Work, specimen, witness: How different perspectives on museum objects alter the way they are perceived and the values attributed to them

Abstract

The generic term ‘museum objects’ suggests that a uniform category is involved. But museums in various disciplines have exhibited objects according to quite different rules and have assigned values to them that depend on the standards of the field of inquiry concerned: aesthetic quality, value as a historical source, as a relic or as a representative item. Over time, various display conventions have become established, which appear to us today to be natural and that assign the objects to specific stimulus values. The aim of this essay is to achieve a better understanding of these exhibition practices and discipline-specific value standards. The study aims to discover why we have become accustomed to using objects in exhibitions in different ways, and it distinguishes between three types of object: work, specimen and witness. The hypothesis here is that each of these follows its own display conventions, forms of perception and standards of value. The present essay aims to situate these three types of object – work, specimen and witness – historically and in this way to articulate the differences in status that exist between them.

How do Visitors Perceive the Role of Authentic Objects in Museums?

“…A broad range of reasons were considered valid as arguments for using a replica, for example, if the original does not exist anymore, it is relevant, but not available for the exhibition, or consists of parts too easily damaged. While these results corroborate the findings from previous research with adult visitors (Hampp & Schwan, 2014, 2015 showing a high acceptance of replicas instead of originals, other studies have reported that children value authentic objects more than replicas and tend to explore them more deeply (Bunce, 2016(Bunce, , 2017van Gerven et al, 2018). We speculate that children's psychological development forefronts questions of reality and authenticity as particularly relevant in prior research (ie: cartoon figures, toys, taxidermied animals; Bunce, 2019), while for adults focus on other object characteristics (e.g.…”

“…More specifically, the interviewees associated authenticity with an object's charisma or aura, with its connection to history, and with its rarity or uniqueness. The study also identified full completeness and unrestricted functionally as a further criterium for authenticity, which seems to be specific to objects such as machines or instruments from the fields of science and technology (Hampp & Schwan, 2014, 2015. In contrast, while the participants mentioned aesthetic appearance and workmanship as important characteristics of the objects, they did not directly relate them to the notion of authenticity.…”

“…While this approach allows for delineating the visitors' perception of authentic objects in the contexts of science, natural history, and cultural history museums, differences between various kinds of authentic objects were not considered. For example, Thiemeyer (2015) has proposed a classification of authentic objects in museums, distinguishing between objects as works with a high aesthetic value, as witnesses with a high value as historical sources, and as specimens as representative items. It is assumed that each of these types follows its own display conventions, forms of perception, and standards of value.…”

“…Finally, the present study's questionnairebased approach should be seen in the context of complementary methods for visitor research. While questionnaires are useful for collecting data from large samples of visitors' subjective impressions of authentic objects, other methodological approaches, including in-depth interviews (Hampp & Schwan, 2014, 2015 as well as observational methods (Schwan, Gussmann, Gerjets, Drecoll, & Feiber, 2020), may provide complementary insights into the role of authentic objects for visitors' museum experiences. Therefore, as an outlook for future research, studies should supplement the present self-report findings by observational measures of visitors' attention, cognition, and emotion when facing particular types of authentic objects; they should systematically take the individual characteristics of museum visitors (such as socio-demographic variables, visiting motivation, or visitor type) into account (Falk & Dierking, 2012) and should also try to validate the present findings with regard to non-German visitors of German museums as well as to visitors of other countries with different traditions of exhibition design.…”

“…The present article aims to contribute to this literature by providing an overview of relevant visitor research findings, followed by a survey study of a large sample of visitors to nine different museums in Germany examining their perceptions of authentic objects in exhibitions. It elaborates on and extends two qualitative interview studies with visitors in a large museum of the history of science and technology in Germany, carried out by one of the authors (Hampp & Schwan, 2014, 2015. The present study also included 22 semi-structured hour-long interviews with curators, exhibit designers, and scientists from the participating museums.…”