I already outed the former American Association of Museums’ “stealth name change” in a CultureGrrl post last week.
Now Elizabeth Merritt, founding director of the Center for the Future of Museums (CFM) has published some coy hints about the substance behind this rebranding, which AAM will formally announce tomorrow.
Merritt’s foreshadowing today of tomorrow’s AAM announcement is informed by her insider status: The CFM is “an initiative of the American Association of Museums,” as she notes on her bean-spilling blog. (I was very briefly affiliated with the CFM, until I was bounced for indiscretely blogging about it.)
Here’s what Elizabeth says on her CFM blog about why the nation’s premier association for museums of all types is morphing from the American Association of Museums to the American Alliance of Museums:
We…need to come together in a plenary session, the big AND small
museums, art AND zoos, history AND science, to identify what we have in
common, pool our collective wisdom and influence, and become a force big
enough to shape the world.To become, in fact, an alliance: to be allies in a common cause. And to
rally, not just museum staff and independent professionals and people
who make stuff for museums and provide services to museums, but everyone
who cares about museums and the work we do.So, is this just a name change for AAM? No, it’s a reflection of a far
deeper and far-reaching metamorphosis of what we hope to achieve and how
we plan to accomplish it. But for more on that, you are going to have
to wait for tomorrow.
It appears, then, that AAM is no longer content to be primarily a service organization and professional standards-setter for the field. It also wants to be a major force for global change. (Reasonable people may regard an ambition “to shape the world” as a bit vainglorious, however.)
It’s no secret that museums generally look to their more type-specific professional associations as primary sources of guidance and support. Among art museums, for example, the importance of the Association of Art Museum Directors far outstrips AAM’s influence.
So is this a power grab or a useful harnessing of “collective wisdom and influence”? My guess is that
trying to orient widely disparate museums (and zoos) towards far-reaching common objectives will be like herding cats.
As neither a mathematician nor a biologist, this art-and-humanities specialist is already baffled by the title of Merritt’s blog post about AAM’s name change—“The Fractal Taxonomy of Museums.” Huh?
So I consulted the fountain of all wisdom for dummies, Wikipedia, and learned (scroll down) that “the word ‘fractal’ often has different connotations for laypeople than
mathematicians, where the layperson is more likely to be familiar with fractal art than a mathematical conception.” (This did bring to mind the recent controversy over fractal analysis of purported Pollocks.) “The mathematical concept,” Wikipedia continues, “is difficult
to formally define even for mathematicians, but key features can be
understood with little mathematical background”…or maybe not.
The moment when AAM ventures to give some specifics on what the above-mentioned “common cause” of museums might be (beyond the general objectives of financial solvency, scholarly excellence and ethical integrity) is the moment when museums’ appropriately diverse range of philosophies, missions, objectives and methodologies will assert themselves in glorious fractiousness (if not fractals).
In disunity there is sometimes strength.