Podcast Transcript

What’s the point of going to a museum? with Susan Crane

SUSAN CRANE: There's a fun story about how the Mona Lisa became famous. Do you know that one?

ERIC JOHNSON: No, I don't.

SUSAN: She disappeared. So this is a very famous story about how a somewhat obscure portrait of a woman became the most valuable piece of painted art on the planet.

ERIC: This is Susan Crane. She's a history professor at the University of Arizona.

SUSAN: I got interested in it because I was looking at blank walls.

ERIC: Susan is also the author of the book "Nothing Happened: A History."

SUSAN: I was looking at what artists do with nothing in front of them or how they make art with and out of nothing. In 1911, there was a theft by somebody who worked at the museum. And when the Mona Lisa was gone, people flocked to the Louvre to the blank space on the wall to see where she had been. It was a big reaction in the press, big reaction in the society at the time. People said, "We can't go into the museum and see this blank space on the wall." And then she came back and became this venerable object.

ERIC: The weird thing is, if you went back to the Louvre in 1911, you probably wouldn't have noticed if the Mona Lisa was there or not.

SUSAN: So it used to be that the walls were very crowded. The walls were stacked with paintings, one on top of the others. It was a statement of, "I own all this. I am in control."

ERIC: Today, you would definitely notice if the Mona Lisa were missing. About 9 million people visit the Louvre every year, and I would bet all of the euros in my pocket that a lot of them are there to see the Mona Lisa.

SUSAN: Why does everyone need their picture of the Mona Lisa? We've got excellent digital versions, better photographs available to the world online.

ERIC: Really, why do people make such an effort to see and photograph this painting? They travel from all around the world to see it, even though before it got stolen, no one really cared about it. This is Call 'Em Like Museum, a podcast about how museums really work and why we love them. I'm Eric Johnson. I wanted to kick off the podcast by talking to Susan Crane because she has a really keen understanding of what museums do to us and for us. Today on the podcast, we're going to talk about how museums have evolved in the past 200 years, how they were radically changed by the introduction of photography, and why controlling what goes on the wall of a museum is so important and sometimes controversial. So why do we go to museums anyway? We'll hear from historian Susan Crane right after this.

ERIC: This episode is sponsored by transistor.fm. If you are starting a podcast, then you should use Transistor. Upload your audio or video and they'll publish your episodes to Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, Pocketcasts, Overcast, and more. Go to transistor.fm for a 14-day free trial. Have you ever left a museum without hitting the gift shop? Yeah, me neither. Tote bags, hats, desk toys, all these specific magnets. I love it all. And now I'm giving some of it away in the Call 'Em Like Museum gift shop giveaway. To enter, all you have to do is sign up for our free newsletter at likemuseum.com. That's likemuseum.com.

ERIC: I met Susan through her sister, my friend and colleague, Elizabeth Crane. Before we started recording, Susan told me that she had often been gobsmacked by things that you could only encounter in a museum. That happens to be one of my favorite words, which is why I said this: I'll just say I'm gobsmacked to be talking to you, in the best way, so thanks for being here.

SUSAN: Oh, that's great. Thank you. I'm glad to be here.

ERIC: Well, I want to start with a couple questions that I'm going to ask everybody I talk to. The first is, what is a museum? And what does that word mean to you?

SUSAN: All right. So the scholarly answer is that it was a temple of the muses. And then for some people, we then have to backtrack and say, who are the muses? And that gets amusing, right? So it is to honor the muses that inspire and guide knowledge and wisdom. Yeah. What is it to us? It's a place we go where we expect to be entertained, educated, see cool stuff that we might not see anywhere else, and then have a nice meal or coffee afterwards. And there's always a gift shop.

ERIC: The cafe and the gift shop, those are an important part of the experience. I'm going to have to do an episode about those. Yeah.

SUSAN: Just those. I would love to know when the first gift shop was created. I honestly don't know. I haven't looked that up yet.

ERIC: What's the first museum that you remember going to when you were growing up? What was your first exposure to museums?

SUSAN: Right. It was probably my dad took me and Elizabeth to the Natural History Museum in Los Angeles and also to the LA County Museum of Art, LACMA, and the La Brea Tarpits, which —

ERIC: Ohh.

SUSAN: Right? I know it's got a big museum with it now, but what I remember is going as a kid and just seeing the stuff in the ground. So yeah, it was probably a combination of natural history and art museums that were my first exposure.

ERIC: When you were little, when you were going to these museums, did you think that you'd be studying museums in some fashion in the future?

SUSAN: Yeah no. (laugh)

ERIC: Was that on the radar?

SUSAN: Honestly, it's a little bit of a problem for people in the museum field. In a way, it ruined my wanting to go to museums all the time. So instead I've become more focused as a museum-goer. I go see one thing. I don't try and do a whole museum anymore. But at the same time, obviously the fascination has never gone away. I still love museums.

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ERIC: You study the theory and practice of history, including how technology changes the way we remember the past. So if I were to pop in my time machine — which I have here, definitely, right off camera — if I were to go back to the 18th or 19th century in Europe, would I recognize what they called a museum?

SUSAN: Actually, it would depend on where you landed.

ERIC: Okay.

SUSAN: But yeah, you probably would, especially if you stayed in Europe and especially if you stayed in a familiar context or what's familiar to you given your background. Would you land in a place where normally you were restricted from? Because if you go in the 18th century, unless you're royalty, you're probably restricted from any collection that you might want to visit. On the other hand, if you land in the 1790s in Paris — and you're adequately protected — you could go into the first public hours of the Louvre when it was first opened to the masses. So it really depends on where you land. You could still land in a curiosity cabinet. You could still land in a palace, but you could also land in the Louvre.

ERIC: I've heard the term "curiosity cabinet," but refresh my memory. What does that mean?

SUSAN: Yeah. The German is great. It's a wunderkammer.

ERIC: Oh my gosh, I love that.

SUSAN: A cabinet of curiosities is a place filled with wonder. There are so many terrific ones. In Europe, starting as early as the 16th century, but even earlier, it was a place where somebody who had a particular interest and the particular means or elite status with the money that goes with it to collect unusual things. So rare things. Could be natural history objects, but could also be maybe things that hint at the mystical or mysterious. Maybe they're one of a kind. And then they'd be kept in drawers or a purpose-built cabinet in a purpose-built room. But again, highly secluded, open only by invitation, etc. Yeah. So curiosity cabinets, they still exist and people still put them together.

ERIC: Really?

SUSAN: But they are in a lot of ways forerunners of museums.

ERIC: One of the things Susan has studied is how the invention of photography changed museums.

SUSAN: I'm really interested in 19th-century photography. And I got interested in photographs as historical objects, as three-dimensional things, some of which we are still fortunate enough to have. They've lasted this long. But then what I was also looking at is, well, for instance, could you have gone back in your time machine into the 19th century and landed in a photography museum? No.

ERIC: Really?

SUSAN: They really didn't exist. The big museums don't start collecting photography until the late 19th century and into the 20th. You don't get a department of photography until the mid 20th century in New York at the Museum of Modern Art. So this is a, shall we say, late-blooming art form. The photographs in the 19th century were privately owned. Some people were assembling them to look at in albums. Other people were seeing them in public displays like slideshow lectures, especially stereograph, [which is] when you have two images that are blended into one when you view it. That's how the public would've encountered photographs in the 19th century: on display, not really in museums. And then they started getting used in the background. Photographs were seen as things you could tear up and reproduce on a wall to create context. I'll give you an example that I've written about.

The University of Arizona where I teach has a museum called the Arizona State Museum on the campus. And they have a terrific collection of the photographer Edward Curtis. So a few years ago they did an Edward Curtis exhibit and I went into the museum to see these beautiful images. What they had also done, though, historically at the museum is they'd used Edward Curtis's images as background. So they have a very famous collection of pots — Southwest, Native American. It's a terrific collection and they have a wonderful way of displaying it in big glass cabinets. But in those same big glass cabinets, there'd be a picture, for instance, of a woman with a child she's holding and a Mojave water basket on her head. And the caption of the exhibit says "Mojave water carrier." And the first time I looked at it, thinking as I do now about photographs in the background, I was like, well, is that a picture of her?

Is that a picture of the basket? Is it a picture of a woman in what looks like the basin of the Grand Canyon with a basket on her head? Or is this just about the basket? The basket in front is not the same basket that's in the picture. This only bothers people like me.

ERIC: (laugh)

SUSAN: Most museum-goers will go, "What a great photo. Wow, she's carrying a basket like that one and I can see the basket." And that's the museum experience that the curators are going for. So I looked at it and I said, "Why is that photograph in the background? That's a famous photograph by a famous photographer." Okay. But it was never about the photograph. It was about the basket. So that is the way, for the most part, photographs have been used in museums in the 20th century and into the 21st.

ERIC: When did we start seeing photography as artworthy of being hung in a museum in its own right, not being used as context? When did that shift happen?

SUSAN: It starts at the turn of the century and it was a big argument between famous photographers who were advocating for photography should be considered a fine art and therefore it should be collected and valuable and you spend money on it and then you exhibit it in an art museum. And then other people who said, "It's just a practical tool. It's a practical tool that produces a document." Okay, we put those in libraries and archives. Why do we need them in a museum? Oh, they're beautiful? Oh, okay. Well, but they're reproducible. So if they're reproducible, they're not unique. And an oil painting can be unique.

ERIC: There's one Mona Lisa, no matter how many times it's photographed and copied and put on mugs or whatever, yeah.

SUSAN: There's a fun story about how the Mona Lisa became famous. Do you know that one?

ERIC: No, I don't.

SUSAN: She disappeared.

ERIC: Really?

SUSAN: She disappeared from the museum wall and people freaked out. And it was a big reaction in the press, big reaction in the society at the time. People said, "We can't go into the museum and see this blank space on the wall." And then she came back and became this venerable object.

ERIC: In case you're watching the video version of the podcast, I am currently showing a painting of how the wall of the Salon Carré looked before the theft. And here's a photo from after the theft.

SUSAN: The Louvre did hang a work by a rather famous Renaissance painter named Raphael, and people were disappointed, even though it's a beautiful work of art by a really famous painter.

ERIC: There have been many, many instances of art theft over the years. The Louvre itself recently suffered another high-profile robbery, the theft of eight of the French crown jewels in 2025.

SUSAN: I wonder if there's something about the status of museums, the fame of the institution that kind of lends itself to every object that's in it. So anything you steal from the museum is then particularly valuable because you stole it from a museum? But when there's hundreds of thousands of objects to choose from, why do you zoom in on that one? I mean, it could be that that has a very particular meaning to the thief.

ERIC: This idea of people coming to see nothing, and you said they were disappointed when the nothing was replaced by something. This is really striking at the heart of one of the big ideas of this podcast is that we're putting these things in these places and we are attaching all this meaning to them because they're in these places. How would you characterize the role of nothing in this story?

SUSAN: Well, nothing is always happening. There's always nothing going on. And then suddenly someone pays attention to it and then it becomes something. And so that was the premise of my entire project was noticing all the somethings that were getting made. What people seemed to remember in her absence was this ambiguous smile, something about her face that was unreadable, something that was titillating, something that was fascinating, that nobody could quite put their finger on. And then somebody did put their finger on it and took it. So that makes it noteworthy or noticeable.

ERIC: So in other words, as soon as the painting was gone, people were remembering she was smiling. No, she wasn't smiling. They were debating about what used to be there and that added to the allure, that added to the mystique of this painting.

SUSAN: When the picture disappeared, the museum staff at the Louvre initially was ... Well, they didn't even notice it right away, for one thing. But when they did notice it, there was some confusion within the administration. They said, "Oh, wasn't the painting being taken somewhere to photograph it, to make a record of it, to document it?" Museums were making copies of the art that they owned pretty much since the invention of the camera, certainly since the second half of the 19th century. So maybe there was a particularly good photo or a particularly good drawing of the Mona Lisa that then became part of what was circulated in the public to remind people of what had been lost. The aura of the original is everything and irreplaceable. Ask any forger who's tried to replicate it perfectly.

ERIC: Let's look at that photo from after the Mona Lisa was stolen again. There are two paintings on either side of the blank space, one by Titian and one by Correggio. And above all of them is a huge work of art by Paolo Veronese, "The Feast in the House of Simon the Pharisee."

SUSAN: What I am intrigued by as a scholar of the 19th century is the way that display changed in museums. So it used to be that the walls were very crowded. The walls were stacked with paintings, one on top of the other. So what you saw at eye level was just two or three of the hundred or whatever that were visible in the room. It used to be more common to present so many things in one room. It was a statement of, "I own all this. I am in control. I'm demonstrating the largesse of my generosity of sharing it with the public, but look at how much I own." That seemed to be kind of the way of presenting either contemporary art or Renaissance art, depending on what you cared the most about.

ERIC: If you go to the Louvre today, you won't find the Mona Lisa jammed between three other paintings. The frame is itself framed by a huge black border behind bulletproof glass. It's a blank wall, nothing on it except for the Mona Lisa.

SUSAN: Stand in the line, queue up like you're waiting to purchase something at the busy gift store. And look how small the Mona Lisa looks on that wall.

ERIC: Oh, exactly. Because there's nothing else on the wall, it really focuses your attention in this tiny little point and you can't get that close to it. And I am not an art historian. I'm not an artist. No one should listen to my opinion on this. Personally, I think this looks terrible. I hate this.

SUSAN: Well, I hate it too. I mean, we all know what the line really looks like on a daily basis. It's a hugely crowded room and I don't like crowds. I don't like standing in crowds. This would completely put me off going in to look at the Mona Lisa. Why does everyone need their picture of the Mona Lisa? We've got excellent digital versions, better photographs available to the world online, right? But this is your proof. I was there. I'm taking a picture there. I stood in the crowd. I braved the crowd. I stood in front of the Mona Lisa. Therefore, I got to see the original, and here's my record of having seen the original. Even though I'm not showing you the original, I'm showing you a crummy digital smartphone photograph of the original.

ERIC: Hey, if you're enjoying the episode, then make sure to follow the podcast in whatever app you're using right now. It's free, and it makes sure that new episodes will show up automatically. If you're on YouTube, then hit subscribe there too. Thank you so much. On this podcast, we believe that everyone's experience with museums is deeply personal, and that's why we want to hear your museum stories. If you've got one, and I bet you do, please submit it at our website, likemuseum.com. Just go to the website likemuseum.com and click "submit a museum story" at the top of the page. It might just make it into a future episode. Thanks.

Let's talk more about the purpose of going to a museum. I want to go back to 19th century Europe where I traveled to. You said that in some places I wouldn't be able to get into certain galleries, but let's assume that I have the privileges to enter into a space where art is being displayed, where let's say paintings are being displayed. Why are people there? Why are people going to museums in this time?

SUSAN: The 19th century is when museum-going just explodes. So you get purpose-built buildings for museums. You get collections being brought together and displayed. Art and painting is just that much. And then there's history museums and there's natural history museums and then there's overlap. And then there's an interest in local heritage. And so people are starting to bring together the art, the objects, the things they want to remember from their locale. So this kind of explodes and expands in the 19th century. So when you say, what are people going to see? If you start with the big museums, the British Museum in London, the Louvre in Paris, go to Washington, D.C., and see the Smithsonian Institution. You're going to see what is considered great art. So you're going to learn something about high culture. That's why you're going. You're going to see something that is considered valuable, important, and you shouldn't underestimate the monetary value and the rarity value.

You're seeing something great because it is unique. Something great because somebody's willing to spend billions of dollars on this one thing and you get the chance to see it. And then there's the monumentality of it. This comes up in the discussion of monuments, which also explode in the 19th century. Big public sculptures get bigger and bigger.

ERIC: Right.

SUSAN: Size matters. So you get big public museums, big public sculptures, and it's the same thing with the art inside. If you can't see the Mona Lisa in real life, what else can you do? You could look at a really beautiful reproduction of it, in a large book about the Louvre or about the artist. It's a lot harder to get access to that kind of thing though. And those reproductions are expensive, so it's easier to go to the museum and see the real thing than it is to get access to a really good reproduction. You can't just get one for free at your library most likely, or get one sent to your house. You might get a book sent to you once in six months.

It's a lot harder. And those reproductions are expensive, so it's easier to go to the museum and see the real thing than it is to get access to a really good reproduction. It's going to take some funds for people to get there.

ERIC: One of my formative experiences with museums as a kid was going on field trips from school. I grew up in the D.C. area. So today we're going to the Air and Space Museum and then next year we're going to the Natural History Museum. I did not know how good I had it back then because I was just a kid on a trip.

SUSAN: Right? Because you were just a kid on a trip. And as a parent, this is also a question that came up for me. Do the kids really remember it? I remember my dad taking me to a museum. But if you start going to a whole lot of museums, does it become, oh, my dad and mom are dragging me again to another boring place where I don't know what I'm looking at. So on the one hand, you want to increase awareness of culture. And so you want to expose kids to it. And on the other hand, you know full well, they're never going to remember all of it. So you're kind of building a foundation and an expectation that this is valuable and important. And even if you don't get it all when you're 8, maybe when you're 16 or 17, you're like, oh, now I know why that painting is considered famous because I know the history behind it. Or, oh my gosh, now I understand why that dinosaur was a significant find and they were able to put it together. That's huge.

ERIC: Right.

SUSAN: So you need a little context. So you start exposing kids early, hoping that it makes sense, and then you have to count on what they know from school. And that's another big question, gosh, that every museum professional has to deal with. How much can you assume your public knows?

ERIC: Exactly.

SUSAN: You don't want to talk down to them, but you also want to educate. You may also want to reeducate. And so at what point can you connect with the public that you're anticipating? And they're publics. I mean, there isn't just one monolithic, hegemonic, one thing public. There's lots of us and we all bring different things to the museum. I think that's one of the things I've come to learn actually from working on this over the years is that what I see is going to be different from what other people see. And what I expect to see is going to be different from what other people expect or want. And museum professionals have staked a lot in a career of trying to anticipate and guide that, but it's tough.

ERIC: This is really what interested me in making this podcast was the fact that two people could go to the same museum, same day, same time of day, have completely radically different experiences there. Being in this physical space that's designed in a certain way, we experience the art, the information, the history differently. It fundamentally changes the experience.

SUSAN: It fundamentally changes the experience. And then there's the part where, oh, there's a list of museums I'm supposed to see because I'm in Madrid or a list of museums because I'm in London. But then why? Why those museums? Who put together the list? So we all have different stakes in it. Is it an achievement to say I've been to these museums? Or is it, oh, I've always wanted that experience of being gobsmacked.

ERIC: Hey, there we go.

SUSAN: The more museums you put yourself in touch with, the better chance you have of being surprised. So there's the list, the famous stuff, everybody has to stand in front of the Mona Lisa. At this point, I think the experience of standing in front of the Mona Lisa is why most people go to the Louvre. Are you going to be gobsmacked by that? I really, really doubt it.

ERIC: It's like checking a box for some folks, I'm sure, where it's like, well, I'm already in Paris. I guess, yeah, okay, I got time to go see the Mona Lisa, one of the greatest works of art ever made. (laugh)

SUSAN: The chance of being surprised is better if you're willing to stumble onto things. So if you go into the room that's less crowded, or if you go to the museum that's not on the list, or if you let yourself sit in front of one thing for a little while, chances are you'll see something that you would've missed otherwise. This is something else actually that I thought was really interesting. If you try and ask any collector, but if you try and imagine what people who've put together some of the big collections that have been the foundation for some of the big museums, if you ask them, "Why that? Why those objects?" Chances are they're not going to say, "Well, scholars have shown that ..." Dot, dot, dot. They're just going to be, "I loved it."

ERIC: Yeah.

SUSAN: So there's probably this emotional connection to it that made them want to have it. And one of the really ironic things that happened over and over again in the history of museums in the 19th century is that a collector might try to specify how their collection was supposed to be kept together. And most of the time after they die, it's either not kept together or it's not displayed together, or you get a very idiosyncratic museum that does stay together. But it's something that collectors really worried about because it had been so meaningful to them. Okay. Well then you think about us in the 21st century encountering those collections and you're thinking, I'm supposed to imagine that one man's fascinations are really important. Why? (laugh) Why this one guy got to say that we now have to all look at this? Who gave them that power? Who gave them that authority?

The other really interesting thing is about the objects. In the history museums that I was particularly interested in looking at in Germany in the 19th century, one thing became clear. The most valuable objects had a story. So the reason you wanted that belt buckle or that vase was because it had been touched by, owned by, created by, created in the moment of something else that was really significant. And without that backstory, without that context, the modern viewer is just going to look at the thing and go, "It's a belt buckle."

ERIC: I want to get to one of the key themes of the podcast, which is why we go to museums now. In the 19th century, right, you said this may be someone's only chance to see some of these things. And now, at least in terms of seeing reproductions of it, we have access to so much information, so much culture online. We can get everything almost immediately. So why is it, you think, that people are still going to museums? What do they mean to us now in an era when we can get everything on demand?

SUSAN: Gosh, that's the psychology of the museum-goer. I'm not sure I'm equipped.

ERIC: Yeah. (laugh)

SUSAN: But I guess I'll go with a couple of things I've noticed when I visit museums. And first of all, that is how quickly people walk past things. How long somebody might spend staring at one thing. How few people read the tags, which is painful to all museum professionals, and what they talk about with each other while they're visiting. So in a lot of museums now you're wearing a headset or you're listening to a phone and you click, you dial and you get information, then you walk to the next thing. I would say in a sense, you're getting a little bit less of interaction among people who visit a museum together. I wonder, are people talking with each other as much if they're dialed into the information that they're getting on the audio from the museum? So in a way it's quieter in a museum and in a way it's lonelier.

But at the same time, there's huge crowds. So that's a real dichotomy there. Why are people going? I think they've heard about things they want to see for themselves. So does the museum still offer evidence as well as the possibility of, "Well, when I see it, I will be transformed." Or, "When I see it, I'll know something in a way that I could not know otherwise by just looking at pictures online." And in that sense, nothing has changed because ...

I'm thinking of Johann Wolfgang Goethe who wrote back in the late-18th, early-19th century, he wrote some lovely dialogues, and he was considering how some other people he knew were also writing these gallery dialogues. It was a genre that was kind of popular among a literary elite. You walk into the Dresden Royal Picture Gallery — this is a palace with a famous art collection — and you're supposed to go into a particular room and be so overwhelmed by the sublime beauty of what you're seeing that you're almost inarticulate. And then as soon as your inarticulateness manifests itself, you need to talk to somebody. And so you need to have somebody who is in dialogue with you about what you're experiencing. So you need to have a conversation like a podcast with somebody else who's seeing the same thing you are. And so this got scripted.

This was a famous writer like Goethe scripting it for other people so that when they went to the Dresden Royal Picture Gallery, they could have the same kind of conversation that the famous poet or writers had had when they were there.

ERIC: Wow.

SUSAN: So there's a form of reenactment going on that all of us as tourists are guilty of. And I don't mean guilty in a bad sense. I mean, we've probably heard about this or been exposed to it, whether we saw somebody in a film or we saw somebody in a video or we read something about how they felt when they saw that or when they went to that museum. So as visitors, we then want to reenact that other person's experience because it was so meaningful and now it's your chance to have the meaningful experience. Okay, then imagine how disappointed you are when you don't have (laugh) the exact same reaction, and you have to cover it up by saying, "Oh wow, isn't that great?"

ERIC: (laugh)

SUSAN: Maybe you and your friend keep — or your partner or whoever you're with — you keep walking into another room and then you get to have that sublime experience, I hope. That's what I mean by gobsmacked. I think it's still possible.

ERIC: What you bring into a museum with you matters, but what if you bring in an understanding of the real world that disagrees with what you're going to see? That's not a hypothetical question. In Washington, D.C., the historically independent Smithsonian Institution has recently found itself fending off accusations of bias from the White House. As of the time of this recording, the president has said the national museum of American history had used the country's history as "a political instrument to divide, dispirit, and discourage our citizens." Could you speak to the politics of controlling museums and why authoritarian leaders care about this? Why does control of this —

SUSAN: That's a really interesting question. Let's put this in a historical context: Why have authoritarian leaders in the past cared so much about art museums especially, but also about how the nation is represented in a historical museum? Maybe the easiest way to put it is democratic regimes as well as authoritarian regimes have had investments in how they are represented. So any museum that is representing a national history or perhaps a colonial history or perhaps an imperial history has a particular stake in how they are represented. And it's no different from anybody who, say, cares about how their portrait looks. Do I want to be remembered by the photo of me on my driver's license? Probably not. Would I rather be remembered by a photograph that was made by somebody with the skill of Edward Curtis? Yeah. Well, okay, that's the small-scale version of what we're looking at in the large scale. So any place that is representing us to ourselves, we have a stake in how we look.

So it's like holding a mirror up to us. And sometimes the mirror is more messed up than others. It's also not uncommon for museums to change a museum tag to reflect better information or to reflect or to — how should we say — repair misinformation. That's always going to be going on. The problem we have right now, and this has been argued about at the Smithsonian since its initial founding.

ERIC: I bet.

SUSAN: It took them 10 years after they got the money for the Smithsonian, they still hadn't put together the board of it because who's in charge? What's it going to include? How's it going to represent what? It took them years and years and years. So in a sense, this is endemic to the history of the Smithsonian. What feels wrong right now to scholars of museums and to curators and museum professionals is the way that the federal government's oversight over the scholarly level of research. It's [encroaching] on it. And it's not okay for someone who's not a scholar and not done the research and also rejects facts and research to out of nowhere say, this is how you have to represent things. Because that is crippling to people who have invested the time to do the research and to consult with each other, to conduct peer review, to follow all of the proceedings that belong to academic freedom.

It's just hanging a black sheet over all of that and saying it's gone. It's as if nothing is there. Yeah, right. Whenever someone says nothing is there, something is going on so you got to pay attention.

ERIC: Absolutely.

SUSAN: It's painful to watch this happening. At the same time, I have a lot of respect for the museum professionals at the Smithsonian who are trying to hold up the standards under which they have been trained and under which they have authority to be managing the institution. It's a tough fight and they're doing it.

ERIC: The silver lining is because the contents of these placards and of these exhibits, right, because they are mutable, they're not fixed: If they're changed one way, they could be changed again.

SUSAN: They can easily be changed again. So if we could just say, with regime change comes relabeling. And that's nothing new. And that's not just authoritarian or democratic. It's with regime change can come relabeling.

ERIC: Well, and I guess it's not just about the regimes. There can also be grassroots pressure. There can be folks who are not in any sort of political power, but they get together and they lobby a museum. I think the British Museum is probably the most notorious example where there's been a cultural shift in people critiquing why do you have all these artifacts that were looted or whatever verb you would like to use there? They were taken from their homes and are being exhibited in England. There are these popular movements trying to change museums from without. Do you have a sense of how effective [these are]? Are those able to really connect and to make a difference in how museums operate?

SUSAN: Absolutely. And just to give a few examples, in my lifetime, the fundamental change that came with NAGPRA, for instance, the Native American Graves [Protection and] Repatriation Act. So that's from 1990 and we're still working on it. But the idea that somebody could challenge the authority of a museum to own human remains, to display human remains. And again, we're back to the Mojave water carrier. The photograph was never just of that woman. It was representing the baskets. Those bones are in a natural history collection or in the Army Medical Museum that was part of the Smithsonian. Some of that was taken from battles that were fought in the American West without any of the permissions of the relatives of the people who died on the battlefield. So is that loot? Is it plunder? Well, guess what? A whole lot of what 19th-century museums were founded on was loot and plunder and sometimes bought under questionable circumstances.

That's a legacy that we are now coming to terms with, and we are looking at those materials differently than people did a hundred years ago. And so that's part of the mutability of a museum. But again, that's happened within museum cultures and within the management of museums. Attitudes have shifted or changed in response to public demands, not just a federal government's order, but to grassroots pressures and to scholarship changes of people looking at the past in different ways and evaluating value in different ways. I think these are positive kinds of changes that happen in museums, and the public isn't always aware of why that's valuable. I think sometimes people feel like ... To give one example, this was in Amsterdam. There was a famous figure in a ... I think it was a canoe that hung over the entrance to a major natural history museum there. And when curators said, "Uh, that's actually a human figure up there, we need to probably take it down." People said, "No! You can't take him down. He's great. He's the museum!"

ERIC: It's history.

SUSAN: Well, but he represented — and we're talking about "he" like we know who he is, right? But this human figure was something symbolic of the entire museum to, it turned out, a very large general public. So it then became incumbent upon the museum professionals and the scholars to explain why they felt that this was now inappropriate. In today's parlance, people would say, "Oh, that's ridiculously woke," or something like that. No, this is a response to changing attitudes towards how we identify historical objects and remnants from the past and how we value them. And it does change and it's always been changing. It's possible a hundred years from now, no one's going to want to look at the Mona Lisa. Have we already changed how we might or might not want to look at human remains? Yeah, I feel very differently about it now than I did when I was a kid going to a natural history museum.

Maybe we don't want to still look at those sculptures that were made in the 19th century of famous generals. Maybe we don't still want to look at the Mona Lisa. I fully do expect that to change. I fully do expect it to change.

ERIC: Why do you think it's going to change? What gives you that sense?

SUSAN: Because I'm a historian. Because if things didn't change, there would be no history, no past to write about. So change is essential to the study of history. If it didn't happen, well, we wouldn't be here, but we also wouldn't have memory.

ERIC: I once interviewed the American historian Gordon Wood, and he said, "History doesn't teach us any great lessons. No one should ever really learn from history. The only lesson it teaches us is that nothing turns out the way you expected."

SUSAN: Nothing! I knew it! We were going to come back to nothing.

ERIC: I didn't even intend that.

SUSAN: Nothing's everywhere. Nothing is always happening.

ERIC: This has been an incredible conversation. I've really loved talking to you, Susan. The last question I have for you, this is the hardest question I'll ever ask you. When you're in a museum gift shop, what do you buy?

SUSAN: That's an easy one. Postcards.

ERIC: Postcards?

SUSAN: I always buy postcards, and that's usually all I buy. Sorry, museum gift shop, but I usually only want the postcards. And I get really frustrated when the thing that I thought was the coolest isn't on the postcards.

ERIC: (laugh) I read an article about this once, about how they do all sorts of analytics behind the scenes to figure out what should they put on the tote bag, what goes on the postcard, what's going to sell, what's going to move, because they only have limited space in that gift shop.

SUSAN: I have a collection of postcards and it goes way back into the '70s.

ERIC: Oh my gosh. Fantastic.

SUSAN: Well, actually, there's a bunch that are older than that, and I've used them in my research, but I'm talking about the ones that I've purchased. I don't send them. Well, I used to. I used to send them. Now mostly I keep them.

ERIC: All right. I'll send you a postcard when this episode comes out, but — (laugh)

SUSAN: Thank you very much. That would be much appreciated. I do collect them.

ERIC: Thanks again to Susan Crane for coming on the podcast. You can find a link to her book, "Nothing Happened: A History," in the show notes. That book is also in one of the prize packages, which you might win in the gift shop giveaway. To enter, all you have to do is sign up for our email newsletter at likemuseum.com. Call 'Em Like Museum is hosted and edited by me, Eric Johnson. It's produced out of my podcast agency in San Francisco, Lightning Pod. Our marketing specialist is Julia Wilde, artwork by Rhe Civitello. Special thanks this week to Elizabeth Crane. Thank you so much for listening to this episode. I'll see you at the museum.