What makes a good museum?

What makes a good museum? Are all museums good? How do you measure the quality of a museum? What is the value of an object?
These are all questions from the readings this week. Most are hard to answer, although the second should have an obvious one, NO. There are museums are bad, either because they do “bad history” or because they have not been able to articulate and make themselves matter.
A good museum is one with a clear purpose, adequate resources, efficient use, and good interpretation. A failure in any one of these areas will make a museum “bad”, and failures in multiple would probably put a museum under—or at least make it lightly visited.
Museums tread a fine line; they must balance the truth with what their visitors can stand to hear. A museum does not matter if it has no visitors, because regardless of how well they do any of the other factors, no one will know it exists. Often this can involve tempering the truth, offering it selectively, speaking in euphemisms. But sometimes one must stand up to the public, and surprise them with facts that might be troubling.
What is exhibited and how it is described is an important part of this equation. Whether it is a controversial work of art, or the “servants quarters” of a historic home, controversial exhibits bring questions, and often make people think about the past, present, and future in new ways. Today museums matter because they encourage thought and reflection in ways that the average person understands.

But how does one determine if a museum is meeting these new goals. One way is AAM accreditation, another is a new assessment program that helps museums compare themselves to each other, in a way this is beneficial, it helps one to understand what else the field is doing. But Stephen Weil points out a problem with this model, the resources of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the South Cupcake Art Museum are entirely different, one simply cannot compare with another. SCAM may be the only cultural institution in town, therefore it must not only exhibit art, but serve the other needs of the community as well, it probably also has less resources to do this, so instead of staging massive art exhibits, SCAM would stage smaller exhibits, perhaps some live music shows, school programs, and other community events. But does the lack of a major collection (even one major work) make SCAM a scam? If its purpose is to serve the community in multiple ways, then it is doing its job well, but if SCAM wants to be PMA, then it truly is a scam.