"The Best in Heritage" program presents a strong selection: only the best museums or heritage institutions, the ones which won a prize in their country and which are supposed to share the characteristics of excellence in their area of expertise.
But what is excellence? What is museum excellence (the same could be said for heritage institutions in general, but I will focus on the specific museum aspect)? The English verb "to excel" means: “to be superior or preëminent in the possession of some quality, or in the performance of some action, usually in a good sense; to surpass others”. To put it another way, an excellent museum, a museum that excels at being a museum, is supposed to be superior to the others with qualities museums are supposed to have.
Of course, in this prospect, the question remains, although slightly different: what are the qualities that museums are supposed to have and, more basically, what is a museum?
Most of us are supposed to know what a museum is. But some of us also experienced how amazingly difficult is the process of definition. Several ways of defining the museum have been propounded: by the ICOM, or the Museums Association, the American Association of Museums, etc. Searchers associated to such a process know how difficult the art of defining is. It usually ends with compromises and frustrations. The recent museum definition process launched by ICOM, elaborated notably through Internet under the presidency of Gary Edson, is a remarkable example of how difficult such an experience may be. Many proposals insisted only on certain functions, certain characteristics, certain qualities a museum should have (or not have). No real consensus has been found. Real differences emerged.
Generally, a museum might be declared excellent regarding his tendency to meet national codes of good practices requirements, to fill accreditation programs, etc. Obviously, its external aspects (the public quality of the institution, or its social and economic impact) offer the best and easiest way to judge it. In this respect, evaluations can be made from an objective (performance indicators) or subjective (peer review) basis. Ranking may be calculated and “superior museums” can be found, but these evaluations do not always appear to be really satisfactory.
"Excellence" might also be taken from another point of view. English and French uses the same word: it derives from the Latin excellere, which means: "to move (cellere) out of (ex)". Excellere, to "move out of", suggests a dynamic view and new perspectives. You might become excellent as the best swimmer of your swimming pool, but an excellent swimmer might be also the one who choose to leave the pool for the see, or the one who invents a new way of swimming.
The fact is that a lot of swimming pools exist, and that architecture, maintenance and management of swimming pools evolve. The museum idea has also been changing a lot since the Renaissance. Above all, the concept proves to be never the same, even with definitions, associations, networks, standards, good practices, etc. Everybody has it own idea of what a[n excellent] museum is or should be. Some of these ideas can be easily gathered but others would be rejected by some communities (conservators vs educators or market managers). In that sense, the museum phenomenon appears as a rhizome without real limits, self creating generations after generations. We may start from this more confusing perspective in order to consider another level of excellence that would not start from the concept, but from the people who worked on it.
The idea to judge a museum from its personnel, its staff, its curators, is not new. Of course, most of us think we do it partly or totally. But we rather consider excellence from an external point of view, insisting on the quality of collections, audience, techniques, building, design, access, etc. Museum Masters, the essay written some 25 years ago by Edward P. Alexander, focus on this specific angle. "It is easy for a Museum to get objects; it is hard for a Museum to get brains. […] But, objects do note make a museum, they merely form a collection", wrote John Cotton Dana, one of those masters, insisting on the human factor in the constitution of excellence. Somehow, the questions "what is an excellent curator", or "what is a museum master" might proof very useful for our investigation. Among others, in his bibliography, Alexander quotes Dominique Vivant Denon, Hans Sloane, John Tradescant, Alexandre Lenoir, Henry Cole, Arthur Hazelius, Georges Brown Goode, John Cotton Dana, etc. Those who know these masters would agree on their personalities’ differences. And the same could be stated for the external aspects of the institution they ran or founded. However, these men were elected for their peculiar profile, their passion for the "museum thing", their clear vision of what should be done, and above all their passion for a certain art of creating, sharing and transmitting ideas.
It could not be said that these masters were excellent human beings. Museum people do not always behave like philosophers in Antiquity, at the age museums were supposed to be places dedicated to wisdom. But museum masters emerged at specific changing periods of History. They were elected as master because, for the time being, the model they proposed proofed to be a good solution: the Louvre (Vivant Denon) as the prototype of an institution dedicated to new revolutionary ideals, industrial museum (Cole) or commercial museums as establishments for the new industrial society, ecomuseums (Rivière and Varine) as an answer to the 1968 revolution, etc. Above all, their model was conceived to make the world better.
Now, in our confused context, who are the museum masters for the XXIst century?
