Including Artifacts

Many considerations should go into an individual or group’s decision to include a piece of art or an artifact into an exhibit. These considerations include but are not limited to relevance to the exhibit, educational value, and known facts. What should not be included is the marketability of the product. Once a museum starts to collect exhibits based on what is going to sell the best or what is going to make a patron spend more money, they cease to be a museum. They become a hindrance and a disgrace to education instead.

The goal of a museum is to educate and expound upon the knowledge of a patron. It is not to sell souvenirs of artifacts because they look pretty or because they will make a lot of money. The curators should carefully look at the benefits of including a particular artifact to the museum based on the impact it will make on the patron. Sales should not rule a museum, education should. Currently, they chose a work of art to be replicated and sold based on aesthetical values, not educational ones (Source D). It should be the other way around in which education and the truth of an exhibit or piece of art is put before looks and profit. A balance must be reached.

Colonial Williamsburg is an example of a living historical museum that is being used monetarily for aesthetical purposes. The town shows a slave-free, harmonious town in which the Native Americans and the settlers get along and engage in trade with one another (Source E). This was Rockefeller’s carefully selected and ideal view for the colony. In truth, there would have been fighting, slaves, hardships, ECT that would overrun the colony. It was not a very harmonious time and indeed the life of Williamsburg colonists was variable. In this situation, the making of money by the higher ups was more important than portraying an accurate account of the daily life of an early Colonist.

However, not all museums are like this. The Metropolitan Museum of Art located in New York is one such...