COST CENTRE MUSEOLOGY & NEW MUSEOLOGY

Typically, traditional museology delivered static ‘displays’ and passive programming – not to mention the elitism and exclusivity that comes with the paradigm. This paradigm is/was well enough served by the cost centre funding model – a model where income generation is only coincidental. So long as budgets are not over extended the funding method works well enough and comfortably enough. 

However, with audiences demanding more aggressive programming, even seeking more audacious programming, the calls on budgets grow accordingly. Moreover, it requires a level of risk taking that is almost untenable in the cost centre model as cost centres tend to presume a non income generative stance. 

This is well explained by the research quest. If a researcher knew the outcome of their investigation at the outset, why do the research? In the cost centre model outcomes are deliberately predetermined but the question of relevance is rarely asked. The imperative is to maintain the status quo at any cost and with little or no room for serendipitous moments – the muser’s quest. 

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Currently, the capacity to increase budgets by means of broad based punitive rates, taxes and levies is diminishing as real costs climb. Thus the competition for funds for musingplace budgets has become more intense as incomes stagnate or diminish and the call on people’s incomes diversifies. 

The consequential chain of events under a cost centre model is ever likely to lead to diminished performance and productivity levels with falling or stagnating visitor numbers – and so on. Under closer scrutiny, pressure is ever likely to be pushing for the delivery of more and more from less and less attainable levels of productivity and performance. 

The New Museology 

In the world of musingplaces there is a quiet revolution in progress and that is informed by the ‘new museology’ mode of operation. That is a paradigm where the shift is on and is moving from ‘giving it to them’ to ‘doing it, musing, with them’ – musingplaces’ Communities of Ownership & Interest that is. 

A mark of an institution's engagement with new museology would be its participatory programming.

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Opportunity dividends need to be sought in order to meet these expectations and for musingplaces to operate sustainably. There is little evidence that this might be on many agendas or that many musingplaces are trying to imagine what they might look like. 

To break this nexus it would appear that there is a need for some Govt. mechanism to be put in place to regulate musingplaces in the way charities, education facilities and not-for-profit enterprises are. 

These instrumentalities are oversighted and regulated to protect the public from their potential failings,  their possible administrative excesses and their being functionally unaccountable.