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WE THINK OF MUSEUMS as places of objects. In fact they are places of ideas. The objects of nature give rise to human ideas about nature. Ideas give rise to the objects created by humans. Ideas are the principal means by which humans interact with objects in museums. Too often our different ideas lead to conflict rather than to understanding. Our ideas about objects change over time as our knowledge and attitudes about them change and our research techniques improve. Changing ideas are controversial because they contradict what we have previously believed.
In some instances, the simple display of an object can be controversial. When exhibits go beyond the "wonder" of the object standing alone and are designed to inform and stimulate visitor learning, they consciously invite controversy-as they should.
In ancient Egypt and Greece, museums were centers of speculation and research, the places where Plato, Aristotle, and Ptolemy engaged their students in learning about the natural world.' Most American colleges and universities were organized around collections of art, material culture, and natural science. Indeed, it is to cabinets of natural history that the roots of the Darwinian revolution can be traced. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, museums were at the forefront of challenging our accepted ideas about the world.
By 1969, however, Dillon Ripley wrote:
The nineteenth century is the epoch of the rise of public museums. It is also the period during which museums first created the public impression which has been so disheartening in subsequent years to museophiles. The word museum, instead of seeming to imply a center of learning, came to mean something ponderous, dull, musty, dead, a graveyard of old bones of the past.2
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, museums once again see themselves as centers of learning about the world in which we live. Even though many Americans have complained that museums are boring, they do not want their museums to be controversial. Nevertheless, in a pluralistic society, what and how museums collect, and what and how they exhibit, are matters of increasing controversy. If museums are to be on the frontier of public appreciation and learning about their subject matter, they will be involved in controversies arising from new discoveries, new creations, and new...