Seeing the Past as Present: Why Museums Matter | Colleen Leth | TEDxOxBridge

I want to spend this afternoon talking with you about something which is quite fundamental who we are at sensing thinking and creative people and that's images images matter why do they matter and why do we produce images first I want to ask a question of the audience and I'm glad I can see all of you how many of you in the past year have visited a museum go ahead raise again look around that's a significant number that's almost all of you and it's a good thing but I must admit that even as an archaeologist I'm kind of surprised by this because after all we live in a world of advanced digital technology where any of us with a Wi-Fi signal and some free time can become a connoisseur where we can access millions of images with a click of a button where we can access endless amounts of information where we can tour any of the museum's from Tokyo Rio New York to Vienna in near real time thanks to platforms like Google's Museum project and yet while cultural production has continued to move online while visitation to concert halls and theaters like this one is dwindling visitation to museums is up by as much as 50% in the last 10 years in places like the United States since the first museums were founded in Europe 200 years ago Berlin's altas museum the British Museum the loop we have continued to flock to these secular temples of analog experience to stand in front of works of art in a way that look less and less like this and more and more like this this is the loop 200 years later it's same place and so I have to ask myself what why how has the traditional art viewing experience managed to compete successfully for increasingly precious time and attention and what is going on here and what is going on here but most importantly here when we stand in front of something created 20 or 200 or 2000 years ago the answer for me might be found in one single work of art so I invite you to consider this painting created by Paul Gauguin at the end of the 19th century who again was living more accurately from several sexually transmitted diseases on him remote polynesian island he was broke he had little to no career prospects and he faced the end of his life by creating this masterpiece and tellingly in the upper left-hand corner of the painting we find this translated from the french it reads where do we come from what are we and where are we going and today every year 1.2 million people stand in front of this painting pondering this fresh time and for me that gets to the heart of the matter of why images matter because they seek and successfully answer these three fundamental questions of humanity where do I come from Who am I and where am I going today these answers can be found in paintings like Gauguin or they can be found in very mundane objects a Greek urn a 16th century map a personal letter maybe even Edward Snowden's laptop which is now on view at the Victorian Albert Museum in London images are traces of what we have been who wear what we have been and it's my argument that museums are far from storehouses of the past they are not graveyards of dead artists or dead art they are living breathing active records of us in the most universal global and cosmopolitan sense of the word to wander and to wonder in a museum is to spark that very specific enlightened curiosity about our world it's like travel we can remove the familiar and the foreign into the same space we can place ourselves on a continuum of a shared human identity and history we can see ourselves in another a view that is so critically needed in today's world so why do museums matter and why do images matter because they dissipate ignorance about other because they tolerate and promote curiosity about the foreign because they excite curiosity about what we are not people often ask me you spent most of your career in the art world much of it in museums and if there was ever a disaster a fire terror and you had to save one object what would it be would it be the Mona Lisa would it be the Rembrandt's for the Titian Zoar the 120 million dollar Jeff Koons sculpture no it would be these guys these are Lamaze shoes they are incredibly bizarre towering monumental slightly odd hybrid sculptures created 5000 years ago in ancient Assyria they include elements of bulls lion winged eagles lions feet at the bottom and humans they stood at the gateways of temples and cities in ancient Assyria an empire which stretched from present-day Western Egypt to Iran they embodied the power of their rulers such as asher nasser pol ii notorious king which some of you may know from his portrait which is just down the road here at the Fitzwilliam Museum they straddle that very fascinating liminal zone between past and present foreign and local the here and there animal human mythological terrestrial and for me if art if the art of art history and art itself is a story of tracing this common history this common conversation through images such as this and this is an exemplary place to start so I would invite us to take a walk through history using this example as I said they were highly prevalent they appeared first in coins and cylinder seals and clay tablets they formed the basis of several subsequent art historical traditions appearing in the art of not only Babylon and Assyria but also in the arts of ancient Persia Judea and even early Christianity where the bull lion eagle and human formed the four corners at the Tetra moiré meant to signal Christianity spread throughout the world by 1860 their value had spread to Western Europe and with the birth of archaeology they were excavated at massive rates moved to the new museums opening in Berlin London Paris Neve in New York they were so popular in fact that we can find them in military insignia for the French and British armies in the early 20th century and most recently they served as the background for the in duck ceremony of US Army in the first Gulf War what is so sad today is that their reinterpretation they're useful you represent the very dire threat to our shared cultural heritage as I stand here today all but a few of the lamassu in existence in Syria and Iraq have been severely damaged if not outright destroyed at the hands of Isis and I ash they follow thousands of objects looted from the Bamiyan Museum of Bamiyan Buddhas all the way to the Mosul Museum the ongoing crisis in Syria and Iraq represents the most dire threat to our shared cultural heritage and the most significant loss of our historical material since the Second World War the museum's of the region are home to 7,000 years of shared cultural history and while some like the Baghdad museum have reopened this represents just one success story in a sea of casualties I beg you if we care about our past if we want to encourage a tolerance of difference and promote a curiosity about other nets we must do a better job of protecting it for only if we understand value and protect where we have come from will we know where we are going thank you you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 26,962

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, United Kingdom, Art, Arts education, Culture, Education, History, Museums

Id: SehKVHo601c

Length: 8min 17sec (497 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 27 2016