Essay #4

I believe that in spite of Weil's best attempts to quantify the “quality” of a museum, the perception of quality is still primarily governed by personal opinion. An individual who places more value on, say, community involvement and education is not necessarily going to rate the “quality” of any given museum the same as someone who places more value on the preservation and restoration of rare artifacts, for example. I often find myself highly skeptical of those who would create or even take seriously models of the sort that Weil presents in this article, because I feel that they create an artificial and contrived distortion of reality, all the while patting themselves on the back for being “objective” and utilizing “quantitative data.”

To respond more directly to this week's essay prompt, however, I would say that, though I have been to many quality museums in my lifetime, one that stands out for this purpose is the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Cody, Wyoming. The Historical Center is actually comprised of five museums dedicated to discrete specific topics pertinent to the region (the Buffalo Bill Museum, the Whitney Gallery of Western Art, the Plains Indian Museum, the Cody Firearms Museum, and the Draper Museum of Natural History), however since visitors only pay one admission fee and each of the five museums is housed under one roof, I always thought of the Historical Center as one large museum with five specific exhibits, which is how I will be referring to it for these purposes. What made the Buffalo Bill Historical Center stand out to me is how though each of these small museums could hypothetically stand alone and be entirely successful, they are amalgamated into a single cohesive unit, which provides visitors with both significant depth and breadth of knowledge about that region of the United States. Because the cultural and natural history of that region is discussed so thoroughly, and no room is wasted on exhibits that “do not belong,” so to speak, the museum is able to serve a multitude of different purposes. It works both for tourism and to boost local pride. It works as a casual destination and for research purposes. It is, simply put, a quality museum.