Persian borrowed the term musée from French during the reign of Naser al-Din Shah (1831–96), the fourth king of the Qajar dynasty (1789–1925). Impressed by the European museums during his travels, he established the Royal Museum and another one that focused on natural history in Tehran. Although neither of these two museums was public and they hardly served purposes such as research, their foundation may be taken as the beginning of “museology” and “museography” in Iran. In this study, I first give a brief history of collecting practice before the Qajar period. Then, I investigate Naser al-Din Shah’s travelogues to highlight which museums he visited in Europe. The Shah’s extent of museums’ activities and their various potential roles are pointed out. Finally, I draw upon a few Iranian and non-Iranian sources to clarify how the Royal Museum in the Golestan Palace was formed and what its collection included.

As popular media culture continues to shape public life, museums and galleries have increasingly turned to high-profile figures to drive attendance, visibility, and cultural relevance. This paper proposes a framework of three archetypes through which celebrity museum collaborations can be understood: the aesthetics auteur, whose personal brand identity shapes the curatorial vision; the collaborative curator, who shares authorship with the institution in a more traditional capacity; and the legacy architect, who leverages the museum as a vehicle for encoding their own legacy into shared cultural memory. This paper examines three case studies—Wes Anderson’s guest exhibition at Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum, Pharrell Williams’ co-curated exhibition FEMMES at the Galerie Perrotin in Paris, and George Lucas’ Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles—to assess the opportunities and tensions each archetype presents for cultural institutions. As algorithm-driven media continues to flatten cultural engagement into surface-level aesthetics, this paper argues that celebrity collaborations are a double-edged sword: capable of expanding access and relevance, but equally capable of reducing institutional integrity to spectacle.

Isabella d’Este Gonzaga (May 17, 1474—February 13, 1539), La prima donna del mondo, was a Renaissance marchioness and prolific art patron. Her motto, “No Hope No Fear,” appeared across her personal apartments in the Palazzo Ducale Mantova (now a museum) and objects she commissioned. This article argues Isabella d’Este Gonzaga was an imaginative collector with a strong, adaptative, and unified vision for exhibitions that furthered museum history, in no small part because of her position as a woman in an extremely gender-imbalanced era. While her motto has been a source of reinterpretation from its 16th-century inception, it has never been examined as a curatorial philosophy encompassing her method and focus on three specific values: balance, fortitude, and retreat. Glossing her surviving letters, collections, and the spaces she intentionally designed to house them captures her as a project manager with a centralized esthetic ruled by neither hope nor fear. Using a cross-disciplinary approach between museum studies and art history, this essay reconnects a selection of her proto-museum spaces and artifacts to reconstruct Isabella d’Este Gonzaga’s curatorial philosophy.

Museums and heritage sites in the United States have a complicated relationship with Indigenous Americans and African Americans. Only recently have such places begun to connect with and honor descendants of non-White people who lived and labored on the land in question. This interaction has paved the way for a fuller, more truthful telling of the American story. Unique insights can come from descendant visitors who have not taken part in curation or interpretation. Museums and historic sites can learn a great deal from descendant visitors who are willing to share how their museum experience merges with their personal knowledge and feelings about their ancestry. The author argues that descendant visitors’ responses to heritage sites should be recorded not only to provide important feedback to the individual museum, but also to formulate generalizable ideas--theoretical models--that all heritage sites can use to analyze their own situations.

The history of how human remains ended up in museums is racist and ethically unjust. Many human remains came from grave robbing to aid in medical education, mainly of the poor and marginalized in society. Those people did not give consent for their body parts to be displayed in museums, and museums have been slow to give them the dignity they deserve and respectfully dispose of them. Museums today do not have a widely agreed-upon consensus on how to handle these human remains. While the medical field helped perpetuate this issue, it may now be able to help solve it. In medicine, medical ethics are infused in all aspects of medical care and decisions. Patients have legal authority over what happens to their bodies, and consent is seen as a human right. By applying existing medical ethics to human remains, museums can have a simple and clear way forward to correct the racist practices of the past and restore dignity and respect back to the people that languish in their collections.

A museum should be a place where cultures, dialogue, and social relations are enhanced. Given the renewed public interest in the topic, the author poses the question: Is there a need and a possibility to decolonize ethnographic museums? Should we have common and shared practices? In an attempt to eliminate colonial vestiges in museums, an analysis of literature and practices leads the author to analyze five European ethnographic museums in order to understand their merits and shortcomings. The subjectivity of these institutions and the diversity with which colonization can be presented makes the proposal of a single generalized solution not preferable. An objective analysis, based on actions and variables, drives the author to determine, however, that in order to revitalize museum practices, there is a need to create a sharable framework. The design of minimum standards can help museums set clear and measurable goals to achieve a higher level of decolonization.

This study explores the first East Asian encounters with Western museums by travelers in the nineteenth century. In contrast with our contemporary familiarity with this institution, these travelers had to translate their new discovery into their own meaningful categories. In translating the word “museum,” East Asian travelers composed several words using Chinese character compounds that reveal much about their understanding of the concept in terms of their own culture and language. Moreover, the underlying conceptual categories they invoked shaped their perception of the displays they saw in the various museums they encountered. We see their struggle to settle on a shared term for “museum” so that Kume Kunitake (1839-1931), for example, differentiated the British Museum, the Mauritshuis Museum, and the Swedish Nationalmuseum by employing different common nouns. However, their insights, bewilderment, and even their “misunderstandings” offer us an opportunity to reconsider the modern museum from an external perspective.

In the 2020 video game Animal Crossing: New Horizons, the player builds the collection of the impressive Animal Crossing Museum (ACM). Exploring the visitor experience of this video game museum’s art wing from the perspective of museum professionals allows for the discovery of inventive ways to deepen connection with museum patrons in the virtual space. The ACM is more successful at engaging visitors than traditional virtual museums. It meets visitor needs by offering an immersive, interactive experience, and depends on direct action from the visitor to expand and grow its collection and space. By taking lessons from the player interaction design of the ACM, virtual museums can be designed to meet the psychological needs of visitors and build long-lasting relationships between the visitor and the institution. From the text, this essay proposes seven lessons for designing virtual museums: start with visitor experience at the center of virtual museum design, allow the visitor to collaborate on the creation of the virtual museum, make the virtual museum a habit with intermittent rewards and increased access over time, build social interaction into the virtual museum, add an avatar, show off curator personality, and address colonial roots of museums.

Spermaceti is a waxy substance found in the head cavities of sperm whales (Physeter macrocephalus and P. catodon). This substance had a variety of commercial applications from the end of the 18th to the beginning of the 20th century, such as candles, soap, cosmetics and other compounds. Spermaceti was also occasionally used as wax for modeling sculptures. In order to date such artworks the marine reservoir effect (MRE) has to be considered. The chemical library of the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle (Paris, France) contains samples of spermaceti studied by the French chemist M. E. Chevreul (1786–1889) at the beginning of the 19th century. Eight samples of substances preserved in their original containers were 14C dated. According to the whaling practices and the publications of Chevreul, we estimated that the spermaceti samples came from whales caught between 1805 and 1815. AMS 14C dating results are from 550 to 1180 ± 30 BP, R values between 393 and 1023 (± 34) 14C yr and ΔR between –168 and 504 (± 60) 14C yr. The values presented here are the first ever obtained for spermaceti. However, being based on museum specimens, further measurements on crude material would be necessary to refine these results.

This article focuses on one section of the former Iron Curtain between Hungary and Austria that incorporates diverse memory events after the political change in 1989. The article concentrates on the Hungarian region during the last nearly three decades and investigates the actors and the memories of the former historic period, which show a uniquely diverse set of realizations. Among others, two private museums about the Iron Curtain (established and managed by two former border guards) and a memorial park (commemorating only one day, established and managed by a civil organization) in comparison to the official narrative presented in the last room of the permanent exhibition at the Hungarian National Museum in the capital are subjects of this investigation. Besides the actual memory places and the actors (those who initiated, maintain, and visit these memory spots), their relationship and role in the formation of the regional identity are also analyzed. As theoretical background, the connection between heritage, museum, and memory; the notion of post-Soviet nostalgia; authenticity; and the importance of time are activated for the analysis and to disentangle the complexity of the chosen case study.