Can a bird curate a museum?
Let me explain.
Male bowerbirds work their tail feathers off to attract mates.
These birds sing, they dance — and most impressively,
they build what ornithologists call “display courts,” where they show
off the objects they collect: shells, bones, the keys you lost last year.
And these displays aren’t random: the objects are arranged in
patterns to draw the female bird’s eye to the coolest stuff.
So… is the bowerbird’s display court a museum?
Making him their collection’s caretaker, or “curator”?
What actually is a museum anyway?
And who gets to decide what counts?
Hi! I'm Sarah Urist Green and this is Crash Course Art History.
There are a lot of different types of museums, from natural history museums
to toy museums–there’s even an Instant Ramen Museum and a Museum of Broken Relationships.
But in this episode, we’re mostly talking about art museums.
And art museums took a long, winding road to get to the version we know today, with lots of columns
and marble, cavernous rooms full of objects, mood lighting, and the echo of squeaking sneakers.
Actually, the earliest known spaces devoted to art were caverns — like the Chauvet and
Lascaux Caves in France and the Altamira Cave in Spain.
In places like these, prehistoric people used ochre and charcoal to depict horses,
deer, bison, and even lions and rhinos, which weren’t extinct in Europe yet.
Still, we wouldn’t call these prehistoric caves
museums just because there are pictures on the walls.
Generally speaking, a modern-day museum has professional, trained staff,
an open and publicly accessible space, and objects of historical and cultural
importance that are not only preserved, but arranged with the intention of educating.
In museums, artworks are sorted into groups, or categorized, so that they can be stored
and studied, and eventually displayed in ways intended to convey meaning.
Curators often do this according to time period or culture or geographical location,
to hopefully tell a coherent story about a certain part of history.
They also sometimes arrange works thematically–across
time and culture–to tell new stories.
We get the word “museum” from the ancient Greek word “mouseion,” meaning a shrine to the Muses,
the Ancient Greek goddesses of art, music, and poetry.
And while we wouldn’t consider these shrines “museums” by today’s standards,
some places in Ancient Greece definitely had the feel of them.
Like, If you had visited the Acropolis of Athens in the second century BCE,
you’d have passed through a reception hall called the Propylaia,
where you would’ve seen impressive paintings of Athens’s history.
Your surroundings would have told you that you were standing in an
important place with important objects. Remind you of anything?
The ancient Romans did this,
too. But the Roman ruling class also amassed huge personal collections of
art that they kept in their homes as status symbols–again, awfully reminiscent of today.
And actually, the earliest known spaces dedicated to collecting art weren’t in Europe.
We can think of the ancient Egyptian pyramids at Giza as a kind of giant,
private art collection, built to honor the dead.
Still, we wouldn’t call the pyramids museums either, they were spectacular,
but they weren’t exactly accessible to the public.
Now, flash forward to Europe in the mid-sixteenth century, when private
collecting took on a whole new flavor — that of the “wunderkammer,” or Cabinet of Curiosities.
These proto-museums were full of strange and wondrous items: “dragon eggs” and “mermaid
hands” right alongside legitimate art and artifacts from around the world.
Wealthy nobles and merchants, as well as some scientists, put these bizarro
collections together to show off their travels, but also to advance knowledge.
And they organized items in ways we often see in
today’s museums — like by geography, or chronology.
These were also meant to be entertaining. Nothing says “fun” like an embalmed hanging crocodile.
Cabinets of curiosities were, again, not meant for
the public. They were meant to bring the outside world to the nobility. You know,
so they didn’t have to actually go outside themselves and sully their fancy shoes.
It wasn’t until the eighteenth century that the first publicly
accessible museums began to open their doors.
But it wasn’t an entirely selfless move — it was a
way for wealthy art patrons to show off their collections more widely.
Importantly, these collections often included works stolen from other countries as part of
colonialism…which you can learn more about in Crash Course World History,
European History, U.S. History, Black American history.
All of this stealing has left a pretty messy legacy.
Museums in Europe and the United States are chock full of art and artifacts that
were taken by force from their country or culture of origin.
For example, in the nineteenth century,
the British Empire occupied much of the Nigerian coast, and in 1897 forcibly captured Benin City.
The British military destroyed much of the city, including its palace — where hundreds
of plaques and other important objects depicting the history of the Kingdom of Benin were stored.
Later that year, about 300 objects from Benin City were displayed at the British Museum,
and many have been part of its collection ever since.
The government of Nigeria has for decades been calling for the return of these stolen works,
but it took more than 100 years to even begin to gain traction.
As recently as 2022, Germany and the Smithsonian in the U.S. agreed to return
Benin artifacts from their collections, in a process we call repatriation.
To further complicate the issue, museums sometimes
display those stolen artworks in insensitive and misleading ways.
Regardless of any good intentions of museum staff, some art might be
presented as primitive, or displayed wildly out of context, playing into stereotypes.
Like, Native Americans are often “remembered” in American museums, as if they no longer exist.
James Luna, a Luiseño Indian artist, brought attention to this practice
when he placed his own body in a museum case, with labels identifying his scars
as well as personal belongings, like his college diploma and even divorce papers.
This powerful work attests to the continued existence
and relevance of Indigenous artists and communities, and it also launched
Luna into my personal canon of art history. Ready the canon cannon.
In response to powerful critiques like Luna’s, museums have been called to
decolonize, or to acknowledge and free themselves of their colonial influences.
This involves not only repatriation of stolen artifacts, but putting
collections in different contexts to more accurately represent the past.
Take this portrait of Sir Thomas Picton, the former colonial British governor of Trinidad.
In 2020, the National Museum in
Wales removed it, citing his brutality toward enslaved
workers and free people of color on the island.
Two years later, the museum opened an exhibition called “Reframing Picton,”
which highlighted this history, and included the
work of contemporary Trinidadian artists to help develop a more complete picture.
One of these works, an installation by the artist collective Laku Neg, included
a composition of music woven together with the words of Luisa Calderón,
one of Picton’s victims of torture. Pretty powerful stuff.
The work of rethinking our museums also involves diversifying those who work within them, serve
on their boards, and make the decisions about what is collected and displayed.
As we’ve seen, the very idea of a museum was concocted by wealthy members of the ruling class.
So a lot of perspectives have been left out for a long time,
and that legacy isn’t going to be unraveled overnight.
A 2018 survey found that, across 300 U.S. art museums, only 16 percent of
curator roles were held by people of color, and only 12 percent of leadership roles.
The survey was repeated in 2022 and found moderate increases in people
of color across the board, in all museum roles.
And it also found the number of Black staff in museum leadership had doubled,
and quadrupled in curatorial positions.
Is this an improvement? Yes. Is it enough to correct the past or
reflect the U.S.’s actual demographics? Heck no.
The work is far from done, but it’s critical to the continued relevance of museums.
The way that art is presented – and who does the presenting – matters,
from funders to curators, board members to tour guides – and everyone in between.
And it’s not just outsiders calling for these changes.
Sometimes artists themselves question the museum with their artwork,
and we call this Institutional Critique.
One master of this craft is the feminist art collective the Guerilla Girls,
who in 1989 visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City and compared the number
of works by women artists in the gallery to the number of nude female bodies on display.
They found that less than 5 percent of the artists
in the modern art gallery were women – compared to 85 percent of the nudes.
In response to this unbalanced representation,
they launched an ad campaign that called attention to their findings.
And you might be amused to know that not only is one of those original posters now
a part of the Met’s collection, but today the Guerilla Girls are actively
invited to museums around the world to shine a light on new injustices.
Despite the complicated history behind museums, they continue to do important work.
Museums are wonderful places to see and appreciate a huge range of art and objects!
They protect, catalog, and restore our cultural heritage—and make it available to the public.
And the more they can confront and respond to their complicated legacies,
the more nuance they’re able to offer to our understanding of global history.
As we’ve seen, there are many movements within the museum landscape focused on righting the
wrongs of the past, increasing accessibility, and providing a
community-focused and globally-conscious arena for understanding our past, present, and future.
So, in a big way, the idea of the museum continues to evolve.
It carries with it some seriously heavy history, including violence,
theft, and sometimes questionable taxidermy.
But it also can do an amazing job of grappling with that history,
displaying artworks sensitively and respectfully,
returning ones that have been stolen,
and presenting more complex views of the world.
They’re a powerful way of understanding ourselves and each other.
In the end, maybe bowerbird’s nests and museums aren’t all that different.
They both collect the shiny bits and bobs around them and display them in artful, and
sometimes mysterious, ways. Though I don’t think bowerbirds make you exit through the giftshop.
Next time, we’ll talk about how artists came to be seen as quasi-celebrities,
and we’ll start to unravel the myth of the great artist. I’ll see you there!
Thanks for watching this episode of Crash Course Art History which was filmed at the Indianapolis
Museum of Art at Newfields and was made with the help of all these nice people. If you want
to help keep Crash Course free for everyone, forever, you can join our community on Patreon.