Steve Lubar

     This week we attended a discussion with Steve Lubar, an experienced public historian whose credentials I need not list. The subject of the discussion was, of course, museums. Lubar has spent much of his life working with or in regard to museums, and as such he had a number of great insights. First, it is important to know that Lubar considers his field to be the "public humanities." These include history, anthropology, and all the usual suspects, but the new focus on the idea of "public" is very significant. Being public means that the humanities need to be more widely accessible and influenced by all sorts of people, not just experts in the field. It is interesting to find that academic studies are opening more to public influence, especially with this trend being so significant on the internet. Innovations such as Web 2.0 are making good use on the ability to collect data from the ordinary public.
     The way in which the public humanities will affect museums in the future is what I took to be the most significant part of the conversation. In the oldest models of museums, collections were entirely composed by a single owner, with just about no room for public influence. Later iterations of museums sought to influence the experience of their visitors. In making an active effort to do so, these museums were indirectly influenced by the public. Now, as Lubar said, museums are shifting towards a model more focused than ever on the public. A focus on objects within a museum is moving towards a focus on the visitors, and objects themselves are losing their importance. The public still does not have much direct say in what a museum comprises of, as after all the museums are still constructed by curators. As we have learned throughout this course, the power of museums has always been in the visitor's experience (or as Lubar liked to refer to it as, social space) and not in the objects they house. As such, it is interesting to see that museums have moved towards the experiential model, and that they will continue to focus more and more on experience over object.
   I found the discussion with Steve Lubar to be very insightful. His ideas about where museums are heading in the future were very interesting, and I completely agree that they are going towards an increasingly public and social model. As Lubar said, people go to museums to shape their own way of thinking. It will be great to see where this takes museums in the future.