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What’s the point of a museum? While bored schoolkids on field trips may find them a slog, the swarms of tourists still flocking to the Louvre Museum to snap selfies with the Mona Lisa prove that even in our digital age, we still crave real-life relics. But as old-school dioramas give way to tech-savvy interactive exhibits, museums are also reevaluating what they display; when controversy erupts, they can become unwilling symbols of culture wars their founders could never have imagined.
If giants such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art once set the standard for what was culturally worthy—if it was in the museum, it mattered—modern questions of cultural appropriation and colonization have rattled the foundations of such omnicultural collections. A museum inevitably reflects the society in which it operates, and adapting to shifting norms is what keeps its doors open. The British Museum, long criticized for refusing to return the Elgin Marbles to Greece, has more recently faced scrutiny for its handling of sacred objects from Ethiopia and Benin. The Mütter Museum has endured its own identity crisis, caught between its history as a medical collection and its reputation for bizarre spectacle. Museums are often the ground where history, ownership, and identity collide.
And yet, for many of us, they remain places of deep personal connection. I was fortunate to grow up within walking distance of the Smithsonian Institution—a network of 21 free museums, most of them in Washington, DC—funded by a bequest from an Englishman for the “increase and diffusion of knowledge” in a country he’d never visited. For my family, this natural treasure was almost an extension of our backyard. My parents became practiced tour guides for visiting relatives, while my sister and I found our own favorite spots: the glittering moving walkway beneath the National Gallery (more thrilling than any artwork); the parade of First Ladies’ dresses at the National Museum of American History (was Mary Todd Lincoln really that tiny?); Charles Lindbergh’s plane hanging from the ceiling of the National Air and Space Museum. The air-conditioned galleries were a refuge during sweltering summers. Decades later, they became go-to destinations for my own children—posing for photos beside the same stuffed elephant in the National Museum of Natural History’s rotunda that once loomed in the background of my own childhood snapshots.
A free museum is a communal space where people of all ages and backgrounds can cross paths. Unfortunately, such spaces are becoming increasingly rare, as even the most revered institutions struggle to balance the competing demands of donors, staff, management, and visitors.
Yet despite rising costs and growing controversies, museums endure—still central, still significant; places where cultural narratives are displayed, debated, and reimagined. The stories in this list highlight the evolving relationship between museums, the people who visit them, and the workers who keep the cogs running.
What Museum Guards See (Barry Schwabsky, The Nation, September 2023)
My father, a self-described “culture vulture,” liked to take his time at art museums, moving in close to read each label, then stepping back to admire his favorite paintings from a distance. As a teenager, it drove me crazy. How long did we need to stare at a single canvas? Couldn’t we just check out the highlights and move along?
I thought of my father while reading this extended review of All the Beauty in the World, a memoir by former Metropolitan Museum of Art security guard Patrick Bringley. Schwabsky, The Nation’s art critic, considers the different ways museum exhibits are experienced, depending on who’s doing the looking. Professional critics (and passionate amateurs, like my father) assess a piece slowly and with great consideration, unlike casual visitors. But there is one group of people who straddle that divide. Museum guards may not be trained in art appreciation or technique, but they spend more time looking at famous works than almost anyone else, and that day-to-day familiarity gives them an insight that even the experts miss.
What gives this review added depth is Schwabsky’s willingness to question his own prejudices and assumptions. He remembers standing in front of a Robert Rauschenberg sculpture in Philadelphia, perplexed, when a guard told him, “No matter what you think, it’s art.” It’s an admission that critics can sometimes make things more complicated than necessary.
An “encyclopedic” museum like the Met is beset by challenges, he admits, ranging from colonialist legacies to government funding cuts. But it also attracts an encyclopedic range of visitors and staff. Bringley’s fellow guards come from dozens of countries, bringing a range of experiences to the job. “So many stories under the blue jacket,” as one of his coworkers says.
Museums are beset by so many problems today, and encyclopedic ones like the Met possibly more than most. Some of the problems can be traced to their inexpungible entanglement with histories of colonialism and white supremacy, others to their uneasy integration . . . into contemporary corporate culture, with its religious conviction of the might and right of markets. Bringley seems aware of such issues, but perhaps understands that he has no special insight to offer on them. The value of his book, rather, is in reminding us of why, despite everything, the idea of the museum is worth saving, because fundamentally it is the museum that enables an idea of art that makes it a point of communication—or dare I say, even communion?—among disparate cultures, across time and space. And from Bringley’s worker’s-eye point of view on his former employer, the cosmopolitan nature of the Met’s personnel is as telling as the cosmopolitan nature of its holdings.
Ham Dungeons, Vinegar Lofts, and More Adventures in Italy’s Oddly Specific Food Museums (Tony Perrottet, Travel + Leisure, November 2020)
The foodie tour is a well-worn genre of travel story: A writer with a generous expense account gorges on gourmet meals interspersed with “authentic” dives. This entertaining story does something more, combining, as Perrottot writes, the two great pleasures of travel, “the intellectual stimulus of the museum and the sensory delight of dining out.”
Going off the beaten path in Italy’s Emilia-Romagna region, he searches out places and people that keep the area’s culinary heritage alive. There are touches of gentle humor throughout—the scary-looking collection of can openers in the Museum of the Tomato; the male, female, and nonbinary barrels in the Museum of Traditional Balsamic Vinegar—but Perrottot is most taken by the history he traces at centuries-old restaurants and the places that supply them. At some museums, it turns out, you can actually taste the past.
By now I was at risk of becoming glutted on culinary lore. Should I head to the Museum of Felino Salami, I wondered, devoted to a type of peppery sausage? The Museum of the Marinated Eel? I opted to go top-of-the-line: Emilia-Romagna is ham country, and I had yet to try culatello, Italy’s rarest and most revered porcine product. Only 30,000 culatellos are made each year, and few leave the Po Valley. Which explains how I found myself lost in the cobwebbed darkness beneath thousands of hanging haunches.
The Museum Director Who Defied the Nazis (Laura Spinney, Smithsonian magazine, June 2020)
Museums can be defined by their mission as much as the physical space they occupy. That was certainly the case for French anthropologist Paul Rivet, an outspoken voice against the racism that pervaded his profession in the early 20th century. At a time when his peers regularly touted “scientific” proof that certain races were superior to others, Privet put his theories into practice at the Musée de l’Homme (Museum of Mankind), where similarities between peoples were emphasized rather than exaggerated. His motto? “Humanity is one indivisible whole throughout time and space.”
Then came World War II. Spinney’s piece unfolds like a spy thriller—except it’s all true. When the Germans invaded Paris in 1940, Rivet kept the museum open and sheltered staff members who formed the early French Resistance, secretly printing newspapers in the museum’s basement. Those brave beginnings led to some tragic losses, but Spinney makes a compelling case that Rivet is a role model worth emulating: When a society’s central values are threatened, museums can be both a place to hide and a place from which to fight back.
It was dangerous work—if caught by the Gestapo, the résistants risked being tortured and executed—so they inhabited a secretive, nocturnal world of code names and passwords. When one of them wanted to speak to Oddon about resistance matters, they would appear in the library and announce: “I have come for my English lesson.” Rivet carried on the fight in public, giving hugely popular, standing-room-only lectures on the folly of scientific racism. In July 1940 he wrote the first of three open letters to France’s collaborationist leader, Marshal Philippe Pétain, in which he warned, “Marshal, the country is not with you.”
A Medical-History Museum Contends with Its Collection of Human Remains (Rachel Monroe, The New Yorker, June 2025)
The Mütter Museum in Philadelphia is known for its collection of biological oddities. Its willingness to embrace the morbid has kept it afloat for years, but questions about consent have recently led to some difficult soul-searching. As Monroe writes in this nuanced, sympathetic piece, “Collections of pathological specimens came to be associated more with P. T. Barnum-style sideshows than with medical scholarship, although the two categories hadn’t always been clearly delineated.”
Many of the objects at the Mütter came from people who weren’t consulted about their wishes. In many cases, we don’t even know their names. If a person never gave permission for their remains to be shown to the public, is it ethical to keep them on display? What struck me about this piece was the even-handed way it tracks the museum’s changing persona over time—a center of academic knowledge initially respected, then creepily enterteraining, and now verging on embarrassing.
“The turmoil surrounding the museum’s direction ultimately seemed to be less about major alterations to the space than about a shift in emotional tone,” writes Monroe, “a movement away from celebration and toward something like penance.”
This research is just the first step in a process that may eventually involve contacting descendants, a project that would have its own set of complications. McLeary paused at an entry describing the skull of a man sentenced to death for murder. “You think about these what-ifs—what if you contacted these descendants? The crimes he committed were horrible,” she said. “‘Did you know that your great-great-grandfather might have sexually assaulted his daughter and then killed her? Do you want his skull back?’”
The Museum of Broken Relationships (Lulah Ellender, The Junket, August 2014)
I’m old enough to have an actual mixtape, complete with handwritten liner notes, buried in one of my basement storage boxes. Even though I no longer have the technology to play it, I’ve kept it as a reminder of my younger self—and the bittersweet memories of that time in my life. Such relics of heartbreak are the backbone of Zagreb’s Museum of Broken Relationships, a collaborative museum built on visitors’ stories of love gone wrong.
In this personal essay, Ellender considers how seemingly prosaic objects gain meaning once we know the people and experiences behind them. Every visitor who donates an object adds a note with their hometown, the length of the relationship that the piece represents, and an explanation of what it means: “It is these snippets of information that stop the exhibitions being a collection of random detritus and turn them into a heartbreaking, inspiring and enlightening reflection on love and loss.”
There’s a certain relief, Ellender writes, in realizing one’s own, private disappointment is actually a widely shared experience. The Museum of Broken Relationships may not be a traditional, curated collection, but its pieces speak to anyone who’s just been told, “Sorry, you’re not the one.”
There is a bowl, given to a woman who explains her ex-lover wanted her to bake bread, relishing the prospect of watching her knead and pummel the dough, until she realised her bread was always a failure because she was terrified he would smash that bowl over her head in a jealous rage. There is a mobile phone, with this note: ‘He gave me his cell phone so I couldn’t call him any more.’ A blue Frisbee sits alongside this message: ‘Darling, should you ever get the ridiculous idea to walk into a cultural institution like a museum for the first time in your life, you’ll remember me.’
It’s all there, encapsulated in these seemingly ordinary and insignificant objects: the pain, the anger, the floundering, the enormity of lost love. But the museum offers people the chance to turn these emotions into a creative act, to contribute to a collective work of art, to speak their story publicly.
Did Anyone Order a Renaissance Ceiling? (Peter Watts, Apollo, July 2025)
Many large museums display only a fraction of what they own, leaving the rest in storage. But London’s Victoria & Albert Museum decided to make all those “extra” pieces as accessible as possible to the general public, setting up a website for anyone to browse their collection of more than a million items—and then make an appointment to view them in person at their Study Centre.
Watts’s first-person piece points the way to a possible future, where collections are more readily available than ever, while also providing unexpected, eye-opening juxtapositions. The V&A’s Study Centre, Watts writes, is no dusty warehouse: “Imagine a restaurant with not just an open kitchen, but one that lets you poke through the dustbin and store cupboard, nose inside the freezer and then stop to chat with the sous-chef on the way out.”
Watts marvels at the visceral power of the objects he’s requested: the vibrant colors of a psychedelic Bob Dylan poster; the texture of a 1960s brocade jacket. Like all the best experiential journalism, Watts’s piece made me want to immediately book a trip to London and prowl the industrial shelves of artifacts at the Study Centre, waiting for my requested pieces to be ready.
The ground floor is for V&A staff. Visitors can watch conservators at work from a glass observatory deck, or stare down at archivists moving items or packing them up for delivery. There’s little in the way of orientation or labels, although a chunky catalogue is on hand for browsing. Instead, the space is populated by numerous cheerful visitor-experience staff, all wearing the same natty uniform and happy to help visitors get the best from this postmodern museum. As I leave, Bill asks if I enjoyed my visit. He tells me he loves it here. ‘Because there are no labels, I’m drawn to things I wouldn’t normally be interested in,’ he muses. ‘It’s just the beauty of each object that catches my eye.’
The British Museum Is in Trouble on Two Fronts on Stolen Heritage (Lydia Wilson, New Lines Magazine, August 2023)
For all their public-facing openness, museums are also fortresses: their locks, alarms, and surveillance systems protecting the treasures of the past. Institutions such as the British Museum have touted those features when justifying why they won’t return certain pieces to their land of national origin. As Wilson sums up in this provocative essay, “They’re ‘safer’ here than there.” The recent arrest of a museum employee for stealing and selling up to 2,000 pieces of Greek and Roman jewelry has put that whole defense into question: “Now that a curator in the U.K. has been found to be corrupt, will another country swoop in to take its heritage, arguing that the country can’t be trusted to look after its valuable objects?”
Wilson uses the theft scandal as a jumping-off point to question the mission at the heart of the museum. If only one percent of its collection is on display, why not repatriate pieces so they’d finally be seen? Why claim that “the return of any object is to whittle down the spirit of universality and therefore the point of the museum itself”? The irony in the British Museum claiming to have a “universal” collection, she argues, is that its exhibits don’t showcase all world cultures equally. A walk through the British Museum traces the steps of the British adventurers and armies who took what they wanted and were applauded for it when they arrived home.
This is the constant tug of emotions when visiting the British Museum. There is wonder at the breathtaking objects that showcase many civilizations across the globe and throughout human history, yet it’s open knowledge that the holdings are mostly the result of British colonialism, and therefore violence, whether real or potential, is the backdrop to many of the objects on display or held in the warren of storage rooms. What is the moral case for such a huge collection of the world’s heritage to be housed in one country? Can the intellectual value of housing so many cultures side by side ever outweigh the damage done, and in any case, can such damage ever be undone?
Elizabeth Blackwell is the author of While Beauty Slept, On a Cold Dark Sea, and Red Mistress. She lives outside Chicago with her family and stacks of books she is absolutely, positively going to read one day.
Editor: Carolyn Wells
Copyeditor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
