the Extended Self”, The Journal of Consumer Research, 15/2 (1988), pp. 139-168.

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benevolent demonstrations, it might be a “narrative fabric” - a support for the strictly material syntax.

Horia Bernea states that the objects, taken out of their organic context and emptied of their primary functions through museification within weak contexts, “grow weaker”, in their turn, they become artificial, therefore they must be helped: “I think it is useful to give them the chance to exist in an active space, in an open cultural space that would bring them out of the dormancy of the old symbolic-emotional comparisons. The object must become the agent through which we produce information” 31. His solution consists in the permanent, rhythmic dialogue between the strong and the weak object, making up a network of significations. This is, however, an intellectualist approach, which perhaps

would come in handy to the naïve museology only by accident, which we cannot count on a priori. On the other side, Russel W.Belk draws the attention on the fact that the museification gesture operates a kind of sacralisation of the object32 – therefore a consolidation of its meaning – because the museum itself is a temple of the modern world33, and the transfer of the object from its everyday organicity to the privileged array of other sacred objects would bestow this dimension upon it. In the case of the naïve museology, though, the connections that can enhance this effect can also blow it up, because they are, to a great extent, subject to accident. In the absence of narrativity as a strategy to “repair” the historical void of the discourse, the objects will but signify time itself, in an abstract manner 34.

Instead of conclusions: the Museum and the Peasant In the field of naïve museology there is an excess of meanings, generated by the freshness and spontaneity of the gesture, by the courage of the view that does not care about the error. On the other hand, this involves two kinds of voids: a constitutive void, supposed to be filled by the very curatorial gesture – an identitary void of someone in a state of “in between”, who turns to the past to search for their guiding landmarks; the other is a void of reception, which might be repaired by re-establishing, to a certain extent, the historicity, within a space emptied of time by the thirst for origins and authenticity, thus the past which is to be expressed being dynamited.

There are several causes which Vintilă Mihăilescu places at the origin of what he radically calls the disappearance of the peasantry in the Romanian space of the present: the dissolution of the community spirit as regards the propriety, as a consequence of communists depriving the peasants of their land and of cooperativization, the communist industrialisation and the forced and somehow false urbanisation of the peasant (the occurrence of the intermediary category of worker-tofter), followed by a fulminating exodus towards the rural space after December 1989, then by a reinstatement of the property without a sustainable agricultural plan focused on production and by the massive migration abroad, in search of work35. All these things must have bewildered the Romanian peasant, permanently separating him from his matrix: the land. In the anthropologist’s view, the peasant is a person intimately connected to the land, a non-mediated, codependent relationship is set between the two: the land needs to be worked by the 31 32 33 34 35

peasant in order for it to yield the crops and the peasant needs to work the land in order to eat and sustain himself economically. With this umbilical cord between the peasant and the land also comes a way of life and of looking at the world, around it an entire culture is woven.

Or, the more elements come between the body and the bare land, the more the umbilical cord breaks and the peasanthood dilutes. Perhaps not to that extent so as to speak about a disappearance, but definitely about a substantial dilution. Even if they are still intimately connected to their land and reclaim themselves as peasants, the persons in the rural environment who call themselves peasants will be a niche in an adverse system.

One of the effects of this change of paradigm is the normalisation of the museification gesture in the village.

Someone whose identity as a peasant is intrinsic and assumed, not extroverted and declaimed, would not recognise the necessity of a gesture of museification of their own life. They would possibly museify historical figures and events haloed in glory, from which they would “contaminate” themselves with prestige, they would museify facts that break the everyday life. But not the everyday life itself. As long as it is living, organic, as long as it flows naturally, why should one conserve it? Why exhibit it? The emergency behaviour regarding the facts of traditional culture has modern roots and represents an intellectualist approach on the archaic space. If the people of the place have absorbed this behaviour so as to present it as their own initiative, this being a reason for pride, it means we are not dealing anymore with peasants in the sense they state they are,

Bernea, Horia op. cit., p. 24 Belk, Russell W. The Role..., op. cit.

Rheims apud Belk, Russel W. ibidem.

Baudrillard, Jean Sistemul..., op. cit., p. 50.

Vintilă Mihăilescu, Nu mai există țăran român, available at http://adevarul.ro/news/societate/vintilamihailescu-nu-mai-exista-taran-roman-1_513786b300f5182b85d855f1/index.html (interview by Oana Dan; last consultation: 22.04.2015).

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but with post-peasants who cannot isolate themselves from the implications of a post-peasant society, which is looking into a modern future. If the more or less skeweyed sight is directed at the same time towards an idyllic past, identitarily assumed, it is because these people feel that they are losing something, that in the answer to the question “Who are we?” a threatening void is

growing. And the museified object tends to fill this void, as a discourse directed inwardly, because the object is a bearer of ghosts. And furthermore, maybe even a ghost aggregator, as long as it is able to evoke an idyllic past excised from evil and to offer the refreshing illusion of its prolongation up to a present not so rich in identity markers.

Classification of the objects in Maricica’s museum, by functional categories 1. Household industries • loom • shafts • slay • treadles • rollers • temple • urioc (warp) • raghilă (a type of comb for goats) • „combs” • wool • reel • shuttle • țăghii (fabrics) • „special” chair for the reel 2. Rooms / parts of the lodging • „the big room” • chiler (elderly’s room) • portar (door) • „blind” doors (without window) • „dairy” (kitchen) 3. Household objects • gas can • crintă (tub for the whey of the green cheese) • scales for weighing the green cheese • cabinet table (used to belong to the owners of the house) • feredeu (laundry tub) • kneading trough for flour straining • roller • blidar (open cupboard) • strain • gas can • botă (water tub) • „șâtar” (tub for milking the cow) • cow bell • scissors for sheep

4. Kitchen objects • trencher • wooden knife borsch bowls • cofiță (jar) • wooden spoons 5. Traditional peasant’s costumes • Girl’s apron (at the entrance) • Woman’s costume (in the bedroom) • Man’s costume (in the bedroom) 6. Furniture objects • Headboard bed (in the kitchen) • blidar (open cupboard) • Bourgeois-style desk (in the „big room”) • wall mats • mats • mirror • cabinet-table • beds with straw mattresses (in the bedroom) 7. Festive / holiday objects • buhai (musical instrument used in carolling, made of a cone-shaped barrel with a leather bottom, through which a horsehair tuft is inserted) • drum with sticks • bagpipe made of billy goat leather (at the entrance) • alpenhorn (wrapped in cherry-tree bark) 8. Ritual objects • Icon with basil 9. Medical / healing objects • cupping glasses (near the stove) 10. Infant care objects • feredeu (baby tub) • “little dumpling” (wrapped baby doll in the bedroom cradle ) 11. “Fantasy” objects (creativity of the museum narrative) • “little dumpling” (wrapped baby doll in the

(*** The objects were classified into categories in the order they appear in Maricica’s presentation discourse

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bedroom cradle) • „green cheese” (a rock wrapped in paper, with a textile thread playing the role of the whey) 12. Non-peasant objects • Clock with no batteries • Two new interior doors (non-original, replacements brought to the museum by Cornel Bercariu) • Bourgeois-style desk (in the “big room”)

• Clay knick-knack („for the sake of its beauty”) • Deer’s horn with two branches („for the sake of its beauty”) • “The Abduction from the Seraglio” wall mat (in the chiler) • Clay wall-plate, “Abundance of the house” type (in the bedroom, between the traditional costumes)

References

Specialised publications: Romanian Peasant’s Museum. 2008. Robii frumosului. Muzee şi colecții săteşti din România (Serfs of Beauty. Village Collections and Museums from Romania), Bucharest: Martor Baudrillard, Jean. 2005. Societatea de consum. Mituri şi structuri (The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures) Bucharest: Comunicare.ro (transl. Alexandru Matei) Baudrillard, Jean. 1996. Sistemul obiectelor (The System of Objects). Cluj: Echinox (transl. Horia Lazăr) Belk, Russel W., „The Role of Possessions in Constructing and Maintaining a Sense of Past”, NA – Advances in Consumer Research, 17(1990) Belk, Russel W., „Possessions and the Extended Self”, The Journal of Consumer Research, 15/2(1988) Bernea, Horia. 2010. Câteva gânduri despre muzeu, cantități, materialitate şi încrucişare (A Few Thoughts on the Museum, Quantities, Materiality and Intercrossing). f.l.: Liternet Publishing House Bonnot, Thierry. 2014. L’Attachement aux choses.

Paris: CNRS Editions Hobsbawm, Eric. 2012. The Invention of Tradition.

Cambridge: Cambrige University Press Nicolau, Irina. 2001. „Despre cădere, punere și așezare” (About Falling, Setting and Laying), in Talmeş-balmeş de etnologie şi multe altele (Hodge-podge of Ethnology and Many Other Things).

Bucharest: Ars Docendi Publishing House Pleșu, Andrei, „Despre un personaj cu nenumărate chipuri” (About a Character with Countless Faces=, Folio. MȚR’s Information Bulletin, 1(2001) (interview by de Silvia Cazacu) Poulot, Dominique. 2009. Musées et muséologie.

Paris : Editions La Découverte Thiesse, Anne-Marie.1999. La création des identités nationales. Europe XVIIIe-XXe siècle. Paris : Editions du Seuil Thiesse, Anne-Marie.1999. La création des identités nationales. Europe XVIIIe-XXe siècle. Paris : Editions du Seuil Online references: The Law on museums and public collections no. 311 / 8.07.2003 available at http://www.cimec.ro/muzee/lege/index.htm http://www.muzeultaranuluiroman.ro/istoric.html MIHĂILESCU, Vintilă, The Romanian Peasant no longer exists, available at http://adevarul.ro/news/societate/ vintilamihailescu-nu-mai-exista-taran-roman- 1_513786b300f5182b85d855f1/index.html (interview by Oana Dan)

Anca-Maria Pănoiu Romanian Peasant’s Museum anca.maria_p@yahoo.com

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Fig. 1. Museum of Agriculture, “Poiana” wooden church

THEMES AND FORMS OF EXPRESSION in the recent exhibitions of the Slobozia Museum of Agriculture ABSTRACT Abstract: Reaching the maturity of exploring and promoting Romanian national rural culture, the Slobozia Agricultural Museum continues, in the same tradition of preserving and revealing the essence of the heritage that is under its management, to choose a large variety of themes regarding its exhibits that are meant to enrich the thinking, imagination and sensitivity of the modern man. Intuition was the one that managed to survive over the last years, in spite of the financial issues, mostly because the museum is oriented, concerned and dedicated to its public, thus organizing event – exhibitions that contain many interactive activities (creative workshops, artistic moments, practical demonstrations of traditional cooking, etc.). These are supposed to not only develop specific skills, but also facilitate a better understanding of the language of the world of the museum. Therefore, this paper is going to focus on the ways of presenting the spiritual and material culture through temporary thematic and symbolic exhibitions that are all ready to answer the needs and interests of the visitors. Such exhibitions play also an important role in revitalizing the heritage and the Agricultural Museum itself, that is more and more preoccupied with the relationship and interference between the traditional world and the nowadays rapidly growing technological society.

KEY-WORDS: Slobozia Agricultural Museum, rural culture, exhibitions, traditional, practical demonstrations 42

Fig. 2. Lanz Bulldog tractor for sowing (made in 1939) and Rud Sack two-thrifts iron plough (1936)

The inauguration of the permanent exhibition, accompanied by the collection catalogue, has probably been the most important event from the establishment of the museum up to the present. The Museum of Agriculture was established by the Ialomiţa County Prefecture’s Decision no. 178/1990, under the Law no.

311/8.07.2003, and received the name “The National Museum of Agriculture”. On the 15th of November 2006 the law was republished, with no annexes, and the museum’s name remained “The Museum of Agriculture”. In 2011 efforts were made to return to the name “National Museum of Agriculture”, but the results are being delayed, due to bureaucracy.

The museum was officially opened for the public on the 25th of March 1996, thanks to the special efforts of the authorities, of the management and personnel of the museum at the time. The building, improper for a museum, particularly for an agricultural museum, which needs adjoining spaces, necessary for storage, demonstrations with agricultural machineries and equipment, fairs etc. made us conduct a pre-feasibility study that will allow the consolidation, re-arrangement and development of the museum spaces, of the storage houses, of the conservation and restoration workshops, which will grant this museum its proper importance, alongside with a proper museum circuit,

with the purpose to present a valuable and diverse national heritage to the public.

During the last years, there has been a special focus on the consolidation of the material resources, on the exhibition exploitation, through a programme that comprises the circulation of an important part of the heritage owned by the museum, on the editorial exploitation through exhibition catalogues, on the conservation, restoration and maintenance of the exhibits, on the professional training of the personnel, through a project of the County Council of Ialomiţa, on the dialogue and exchange of experience with 43

Fig. 3. Fuierea’s Mill museums, cultural institutions and organisations, education institutions with similar institutions from abroad, via the International Association of Agricultural Museums, on the relationships with the media, the local and national TV broadcasters, on the well-advised use of the budget, in accordance with the management project approved by the County Council of Ialomiţa. All these things and many more have permanently kept the Museum of Agriculture in the public conscience.

The “Poiana” church, where all the ChristianOrthodox services for the Annunciation Parish have been performed since 2000, is, at the same time, a tourists’ attraction not only locally and nationally, but also internationally. In the spring of 2011, all the administrative services of the church were taken over – naturally – by the Annunciation Parish.

The Model Farm of Perieţi, with a 5.4 ha of land and 18 buildings, was donated to the museum in 2005.

Established in 1936, the Perieţi Farm becomes a Model Farm and a landmark in the context of Romanian agriculture’s modernisation in 1945. The absence of coherent projects approved by the Direction for 44

Heritage and the National Commission of Historical Monuments, the lack of a realistic vision on the restoration of these buildings and the delay of some works that were absolutely necessary resulted in the ruin of some buildings.

The historical monument “Agricultural Farm Ensemble, Perieţi commune, Ialomiţa County” was endangered, along with the heritage objects stored here. Therefore, by the Order no. 2656/16.11.2012, issued by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage, the building of the Perieţi Agricultural Farm, having the legal status of historical monument, group “B”, code IL-IIa-B-14153 in the List of Historical Monuments was partially declassified. At present there is a feasibility study, which allows the institution to access nonrefundable European funds, because the county of Ialomiţa does not have the financial availability to support such a vast project.

The movable heritage of the museum comprises 13,416 exhibits, structured in representative collections: tools, agricultural machineries and industrial archaeology installations, ethnography (agricultural tools made in rural workshops and households, means of transport,

Fig. 4. Pillar of the Sky

Fig. 5. The hardware workshop

Fig. 6. The Village Hall

household objects, furniture, pottery, textiles, costumes, props, customs), memorial history, art, religion, literature, natural sciences. Our duty is to value, within exhibitions, the heritage objects, priceless through their artistic, documentary, historical, scientific, cultural and memorial value, purchased from all the country’s ethnographic regions. Undoubtedly, a simple, synthetic imaginary foray through the exhibits is not sufficient to catch the technical, creative, spiritual richness of the human genius, and this “national specificity”, defined in academic books, does not offer enough information for us to know the intimate fibre of each object, but nonetheless we invite the visitor to 45

Fig. 7. The Bakery reflect, to try to imagine, even for a few moments, the old-time atmosphere of the Romanian village, the spectacle in the village lanes during holidays, the almost forgotten customs and traditions, - signs, symbols and testimonials showing that everything seen here really existed once, that it is not just a story.

These are all memories that must be carefully kept in our souls, and the museum, through its objects, may awake our nostalgia for our childhood years or our grandparentsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; youth, to stir our curiosity to know more Fig. 8. The Photo Studio

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about what once was and never will be anymore.

The Museum of Agriculture organised such a general exhibition, which includes objects from all the collections. We engaged in an endeavour requiring considerable efforts, we had difficulties in re-tracing the history of some objects, which, unfortunately, became heritage objects without anyone knowing minimum pieces of information about them (owner, dating, origin etc.), but we hope that, through this

Fig.9. Inside a peasant’s house.

The work room

Fig. 10. The old times’ kitchen exhibition, we will value the exceptional collections of the museum. We mainly focused on the following collections: tools and machineries for land-working, old agricultural machineries, means of transport, Viticulture, Horticulture, Apiculture, Grain barns, Household objects, Traditional textile instruments, Textiles, Trades and Crafts, fire-extinguishing means, Glassware, Pottery, Metrology, Clocks, Photo cameras, Vintage photos .

Our mission is to create, by valuing the cultural, historical and heritage resources that we possess, a “visible” institution, a renowned, appreciated and visited museum, which shall ensure its future existence and its funding in particular. Through this exhibition project we are trying to take the step from a traditional, rigid structure, to a flexible one, adapted to the environment, to the needs of the visitors, of the members of the local community – permanently concerned with the quality of the museum-exhibiting

act – which will also ensure the increase of the county’s and region’s attractiveness.

The Museum of Agriculture is at present the only agricultural museum in the country and it has the responsibility to offer quality, professionalism, freshness and continuity. These are dimensions of our institution which give it cultural representativeness, prestige and exemplarity, all of which being our message within the current Romanian cultural life.

Prof. dr. Gheorghe Petre Museum of Agriculture 20031, Slobozia, B-dul Matei Basarab, nr.10, Tel./Fax: 0243-231991, e-mail: mna_slobozia@yahoo.com; www.muzeulagriculturii.ro

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Fig. 1. Mureşans’ House Interior – 2007-2015. The permanent exhibition

ARTS & HISTORY a new vision for an old museum

ABSTRACT Art&History - A New Vision for An Old Museum. This article presents the nuances in defining a museum in relation to its museum-collection. Usually, a museum is the reflection of its collections, but sometimes, in particular cases, the exhibition may not be only the reflection of its collections. In our case study, Mureșianu House Museum from Brașov, Transilvania, we describe a museum that is translating from a classic memorial museum to a modern museum, adapted to the requirements of contemporaneity.

KEY-WORDS: Mureșianu House Museum Braşov, 2015, modernization, museum, collection, modern museum space

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Fig. 2. Mureşans’ House Interior 2007-2015. The permanent exhibition

The Mureşans’ House Museum in Braşov is one of Romania’s most important memorial museums . After having established itself through community projects and educational activities marked by excellence in the last decade, in 2015 it started its re-orientation towards a more intense activity of promotion of contemporary culture and arts, at the same time keeping its component of exploitation of the classical heritage. The paper presents the manner of reorganising the museum spaces and the re-positioning/rebranding campaign, respectively.

The museum-collection relation is vital in the economy of our specific activity. „Museums «as holders of primary evidence...» have a «...primary duty to preserve [their] collections...», to acquire objects with the «... expectation of permanency...» and to «...keep them for posterity».

However, in some situations such as «living» or «working» museums, it may be necessary to regard «at least part of their collection as replaceable or renewable»”1. ICOM’s Code of Museums repeatedly reasserts that these collections must be preserved, conserved and documented in an appropriate manner.2 1 Donahue, Paul F. (2004), p. 4 2 idem

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Fig. 3. Interior of the Mureşans’ House, before 2007. The permanent exhibition.

However, there are also a series of exceptions, among which we believe that the Braşov “Mureşans’ House” Museum is included: „There are many exceptions to this definition and to the traditional concept of a museum as a collecting institution. Examples are one-object museums, such as a ship museum or a house museum with a plethora of culturally associated objects, the avocationalists’ museum that puts its member’s models on exhibition but does not concern itself with acquisition, preservation or research, the art museum that appears not to have acquired a permanent collection – [see also Andrew J. Pekarik, „Museums as Symbols”, in „Curator” 46/2, April 2003, pp. 132-135] – the virtual museum with virtual objects, and the science centre or children’s museum with no collection”3. We believe that the museum presented in our case study may go in this direction.

In order to fully analyse the position of the Braşov museum, we must refer to the definition of museums, as stipulated by the Law 311/2003: “The museum is the public cultural institution, in the service of society, which acquires, conserves, researches, restores, communicates and exhibits

the tangible and intangible heritage of human communities’ existence and evolution, as well as of the environment”4. Obviously, a memorial museum’s function of collecting is significantly reduced by the very nature of the collection’s origin – usually a donation of the personality’s/personalities’ heirs or family, by the number – limited both in space and time – of these material testimonials, respectively.

Going onward with our arguments, a natural question arises: how does the operation of such a museum respond to the strategic priorities of the field of Culture, as described in the “Sectoral strategy in the field of culture”? This document – vital for the direction of the national cultural phenomenon – is set within the timeframe of the period 20142020. The sectoral objectives focus on the National Cultural Heritage (both movable and immovable, as well as intangible) and on the Contemporary Creation. Furthermore, there are also the horizontal objectives, i.e.: The consolidation of the institutional capacity, the cultural education and professional training, the Cultural intervention, as well as the Development of the cultural infrastructure5.

3 Ibidem 4 Law 311/2003 [Online] Available at: http://www.dreptonline.ro/legislatie/legea_muzeelor_colectiilor_publice.php 5 CCDC. (f.d.)

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Fig. 4. Interior of the Mureşans’ House – 2015. Temporary exhibition

The new museum vision put forward for the Mureşans’ House, as stipulated by the management project for the years 2014-20196, is holistic, integrating the majority of the sectoral strategic priorities for the field of culture. Thus, at the end of this process of re-positioning and rebranding, the Braşov museum must become a modern museum, prepared for major cultural projects, with exhibition spaces able to accommodate the exhibitions of the present and of the future, with a reasonable and successful alternation of the classical heritage themes with those of the contemporary creation and with an increased attention given to the cultural education, all of which meant to lead to the institutional consolidation.

The Braşov “Mureşans’ House” Museum was established in 1968, following a donation of the descendants of Iacob Mureşianu (1812-1887), member of the Romanian Academy, pedagogue, journalist and exceptional politician of the 19th century Transylvania. The name of the museum is related to the name of one of the most important Romanian cultural dynasty, which gave us exceptional

teachers, journalists, politicians, writers, historians and musicians. The museum’s “pièces de résistance” are the few documents left behind by Andrei Mureşanu (among which a 19th century transcription of the poem “Echo”, today Romania’s official national anthem), as well as a massive family archive (containing more than 25,000 cultural heritage goods), accompanied by a series of furniture pieces, plastic and decorative art, musical instruments.

Initially, the museum looked like a “classical” memorial museum, with furniture belonging to the family, completed with showcases and wooden panels, where explanatory texts and documents were exhibited. This museum had never been adapted to the exhibition requirements specific to a classical museum, i.e. a modern illuminating system, doubled by the obturation of the natural light etc. Moreover, the prolonged display of documents from the 19th century did not comply with the guidelines of conservation and exhibition of the movable cultural heritage7.

6 Rus (2014) 7 According to GD 1546/2003. [Online] Available at: http://www.bcu-iasi.ro/docs/HG1546-2003.pdf.

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Fig. 5. Interior of the Mureşans’ House – before 2007. The permanent exhibition.

Fig. 7.

Fig. 6. and Fig. 7. Interior of the Mureşans’ House - 2015. Rembrandt@Braşov temporary exhibition

In 2007, the permanent exhibition of the museum was remade according to a new exhibition vision, which derived from the idea of recomposing the atmosphere of the period, specific to a civil lodging of the second half of the 19th century. Thus, the exhibition was based on a new concept: the panels and showcases were removed, the walls were covered in wallpaper in 5 halls out of the 8 of the permanent exhibition, and only the furniture, the 52

plastic and decorative art elements from the initial donation were kept. In addition to these, there were three permanent exhibition halls, where cultural heritage goods representative for other personalities of Braşov’s cultural life, such as George Dima and Paul Richter, were exhibited. One of the halls was exclusively dedicated to the technological evolution of music-playing objects (music boxes, phonographs, gramophones, record-players or harmonicas). Two

Fig. 8.Mureşans’ House Interior – 2015. The permanent exhibition

other exhibition halls were dedicated to temporary exhibitions.

All these factors considered, the radical solution of changing the exhibition spaces of the museum was adopted, as follows: the new temporary exhibition space of the museum has 8 halls, connected through a long corridor, with a space of more than 220 sq m, and approximately 90 m of panels; the permanent exhibition has three halls allocated, with approximately 100 square metres.

The new permanent exhibition of the museum contains approximately 500 objects freely displayed – cultural heritage goods and replicas (objects and photographs). In two of the exhibition halls the idea of reconstructing the epoch (19th century) was observed, while the third room is dedicated to the two centuries’ evolution of music-playing equipment.

The exhibition space is equipped with a mixed illumination system (incandescent light-bulb lamps and LED spots), as well as with sound-playing devices (classical music and audio guiding, in Romanian and French).

Fig. 9. Mureşans’ House Interior – 2015. The permanent exhibition

The new temporary exhibition halls are the largest and most modern exhibition space of Braşov. They are equipped with a modern illumination system, with railed LED spots (15 W each, 94 pieces in total). The natural light was obturated by blinds at every window of the building. This space is meant to respond to the new organisational mission of the museum, as formulated by its management, for the 53

years 2014-2019: “Our mission is to interpret and celebrate the past within a context of the present and of the future, in a manner adapted as much as possible to the needs of modern tourism. The Braşov “Mureşans’ House” Museum exists with the purpose to show a possible human model to follow.

The people of today’s Braşov must know how the people of old times’ Braşov were, and this museum permanently reminds them that the future has an ancient heart.

The Mureşans and their contemporaries (Gheorghe Dima, Paul Richter, Ioan and Ştefan Baciu etc.) were a model of multicultural urban civilisation, and this museum will try to bestow this spirit upon the young generation, by initiating community partnerships and projects, with extra-budgetary financing, as well as by setting-up exhibitions adapted to the expectations of the public and of the tourists of Braşov”8. Therefore, the new exhibition space was properly prepared for the first temporary exhibition

that re-opened the museum on the 5th of October: „Rembrandt@Brașov”. This exhibition contains 273 stamps made in the 19th century at the National Library of France, replicas of the original works of the great Dutch painter. The collection is the property of Mr. Thomas Emmerling, who had the amiability to bring this exhibition to Braşov, after having been in Cluj-Napoca, Timișoara, Iași and Câmpulung Muscel. The exhibition was promoted appropriately during the pre-opening period, by means of banners, posters, stickers, electronic billboards, radio and TV spots.

In conclusion, Romanian museums can and must adapt their exhibition discourse to the needs of the communities they operate in, by permanently pursuing the strategic national cultural priorities, in a manner as integrating and holistic as possible, prepared for the alternative promotion of the national cultural heritage, as well as of the contemporary creation, in a modern and attractive way.

Bibliography:

„Casa

Centre for Research and Consultancy in the Field of Culture n.d. Strategia sectorială în domeniul culturii şi patrimoniului național pentru perioada 20142020 (Sectoral strategy in the field of culture and national heritage for the period 2014-2020) [Online] Available at: http://www.cultura.ro/uploads/files/ STRATEGIA_%20SECTORIALA_ IN_DOMENIUL_ CULTURII_2014-2020.pdf

“Mureşans’ House” Museum, Braşov, 2014-2019,

Mureşenilor”

(Management

Project,

MS.

Donahue, Paul F. „Reevaluating the ICOM Definition of the Museum”. Focus 2 (2004), pp. 4-5 [Online] Available at: http://icom.museum/fileadmin/ user_ upload/pdf/ICOM_News/2004-2/ENG/ p4_2004-2. pdf GD 1546/2003. [Online] Available at: http://www. bcu-iasi.ro/docs/HG1546-2003.pdf.

Law no. 311/2003 [Online] Available at: http:// www.dreptonline.ro/legislatie/legea_muzeelor_ colectiilor_publice.php Rus, Valer. 2014. Proiect de management. Muzeul 90 Rus (2014)

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Dr. Valer Rus Mureşans’ House” Museum Brașov, Piața Sfatului 25, Brașov, code 500025 rus.valer@gmail.com

THE CURATOR: WHAT’S HIS USE?

ABSTRACT The article analyses the terminological difference between the existing term, “museographer” and the more recent term in use, “curator”, as well as their descriptions as job requirements in Romania and abroad. The need for an official recognition of the “curator” is questioned, under a brief overview of the current circumstances that could have led to the necessity of introducing a new term or a new occupation – the curator, along with a critical approach on the market exigencies and available tools and resources in the curatorial work in Romania. After identifying several major deficiencies that could interfere with the quality of the curatorial act, the article does not attempt to find solutions to these particular problems, but suggests ways of overcoming existing obstacles instead, in an achievable manner, stating that issues lay in changing perspective, rather than in amending terminology.

KEY-WORDS: curator, museum professions, museum job description, museum exhibition, exhibition planning.

„Curator”, with its meaning in museography, which we are tackling in this paper, is a new term in Romania. It sometimes tends to replace the more modest term of „museographer”, which lacks the aura of modernity and intellectualism. And it helps us compensate for the lack of a term applicable to other types of exhibitions than museum-exhibitions, quite rare until not so long ago.

It is quite useless to say that „curator” entered our language through the Anglo-Saxon connection, which has an increasing influence not only in the language, but also in the everyday life.

However, let us remember that the term is not new in the Romanian language, it has an old legal meaning – that of a person in charge with managing the possessions and/or the interests of another person.

More precisely, in charge with their good management.

If we take a look at the „job description” of the French, British, American or Italian curator, for instance, we notice that the description of the tasks overlaps with the job description of the local museographer (from whom the Classification of Occupations expects quite a lot). So far, there is no difference between what we expect from a curator and what we expect

from a museographer: general conservation, inventory, research, interpretation and exploitation of the heritage, for the well-known and renowned education and enjoyment purposes. Here we should also add: propaganda and „soft power” or cultural diplomacy purposes.

So: where does the need to coin a new term alongside the official „museographer” come from?

I dare say that it comes from the need for modernisation. And from the comparison of our curatorial products with those in other, luckier countries.

What do we lack? First of all, the spectacular. The vastness. The novelty. The complexity. The (material) means. The boldness. And, unfortunately, creativity.

All the above-listed are observable in the visible area of the curatorial activity. The research, the conservation, the inventory are not accessible to the public, either physically or for their evaluation. My personal experience has shown to me that here we do not have major or fundamental breaches, as our museums are the creation of a bureaucratic, authoritarian state – not necessarily in a negative sense of the word.

However, what can be seen is subject to the evaluation of all the beholders and to the test of time, a more 55

and more accelerated time.

And what can be seen, after all? Except, maybe, for the painting and the decorative art objects, all the exhibits in the museum exhibitions are extracted from their initial, authentic, utilitarian context. They are subject to our current interpretation, which simply alters their initial meaning.

And this alteration through interpretation cannot serve objectivism, it remains in relativism, serving circumstantial choices, which can be evaluated according to circumstantial criteria. In order to satisfy, it has to adjust itself to the current taste.

This does not mean that we shall choose to simply satisfy or to satisfy the taste of the majority. But nowadays success is defined through quantity, through number of visitors and, oftentimes, through financial profitability.

Let us set foot on the path of satisfying the taste of the majority this time, and not on the road to recognition within the guild, for instance, within less numerous elitist environments or niche audiences.

The current taste: visual, very visual, fast, cooler than the competition, with easy and accessible information, technologically adapted (and digitalized). Communicated and marketed following the rules of the market economy. Namely, aggressive.

What prevents us from having more successful exhibitions in our museums?

In order to figure out an answer to this question, let us see first the instruments of the curator-museographer, the ingredients of an exhibition, in short: • in a biased manner, I would choose to start my listing with the exhibits, either heritage objects or not; • the exhibition space is in close competition with the exhibits, with all its coordinates: dimension, display devices, illumination, microclimate conditions, ways of access; • the time necessary for setting up and implementing the exhibition project; • the meta-exhibition materials; • the available financial and administrative resources; • the target public

strategy at central level, drawn-up by the specialised authorities, there are no detailed exhibition policies, not even in the well-known „management projects”.

Drawing up a substantial exhibition takes time. The annual budgetary exercise is not the most fortunate frame for drawing up, preparing and implementing an exhibition project. Not to mention the fact that the route of the „approval” of a project is rather a way to frame the project within the existent budget and not the other way round.

The museographer should adapt to the institution’s management contract, should anxiously wait for the approval of the annual budget and diligently write down, in the „risks” section, the data of the budgetary revisions.

Therefore, given all these premises, it is somehow predictable that we shall lean towards less costly exhibitions, which would require minimum administrative and human resources and a short time to implement. The results match these premises: small or minor projects.

How can we then compensate for these discouraging premises? I suggest two treatments: aggressive communication, particularly by online means, and a little „film direction” – the maximum exploitation of the object’s interpretation, the novelty of object selection, as well as giving up the classical structures of the display.

Therefore, what is the use of the curator, terminologically speaking? It may be about highlighting the value of public valorisation of the museum activity.

An additional specialisation of the types of museographers may be useful, but at least as useful would be the revision of the exhibition policies and of the curatorial way of thinking.

All these ingredients condition each other and limit the curator’s freedom of choice and creativity.

Under the current circumstances, few are those who can afford, financially and logistically, to include in a display objects that do not belong to the heritage of their own institution.

The exhibition-related policies are absent. There is no 56

Alis Vasile British Council România 14, Calea Dorobanţilor, sector 1, Bucarest vasile_alis@yahoo.com

I VISIT. I SEE. I UNDERSTAND. Reflections on the curatorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s role in influencing the visitor

ABSTRACT Museum visitation is relatively low around the world, one of the main justifications given is the poor quality of the museum offer. What could museums do in this context, not only to increase the number of people who enter their exhibitions, but also to increase their socio-cultural impact, namely to achieve their complex missions in good conditions. This paper proposes the investigation of the points of reference a curator of an exhibition should consider when designing a successful exhibition. The proposed solution is to adopt a marketing vision, taking into account both museum visitors and other stakeholders. The landmarks are multiple: the characteristics of the public, its motivations, the interests of contemporary society, the discourses that animate the public space, the context in which the visit takes place and such. The curator is not only a connoisseur, a protector and promoter of heritage. She must be a good marketer, understanding the visitors, and open to their specificities.

KEY-WORDS: Exhibition planning, museum marketing, visitors and exbitions, heritage interpretation.

The museum visitor Museums have become animated, they have changed their ways to communicate and relate with the visitors. In order to visit some museums or exhibitions, the public must wait in a queue for hours.

Many museums report higher and higher numbers of visitors, and the interest in these institutions seems to be rising all around the world. In Asia blockbustertype exhibitions are organised, which attract even more visitors than in Europe or the United States.

In the Arab world imposing museums are opened, and the great museums of the world contribute with collections and open branches in this region.

However, the cultural consumption studies show that the visiting numbers do not seem to have modified significantly. In the European Union, for example, in 2013, 63% of the population had not been to a museum in the previous year, a 5% increase as

compared to 2007 1.

In Romania, only 21% of the population (aged at least 15) has been to a museum or gallery at least once a year, 6% less as compared to 2007. The percentages for other cultural activities are: 20% have been to a cinema at least once, 33% have visited a historical monument or site (palace, castle, church etc.), 25% have been to a concert, 17% have visited a public library, 15% have been to the theatre and 11% have attended an opera/ballet performance2. A low cultural participation was recorded overall, and the cultural practice index is much lower than the EU average.

Only 7% of the population has a high or very high index as compared to the overall 18% European

91 EC (2013a), p. 9 92 EC (2013b), p. 1

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average. Moreover, 55% of the Romanians have a low cultural participation in 2013, 4% higher than the average of 20073. This situation may be related to the economic crisis between the two issues of the Eurobarometers.

The Cultural Consumption Barometer conducted in 2015 in Romania8 shows that the most important values of the museum visitor are education, leisure, relaxation and culture. These values are different from the main values of the non-visitor.

As we can see from these figures, museum visiting seems to be more attractive than other cultural activities, but the most attractive cultural sites seem to be the palaces, the castles etc. – historical monuments and sites in general. Oftentimes, they are visited during vacations and various trips. The question is whether the museums also fall into the category of vacation visits for many Romanians.

The main reasons they do not visit museums are, in decreasing order: lack of time – 32%, limited choices/ poor quality of the offer in the locality of residence – 26%, lack of interest – 22%, expensive access tickets – 12%4. A lower percentage of the Romanians – as compared to other Europeans – state that they are not interested in museums (22% as compared to the European average of 35%). The least interested are young and elderly people, as well as those with a low education level5.

In order to design exhibitions with impact, it is important to consider not only the visitors’ characteristics and motivations, but also how the visitor decodes the messages conveyed by the museums. We must take into account that the visitors do not come to the museum alone, but they are accompanied by friends, colleagues, relatives and that social interaction is relevant in the context of a museum visit9. A visitor does not perceive an exhibition only from the perspective of the informational content received, but also from the viewpoint of the associated experience, mediated by the group they belong to at the moment of the visit10.

An important indicator for a better exhibition design and for an interesting interpretation of the heritage, respectively, is the visitors’ motivation. We can list a great variety of visiting reasons: education, curiosity, socialisation, family habits, interest in certain subjects etc.

The public has also certain expectations from the museums, according to these reasons. In general, the public expects the museums to be both educational and entertaining6. Furthermore, the museum is often associated with spending one’s time in an agreeable, interesting and even unique manner, during holidays7.

The public’s expectations from a museum visit can also be related to the general values of the visitor.

3 EC (2013b), p. 1 4 EC (2013b), p. 2 5 EC (2013b), p. 2 6 Hooper-Greenhill (1994), p. 67 7 Hooper-Greenhill (1994) 8 Croitoru & Becuț (2015), p. 151 9 Falk & Dierking (2000) 10 Falk & Dierking (2000); Lehn, Heath & Knoblauch (2001) 11 Zbuchea & Ivan (2013)

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The behaviour within the museum generally varies depending on gender, age and education level. Youngsters interact more with the exhibits and exhibition-related equipment, with the new technologies integrated into the museum narrative, and they have expectations in this respect. As far as Romanians are concerned, we can generally speak about two main types of approaches: the „selective” visitor and the „bird’s eye” visitor11.

The first category comprises persons with a high education level, who visit the museum selectively, according to their interests and knowledge, who are not very interested in the new technologies and are willing to participate in the museum’s educational programmes. The „bird’s eye” visitors try to learn as much as possible from the available information, use of new technologies included; they are customers of the museum’s shop. This second category of visitors is more numerous than the former.

Interpretation of the museum heritage.

What the curator does. What the visitor perceives.

The interpretation of the museum heritage and the display of the latter in an exhibition are based on a complex and interdisciplinary endeavour of scientific research. Many times, this process is not simple and it is influenced by the values assumed by the researchers, as well as by the position of the heritage within the society, at a certain moment – which is well-illustrated by one of the most famous works of art in the world: Venus de Milo12.

The manner of presenting the results of the research to the public should be closer to the visitors’ language and interests. It is the successful exhibitions, easily „accessible”, both mentally and physically, that make the visitors have special experiences. Reaching this goal is not easy, not only because of the logistical limitations or other objective elements, but also because subjective matters, pertaining to the management of some museums or to the curators of some exhibitions. Twenty years ago, HooperGreenhill noted, probably referring to the situation in Great Britain: Among some curators there is still a great fear that, by facilitating the visitors’ understanding of the ideas represented by the collections and approached by the exhibitions, the fall on a slope of commercialisation will begin, a slope of low academic quality, of easy interpretation and superficial entertainment. This fear must be converted into the understanding and appreciation of the desire of a significant number of people to like museums and to find them both useful and entertaining13.

This appreciation is, undoubtedly, still valid for museums from many countries of the world, including Romania.

A well-designed exhibition creates an experience of immersion for the visitors, by engaging their senses, stimulating their intellect and liberating their imagination14.

When this goal is reached, the importance of the visitor in the process of designing the exhibitions is once again highlighted.

Adopting a marketing approach – focused on the museum visitor – when designing, setting up and communicating an exhibition yields numerous beneficial effects15. We mention only a few of them: choosing a perspective on the subject that should be interesting and enticing from the public’s point of view, setting up an ergonomic exhibition – which should not overburden the visitors, allowing them to focus on the content of ideas –, attracting a higher number of visitors by means of integrated marketing and communication campaigns etc. In the end, the marketing approach helps the respective exhibition be efficient, it contributes to ensuring the expected impact among the public.

However, we mention that the process of setting up a „visitor-centred” exhibition is a difficult one. On the one hand, it is about a series of objective difficulties, such as not knowing the visitors too well and the multiple obstacles related to carrying out complex studies regarding the visitors. On the other hand, the visitors’ reaction to a theme and to an exhibition is extremely subjective and contextualised. It is very difficult to know the public’s interpretation of the heritage and to design an exhibition that will achieve the respective museum experience16.

A possible model to be adapted is IPOP: Ideas– People– Objects– Physical.17 These are relevant markers to be considered when designing an exhibition. The ideas refer to the knowledge represented in the information and proposed interpretations. The people refer to other people’s lives, as captured in stories, biographies, movies, photographs etc.

The objects are the artefacts, as exhibited in the displays, as well as elements of aesthetical and descriptive nature. The physical aspects are related to movement, touch, signals etc. By using these

12 Anghel (2006) 13 Hooper-Greenhill (1994), p. 113 14 Beghetto (2014), p. 1 15 Zbuchea (2014) 16 Beghetto (2014), p. 1 17 Beghetto (2014), p. 2

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markers, the curators can structure the experiences with a view to attracting and engaging the visitors.

Most of the time, there is a fault line between the way an exhibition was planned and the way it is perceived. In this context, it is difficult to obtain a certain reaction from the public18. A method to diminish this difference is the cooperation with an interdisciplinary team that would not only ensure a more complex and interesting result for more segments of public, but would also reduce the subjective elements and the limits specific to each and every research field.

When designing an exhibition, the curator should cooperate with an entire team of professionals, among whom there should be a marketer or at least a communication specialist. An exhibition may be associated with a marketing strategy. This could help in defining the target public more clearly and, depending on the latter, in adopting the most suitable approach: a strategy focused on a well-defined target public, a differentiated strategy that presents several approaches customised on a reduced number of public segments or an undifferentiated strategy, addressing the public in a unifying manner. The selection of the most efficient alternative depends on the characteristics of the exhibition and on the assumed objectives, on the resources available to the museum/curator, as well as on the specificity of the visitors, of other stakeholders and of the museum market.

When designing a museum exhibition, we recommend that the following principles be considered19: justification, scientific foundation of the theme, determining the target public, association of multiple significations, interdisciplinarity, interactivity, incitement to debate, offering additional services, ensuring an agreeable leisure. Obviously, a great part of these principles are visitor-centred. They take into account the fact that the museum of the present is a dynamic, visitor-oriented museum, it is a participatory museum20. As a matter of fact, a large part of the public expects the contemporary museum to be interactive, exciting, offering numerous services for the personal comfort, stimulating for the mind and senses, offering entertainment – within the specific 18 Lehn, Heath & Knoblauch (2001) 19 Zbuchea (2014) 20 Simon (2010) 21 Christidou (2013)

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context and its related limitations.

In this context, the heritage interpretation, made by means of an exhibition, should be focused on the visitor: their current knowledge, their interests, the possible current public debates etc. We draw the attention on the fact that the marketing approach – i.e. considering the public’s needs and specificity – must not be considered solely when designing an exhibition. There are many services and public programmes related to an exhibition and they must take the same perspective into consideration.

While visiting a museum, the visitors interact both with the heritage and with the group they came with, in order to understand the heritage better. In the process of heritage interpretation by the visitor three main types of interactions were identified21.

First of all, the visitors feel the need to share something with the others, even to be the group’s centre of attention, to make an impression on the other members of the group. Starting from the text proposed by the museum (the labels), the visitors, in their turn, interpret the heritage by filtering the respective information or even reproducing it. The second type of reaction is drawing the attention on a certain aspect, on their own story. The third type of reaction is the animation of the collection, the representation of an exhibition stance by using their own bodies. This way, an exhibition is subjectively interpreted by a visitor, according both to their own person, and to the members of the group they are visiting the museum with. At first, the visitors tend to identify the heritage and then the process of creating significations is triggered. This may be correlated with two important ideas, relevant for the better design of an exhibition. Firstly, the information conveyed in a formal manner is highly relevant to the visitors. Secondly, the visitors acknowledge the museum’s authority and wish to achieve personal development by absorbing and individually interpreting the information offered by the museum.

Oftentimes we can also notice a specialisation of the role of each person in the group (a visitor reads the labels, another interprets the images, while another interacts with the equipment available within the exhibition). We should also consider the fact that some visitors manipulate and transform

the significations associated with an exhibition/an exhibit in order to get some kind of reaction from the group they are visiting that exhibition with, or in other social contexts22.

An exhibition carries out the interpretation of the museum heritage mainly for educational purposes, but other aspects may be observed, of a social nature, for instance. The educational valences determine the impact of an exhibition. This impact grows if the display of the heritage is associated with other elements, pertaining both to distance learning and to face to face education, such as workshops, conferences, museum theatre, drawing, documentaries etc23. All these allow the interpretation and the better and more complex understanding of the heritage and themes, respectively, by means of engaging the public, of generating experiences and exchange of experiences for the visitors. Therefore, it is recommended that an exhibition be dynamic, interactive and connected to a series of public programmes, interesting for the visitors and other categories of public.

Not all the public categories are attracted to a certain exhibition out of educational reasons. The visitors use the museums in many ways24. For instance, some visitors aim at validating their socio-political opinions and noticing to what extent the contemporary society perceives the respective realities; legitimation may be a purpose. The museum itself may have other goals; it may aim at making its space a space for public debates25.

Depending on the theme, the visitors also relate emotionally to an exhibition – and this is an element that influences the way of interpreting the exhibited heritage. The motivations, the manner of relating to an exhibition, the interpretation of the exhibited heritage also depend on the ethnical and social profile of the visitors, who make connections between their previous knowledge and the experiences and themes of the exhibition they visit26.

The traditional approach is associated with the focus on collections, such as the option to display the rarest and most spectacular pieces, the most

scientifically valuable pieces; these are valued firstly for their scientific characteristics, as relatively decontextualised objects, in a more traditional vision.

Due to this approach, some visitors might have difficulties in perceiving these heritage objects as something else, different from the special objects on a pedestal that they are, likely interesting, surely having an intrinsic value, but existing in a universe that never crosses the visitors’ lives.

A marketing approach in designing an exhibition requires that the latter should focus not only on the visitors, but also on other stakeholders when defining the theme, the content, and even when selecting the heritage to be exhibited. By focusing on the stakeholders, the heritage may come to life, it may be endowed with social values and may enter the personal universe of the visitors and communities, it may make them relate directly and subjectively to the museum heritage and to the theme proposed by an exhibition.

The set-up of an exhibition depending on the stakeholders is quite a difficult process, but this approach may result in a growth of the exhibition’s impact, it may facilitate the accomplishment of the respective exhibition’s mission. By stakeholder we mean any person or organisation that influences or is influenced by the activity of the museum. Any exhibition has several stakeholders27, but not all of them have the same „weight”, i.e. the relationship between them and the museum is not as close in all the cases. Some stakeholders may influence the activity of the museum to a greater extent, as compared to others. Some are more interested in an exhibition/theme than others. Among the most relevant stakeholders – in relation to an exhibition – we mention: the visitors, the local communities, NGOs, and amateurs/researchers interested in the theme of the respective exhibition. Each of these segments of public may relate in a personal manner to the suggested exhibition, in many cases through an exigent eye-glass. Each of these stakeholders has different perspectives when analysing the exhibition: curiosity, passion, prior knowledge in the field, social/ political interests etc.

22 Lehn, Heath & Knoblauch (2001) 23 Hooper-Greenhill (1994), p. 143 24 Smith (2014) 25 Uchill (2012) 26 Smith (2014)

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The museum experience is the result of both the public’s characteristics and interests and of the manner of interaction with the exhibits. The visitor may build a personal relationship with the objects, thus introducing elements like emotions, personal memories and prior knowledge28 into the evaluation of the exhibition. In this context, the response to the messages of the museum is subjective. Furthermore, other categories of public – besides the visitors – react and subjectively relate to an exhibition, as regards both its theme and the exhibits and the manner of presentation of the heritage.

The objects of the museum’s collections have a multitude of significations, both for the visitors and for other various categories of stakeholders29. Each object is decoded differently by different persons, its associated experiences are different from person to person. In this context, a question arises: What is the value and authentic signification of the heritage? A multitude of factors are considered: the characteristics, the signification, the image and the stories behind the object influence both the way an object is used in the exhibition by the curator, and the way the public decodes its message.

Depending on the way the various categories of public (re)interpret the heritage included in an exhibition, and on their characteristics, the visitors may be drawn to interact with the museum. The latter is nowadays a museum with and about people and contemporary communities, more than it is a temple of heritage preservation.

For a proper presentation of the heritage within an exhibition, the museum has three choices of distinct strategic approaches: systematic/ chronological presentation, thematic presentation and interpretation of collections. The first approach, probably the easiest to implement and to manage logistically and conceptually, is the traditional one, which is rather scientifically focused, sometimes easy to perceive logically, but not necessarily attractive to the public. The second strategic approach is more and more frequently used by the Romanian museums. It involves the interdisciplinary analysis of a subject, split onto several major directions of interest. Although this is an interesting approach, 27 Association des musées du Pays-Bas (2010), 27-29; Kotler et al. (2008), p. 60; Zbuchea (2010) 28 Froggett & Trustram (2014) 29 Heumann Gurian (1999)

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more comprehensive than the first one, again, the public may not perceive the conveyed messages very easily.

The interpretation of the collections is a dynamic process of communication between the museum and the public, through which the museum makes its collections and the results of its research activity known, in an attractive manner. The presentation of the collections and the information are made in a manner wherein the public may see and read, may have experiences and try experiments, may understand the value and signification of the collections, as well as of the themes associated with the objects of the collections. It all begins with an interdisciplinary analysis of the heritage, but a lot of elements are taken into consideration: the interests of the target public and of the stakeholders’ communities, the problems of the various communities, the discussions relevant for the contemporary society. This approach corresponds best to the expectations of today’s public.

The benefits of interpretation are multiple, as regards the exhibition. The exhibition is more interesting for more categories of public. It allows the use of external, intangible resources – some categories of stakeholders may contribute to the enrichment of the exhibition’s significations and depths with their own minds’ and souls’ resources. This approach allows the social interaction and integration of some segments of the public.

In order to be understood by the public, the interpretation must consider several aspects. A first step is defining and knowing the target public, in order to interpret the heritage and design the exhibition depending on the respective public.

Although an exhibition involves a presentation, it may contain several messages, several „voices”. It is recommended that several layers of decoding be proposed. The selection of the interpreted story/subjects should be in accordance with the stakeholders of the exhibition. Depending on the visitors, the appropriate forms of presentation are chosen. The mental and emotional challenges designed for the visitors make them become decision

factors in the museum experience, i.e. interact with the exhibition and the heritage, start a dialogue with the museum or with various stakeholders. In this way, an exhibition may also become a forum for debates, too.

The visitors tend to personally relate to the objects displayed in an exhibition, as aforementioned30. In this context, the process of selecting the exhibited heritage should consider the objects’ capacity to evoke pieces of knowledge and emotions among the public, to allow the public to make connections with the heritage. Thus, the exhibition is brought to life, it is more interesting and generates more profound effects.

It seems that the museum visitor increasingly wants to interact with an exhibition31. The young generations in particular, familiar with the online interaction, may have a higher appetite for being active within exhibitions. In the context of the changes within the contemporary society, we might speak about a change in the paradigm of museum visiting, which would take into consideration a dynamic, engaged society, in a general manner.

There is an increased focus on the public’s participation in all the phases of designing an exhibition, with the purpose to ensure a special museum experience for the visitors32. The specialised literature is analysing more models of public-museum interaction, with a highlight on the fact that, in this way, the museum presents a multicultural, pluralist discourse and a greater diversity, in accordance with the requirements of the contemporary society and with the debates that animate it.

The entertainment and the spectacular are important aspects correlated with the contemporary exhibitions. Some curators are afraid to introduce these elements into exhibitions, although they are important points in the visitors’ evaluation. For some visitors they may be more important than the educational or social aspects of an exhibition. Due

to the great attractiveness of these exhibitions, the museums – as well as other types of organisations, including commercial ones – offer „show-exhibitions” to the public33. Within this kind of exhibitions, the spectacular and entertaining elements prevail and sometimes diminish the scientific, social and philosophical aspects of an exhibition quite significantly. The ingredients that grant the success of such an exhibition are: spectacular décor, the creation of a fascinating and engaging atmosphere, dramatisations. These elements offer (the illusion of?) an intelligent entertainment around a theme that stirs up the public’s attention and imagination.

A risk related to the desire to design exhibitions focused on entertainment and agreeable leisure is the reduction of the scientific component of the respective exhibition; designing a „safe/ institutionalised” discourse, abounding in stereotypes34, which should not hurt the sensibilities of some categories of public, should not raise controversies, should not overburden the visitors, thus generating the reluctance to visit the respective exhibition among some segments of the public. In this context, there may be an overuse of problematic reproductions and dramatisations, to the detriment of authenticity. Compromises are reached between science and entertainment, between researchers and marketing and communication specialists.

The exaggeration of such an approach leads to problems in the manner of reception of such an exhibition. The public will not perceive reality anymore, but a cosmeticised imaginary world, they will not be able to relate themselves to the themes in a critical manner, and we cannot speak about a real understanding of the subject approached by the respective exhibition. The number of visitors is in direct proportion to the quality of understanding the themes approached and to the deep impact that the visit has upon the public.

30 Froggett & Trustram (2014).

31 Leshchenko (2013), p. 159.

32 Duarte Cândido, Aidar & Conrado Martins (2013), p. 54-55 33 Drouguet (2005) 34 Drouguet (2005), p. 70-71

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Conclusions The museum is a dynamic organisation, with a complex mission, connected to the realities of the contemporary society. Under these circumstances, the exhibitions are also correlated with the visitors and other categories of stakeholders.

Although museums are more attractive to the general public than other types of cultural offers, their visiting seems to be an activity less attractive for the majority of the Romanian public. One of the main reasons invoked for the lack of interest is the inappropriate quality of the offer. In this context, it is recommended that the exhibitions be designed depending on the target public, in order to persuade them to come to a museum and to obtain the museum experience expected by the museum and by the visitors as well. A marketing approach may contribute not only to the increase of the number of visits to a museum, but also to the achievement of the latter’s mission.

In order to set up a successful exhibition, from the viewpoint of the public as well of the museum, there should be a cooperation not only between the various types of specialists involved in setting up the respective exhibition, but also between the museum and the visitors. Sometimes it is necessary to be flexible and to make compromises – within certain limits – in order for an exhibition to be relevant for the public and to determine their engagement, thus contributing to the achievement of long-term results.

This is quite difficult to accomplish, because the visitor is influenced by numerous factors, pertaining not only to their socio-cultural characteristics, but also to the context wherein the visit is made.

The interpretation of the heritage in an interdisciplinary and complex manner, as a technique of designing an exhibition, is recommended for the set-up of successful exhibitions. The interpretation must focus on the visitor and other categories of stakeholders. The curators must take into account not only the scientific value of the collections, but also other aspects, such as image, signification or manner of contextualisation within the contemporary society.

These aspects may be even more relevant than the objective, intrinsic value of the heritage.

A person visits a particular exhibition only in the circumstances they consider beneficial for themselves, with a certain level of expectations.

The way they look upon, perceive, interact with and understand the heritage depends on numerous factors, some of them objective, others - subjective.

Some factors are generally valid, independently from the visit itself, while others are contextualised within the visit.

Therefore, the curator – in charge with ensuring the success of an exhibition, with obtaining a particular reaction from the visitors, respectively – is facing multiple challenges. Only a small part of these challenges pertain to knowing the heritage. Most of them are associated with the visitor and with finding the right ways to appropriately valorise the heritage. The curator must be not only a researcher and a protector of the heritage, but also its marketer.

Somehow paradoxically, the curator must focus on the visitor, not on the collections of the museum.

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Alexandra Zbuchea Faculty of Management, SNSPA Bd. Expoziţiei 30A, Sector 1, 012104 Bucharest, Romania alexandra.zbuchea@facultateademanagement.ro

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