What, Exactly, is the Point of Museums?: An Honest Review of Chicago's Field Museum

By: Joel Kohn, Staff Writer

What, exactly, is the point of museums?

This was the question rattling around my mind as I was walking through Chicago's Field Museum on a sleepy Sunday afternoon last month.

The answer seems straightforward at a glance. Ask a layperson and they might respond with some variation of “they’re places where you learn about stuff” or “they’re places where interesting things are displayed.”

That’s certainly a fitting description of what museums have done throughout history. The idea of collecting and displaying “interesting” things traces back to the Renaissance era, when the wealthy and well-traveled began curating Cabinets of Curiosities, collections of relics, artworks, and other novel objects to show off to their associates. The purpose of these rooms was not to educate so much as to impress. In a world where most people never traveled more than a few miles from where they were born, showing off narwhal horns, foreign art, or religious relics was a way to signal one’s status. Public museums carried this impulse into the modern era, where industrializing European nations built grandiose monuments dedicated to showing off art and artifacts that were, let's be generous and say they were “acquired” from abroad. Again, the tendency is towards novelty. After all, no one goes to the British Museum to see artifacts from Britain.

Field Museum Lobby. Photo Credit: Joel Kohn

This throughline of showing off persists in the contemporary museum. The giant dinosaur skeletons on display in the field museum lobby, which are also featured prominently in Field Museum marketing material, are a testament to the fact that it’s just cool to see things that are big, unique, or out of the ordinary.

Still, this didn’t fully answer my question in a way I found satisfying. After all, The Bean in Millenium Park is also big and unique, but we don’t think of Millenium Park as a museum any more than we regard as a museum, say, the roadside attraction that displays The World’s Largest Ball of Twine (this actually exists in Cawker City, Kansas).

Maybe, I thought, the difference lies in education. Museums are intended to teach, after all. As I meandered about, I saw several groups of school-aged kids that appeared to be taking part in some sort of field trip.

Yet, this also felt like an incomplete answer to my question. Yes, the Field Museum is clearly trying to teach you about the things it displays. The Inside Ancient Egypt exhibit was overflowing with information regarding ancient Egyptian history, the mummification process, and the life of Unis-Ankh, a priest and son of the last Pharaoh of the 5th Dynasty whose reconstructed tomb one could peruse while walking through the exhibition. But how effective is it really at educating? Compared to a school, there’s no feedback, no test, no mechanism forcing one to engage with the material. Compared to the wealth of educational tools that voracious autodidacts can access online, museums seem like a poor mechanism for transferring knowledge to guests, much less for making sure that knowledge is retained. Case in point, I had to check Wikipedia to confirm Unis-Ankh’s specific Dynasty.

I eventually found the answer to my opening question, in an unexpected place. While wandering through Plants of the World, observing all the encased botanical specimens, I saw a display on the production process for plant models. These replicas stand in for real specimens too fragile or fleeting to display in their natural state. Crafted from latex, glass, wire, wax, or plastic, these are by no means cheap substitutes. Each reproduction of a castor bean plant or the cross section of an orchid flower demanded weeks of painstaking labor by artisans, using reference specimens to make ensure the exact right sheen was applied to the leaves and that the distance from the stamen to the pistil precisely matched what is found in nature. These models, which I looked at for perhaps a second before moving on, were the product of untold effort by someone who, though long dead, continues to touch our world through these works.

T-Rex display at The Field Museum

Thinking back to the Ancient Egypt exhibition, my thoughts were drawn to the mummies on display. These were once real living people, not dissimilar from you or me. They had lived, died, and been mummified millennia ago, 10,000 kilometers from where I stood. In the time between their deaths and my birth, the conquests of Alexander came and went, The Mahabharata was written, Jonas Salk vanquished polio, and The Beatles recorded Abbey Road. These bodies had survived the ravages of time, been hauled a quarter of the way around the world, and were now close enough for me to touch, only a thin pane of glass separating us.

That concreteness, that immediacy, that’s what I think the point of museums is. When the world seems to be undergoing tectonic changes by the minute, there is something special about a space that allows you to stop, slow down, and just reflect.

Recall that you and I are the heirs of 10,000 years of human history, we are the product of millions of years of evolution, and that the atoms that make up our bodies were fused within the cores of stars billions of years ago. It’s easy to forget this in the mad sprint of our daily lives. But it’s true, just as it was a century ago, and just as it will be in another century’s time.

I’m thankful to the Field Museum for reminding me how much has gone into the world I live in. I may not remember every fact and detail that they put up for me to see but that knowledge that the world is so much bigger than I realize—that will stick with me.