*spoiler alert for both movies, though I tried to leave out as much as I could!*

Last week (Thursday) I finally got to see A Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian. It followed successfully in the footsteps of the first movie a couple years ago (2006 according to the Internet Movie Database), and was a genuinely funny piece of work. I loved it… as long as I ignored the actual layout of the National Mall and the horrible things being done (supposedly) to the objects, but it’s fiction and a movie and that’s what you’re supposed to do.

Treatment of objects aside, A Night at the Museum did provide some food for museum-related thought, which I tweeted on the metro back home: “Plot device: museum going completely digital/interactive except for major exhibits. Can it? Should it? Is that what people want at a museum?” The premise of the movie/how they get Ben Stiller to DC is that the Natural History Museum in New York City (the location of the first movie) is closing for two months for renovations… and they’re packing up all but the biggest exhibits and sending them for permanent storage to the Federal Archives, below the Mall. When Ricky Gervais tells this to Ben Stiller, he says that people don’t want objects, they want the next new thing. Traditional exhibits, he implies, are obsolete. The next new thing, apparently, is a digital, interactive Teddy Roosevelt visitors can question as soon as they walk in. It struck me as ridiculous.

Responses to tweets aside (from @gabsters: you mean in the movie? because that’s a bad idea and a huge lack of culture if not. ick. to a deeper discussion with @hummeline) I suppose the question really is: are objects loosing their place in museums? Lincoln Cottage, a National Trust for Historic Preservation site at the Old Soldier’s Home in DC, has proved that no,  you don’t need objects to interpret history or create a learning environment. They have little to no indication of what should be there, and decided against using random, period reproductions. Their lack of furniture and other objects (except in a couple places) opened the way for a different kind of historic house, where they use audio and visual media to tell their stories rather than what’s in the room. It’s amazingly successful.

So, do we need objects in museums? Museums are a place of learning, where we connect people with the past. They have transformed from institutions of research and curiosities into places where education of the public is a, if not there, primary goal. Would we have more success with digital media than traditional exhibits? Or even hybrid exhibits, where we integrate digital or technological components with objects? And even if media is not the way to go, is it something we might have to do to draw visitors and compete for people’s leisure time?

Personally, I believe objects will always have a special place in museums and historic houses, and loosing them is not what people want. Arlington House is undergoing renovations in the house itself, meaning that for their own good all the objects that could be removed have been. When I was volunteering there, the first question people asked was “where’s the furniture?” They usually followed  up with “when do you get it back?”

There’s something special about objects, about getting a chance to look at The Real Thing that anything else just falls short of. Whether it’s George Washington’s camp chair at Tudor Place, C3PO and R2D2 at American History, a canon that shot across the field at Saratoga, or King Charles’ execution warrant in the House of Lords (UK), just being in the presence of an object is something special, something worth remembering. There’s certainly a place for technology and media in museums, and not just on the web. Instead of, if objects themselves are not around? I suppose. But as replacements? Not so much.

Related object reading in this post by my classmate last week.