A museum is an institution of social memory designed to preserve, actualize and transmit to subsequent generations the most valuable part of the cultural and natural heritage. At a certain stage of development society becomes aware of some object as a value, which should be withdrawn from everyday life, ceased to be used in order to preserve it and pass it from generation to generation. It is for the study and presentation of such objects that society has created a special social institution – a museum.

1. When and why museums appeared

Many people associate museums with ancient times. That is why it seems that a museum itself is something ancient and came from the depths of time. In fact, the museum in its current form arose at the turn of the XVIII-XIX centuries, that is, not so long ago, about two hundred years ago. The prehistory of museums is related to collecting (the first known collections we know of date back to antiquity: man has always had a passion for collecting). Since the Renaissance, people began to present such collections to other people, this was a kind of “protomuseums”. In the XVII century began to appear so-called cabinets of antiquities, ancient repositories. But the most common is the term “Kunstkamera”. The Kunstkammer is almost a museum. But the Kunstkammer has one significant difference from a museum in the modern sense, because it is a collection of “curiosities” that are presented unsystematically. There is no what we now call an exposition – a semantic sequence of objects. The visitor has to look at them, understand them, and show a special quality, which in English is called “curiosity” – curiosity. Another meaning of the word is “curiosity”. It is interesting that this very meaning has survived in modern Russian: “curiosity” means odd, strange, and unserious. Kunstkamera was made for such people, both eccentric and inquisitive. Then came the Age of Enlightenment, and museums began to create their collections on some systematic basis.

2. The difference between modern museums and their predecessors

Nowadays, many old museums are based on the model of the Enlightenment museum. In Vienna, for example, there is the Museum of Natural History. It has a bronze plaque on each display case which says “Systematisch” in German. It is a classic educational museum, where everything is arranged on shelves, boxes, and departments. This natural science museum is arranged like a Linnean table. And the historical museum of educational type is arranged like a history textbook, from ancient times to the present. The educational model of a museum was realized in its purest form in Germany and then disseminated around the world. Contemporary Russian museums for the most part still bear the features of this model. In the State Historical Museum, for example, the exposition is organized according to the chronological principle. The Tretyakov Gallery and the Russian Museum have the historical-monographic principle, which is based both on chronology and the names of the artists.

3. Hedonistic museums

This systematic approach to the museum existed for many years. But there was also another line in the development of museum work, although previously not very popular. This is the so-called “hedonistic museum,” focused primarily on a pleasant pastime, getting pleasure, rather than on the transfer of knowledge. Today, some museums, primarily art museums, are beginning to evolve toward the hedonistic museum.

One of the purest examples of this is Insel Hombroich, a modern art museum located in the town of Hombroich near Düsseldorf. The museum was founded by a private individual, a businessman. This man, after earning a lot of capital as a realtor, stopped his business and invested all his money in the creation of a beautiful museum. He bought a piece of land and declared it an island, calling it Insel Hombroich (“Hombroich Island”).

On this agricultural wasteland he planted gardens, with landscape architects doing the work. It’s all very beautiful and thoughtful, there are special pavilions, built, by the way, out of old Dutch bricks from demolished buildings – it’s a very environmentally friendly project. And inside those pavilions, he placed a huge art collection. And the range of the collection – from works of the founder’s contemporaries to Rembrandt etchings, from Calder mobiles to Khmer sculpture. All of these pieces were jumbled together, with not a single label on display. The point is that a person comes to a museum not for knowledge but for pleasure: to listen to the murmuring of the brook, to look at beautiful works of art and get aesthetic pleasure from it all.

4. The Interactivity of Modern Museums

Changes have also begun to occur with science and science and technology museums. The didactic system of the educational museum does not work well for the modern visitor. Today’s visitor can be characterized by a well-known Chinese proverb: “Tell me and I will forget, show me and I will remember, let me do and I will understand. That is why museums more and more often use elements of interactivity. In museums of historical reconstruction visitors are given the opportunity to live in a cave, like primitive people, or forge a nail in a forge. Understanding and memorization occur through direct participation. Even art museums today have elements of interactivity. “Even” because art is most difficult for such active interpretive techniques. After all, works of art usually cannot be touched.

5. The connection between the level of culture of society and museums

A museum is a special place that holds objects removed from everyday life. Therefore, a museum is a very precise “thermometer” of society’s culture and cultural health: the higher the culture is, the greater the range of objects it recognizes as valuable, which should not be used for their original purpose but rather preserved. At present in our country museums are being replenished very slowly and poorly, which shows that the state of culture is not very good. Even worse is the process of de-museumization, when exhibits are removed from the museum and again begin to use them for their original purpose. This mostly concerns monuments of Old Russian art and icon painting. This shows that our society is degrading culturally.