Inside the Lost Museum: Curating, Past and Present by Steven Lubar (review)

With the instincts of a good museum curator, Brown University professor Steven Lubar grounds his comprehensive book, Inside the Lost Museum: Curating, Past and Present, on a specific historical example: the late nineteenth-century Jenks Museum at Brown University. This historic museum, The Lost Museum of Lubar’s title, was revived through an exhibition and teaching project completed by Lubar with assistance from artist Mark Dion and a group of faculty and students—The Jenks Society for Lost Museums—in 2014. Lubar begins each chapter of his book with an illustrative, documented aspect of the historic Jenks Museum project. He then moves from the concrete historical example to explore key interpretive aspects of museum work. These poetic vignettes lead to his larger descriptive analyses of histories of collecting, preserving, displaying, and using the artifacts that form the foundation of American museums. In the most general sense, museums are institutions devoted to the categorization and interpretation of material things, but the term “museum” covers many different kinds of organizations—history, natural history, anthropology, art, children’s, technology—of varying sizes and purposes. By starting with a quirky, personality-driven, century-old university museum—one familiar in form to any museum historian—Lubar’s analyses develop from a set of clear historical problems or conditions.

Lubar approaches the task of understanding the complex and multilayered work of museums—which often are nineteenth-century organizations that have been reluctant to reconsider their roles in the twenty-first century—as his museum curator and registrar subjects would. He labors to sort and define the many tasks that museums require into discrete categories. In four parts, over nineteen chapters, Lubar explores the many facets of how a museum functions. Part 1, “Collect,” considers the motivations and logistics of acquiring items for a museum. This section examines, for example, how museum professionals make choices about what to collect, how to value objects, the key legal and ethical questions to consider, and how collecting actually works. Part II, “Preserve,” considers the “physical, intellectual, ethical and administrative” care of collections (97). Storage, proper cataloguing, preventative conservation, and the cultural and spiritual identities and resonances of museum objects all play a role in Lubar’s analysis of preservation. Next, the section entitled “Display” explores the complex ways objects may be valued, used, interpreted, and presented, and who participates in those decisions and how museums assess those choices. Lubar examines the roles of community stakeholders, designers, and docents, as well as innovative labeling strategies, period rooms and dioramas, and open storage. Finally, Part IV, “Use,” surveys the varied functions museums may perform, from building communities and relationships to creating new and unexpected research possibilities. Lubar outlines the cultural, social, intellectual, pedagogical, economic, and inspirational value of museums—making clear that museums have the potential to “improve people, strengthen communities, and repair the world” (315).

Lubar’s book aims to do the hard and serious work of sorting, defining, and exploring the ways museums have handled the realities of managing and using collections. Although there are surely embedded critiques in Lubar’s analysis of the stereotypical ways registrars, curators, and directors may be viewed, or the familiar irony in having a whole chapter devoted to “paperwork,” the book does not model a new pathway to break through this bureaucracy or to redefine the museum project. Rather he deftly describes, explains, and contextualizes that history, and in the process shows how the contemporary museum is still closely connected to its nineteenth-century antecedents. In his coda, Lubar cedes much of the explicit work of institutional critique to artists. This final section of the book, “Critique,” looks at how artists have made all aspects of museum work the subject of their art to offer meaningful (and sometimes loving) criticism. Mark Dion’s involvement in The Lost Museum project is certainly in this tradition. Even as Lubar focuses on the work of artists’ museum interventions and transformations, he effectively...