Musingplaces and Communities of Ownership and Interest

On July 9 each year Australia celebrates Constitution Day. As a part of this year’s celebration Alec Coles, CEO, Western Australian Museum, talked about taking “A tiger by the tail?” and he promoted musingplaces (my word) as platforms for “Freedom of Speech”. 

Every now and then celebration of one these anniversaries for whatever provides an opportunity to spark an enlightening discourse. As Coles says, “it is not uncommon for Museums to be described as safe places for unsafe ideas. It is a phrase perhaps not coined, but certainly reinforced in Sydney by Dr Fiona Cameron, a research fellow at the University of Western Sydney, in her paper: Safe Places for unsafe ideas? History and science museums, hot topics and moral predicaments.”

Dr Cameron’s observation is at once a fairly straightforward idea and a challenging one. 

It’s straightforward in the way musingplaces have long histories of challenging if not the status quo, then some cherished understanding or other. We might well wonder what part some musingplace somewhere played a part in Christopher Columbus heading west across the Atlantic against the dictates of prevailing wisdoms and belief systems of the time.

All we need to do in order to understand actually how dangerous an idea can be is muse for a moment or two on Galileo Galilei’s lot in life. We need to look no further than him in order to understand the dangerous consequences of challenging conventional wisdom, ‘divine rights’ and the assumed/deemed infallibility of superiors – betters(?).

So in suggesting that musingplaces are safe places for unsafe ideas, well it depends upon which musingplace, where it is and what the status quo has at stake. If in some musingplaces stakeholders look a lot like status quoists it might not be all that surprising given their pecuniary interests in resisting change or the speed of it. Very often these status quoists have conflicts of interest if change is on the agenda in so much as they are likely to loose something – even their stake in an institution.

Nonetheless, arguably, public musingplaces are currently not only on the cusp significant change but also on the edge of a paradigm shift that is likely to shatter the status quo. 

But what is a public musingplace in this context?

Two things would need to be there for inclusion in the list after ‘public ownership’. Firstly, they are places – physical & other – where one might go to acquire, or engage with, new knowledge and/or develop new understandings. 

Secondly, they are the places we might go to in order to make sense of our world: to make sense of our past; to contemplate a future; to imagine and reimagine what makes up our world; to be exposed to cultural knowledge and belief systems; to map out our places in the scheme of things; to discover things, purposefully and otherwise; to put ourselves in the way of the serendipitous; to engage with our cultural realities; and increasingly to build cultural and social networks – and all of the above in a haptic or haptic-like ways.

In the Western world the typical museum and art gallery is modelled upon the Eurocentric model – it is easily recognised and acknowledged. In Tasmania in two instances these institution have been amalgamated into one. After that there are the idiosyncratic ‘local’ or singularly focused institutions – mining, maritime histories, heritage, et al. Many of these do not look like your average musingplace albeit that they are very much just that. For instance, historic and heritage houses are not typically imagined as museums but their purpose is very much that of musingplaces and they are the keeping places of objects and the stories that belong to them and typically a place and a community of people.

In the 1970s it was fashionable to start to consider “stakeholders” in planning and management processes in inclusive ways. At the time it was intended to be an all inclusive notion but very quickly some of these 70s stakeholders began to assert precedence over others – they demanded ranking and privileges to match. Very quickly their concerns were accommodated and as a consequence before anyone could be considered a stakeholder they needed to demonstrate a ‘legitimate interest’ – a ‘deemed’ pecuniary interest, an ownership in law, subject to a potential loss of something, whatever. 

Stakeholdership quite quickly became at once an elastic concept, invested with exclusivity, and then it became inclusive an idea in swift retreat – more often than not, one that is intended to underpin ranking in some way. 

Enter stage right the concept of ‘Key Stakeholder’, the people who collective outrank all others and the ones who can be relied upon to agree with each other. They are also those who will typically facilitate expedient decision-making and very often self-serving decision-making. In planning processes there is a place for stakeholders as a component of the required considerations.

Rarely does the idea of ‘obligation’ come into the stakeholder equation but ‘rights’ are regularly asserted – albeit so often deemed and self-defined. In a 21st C context stakeholdership is an untidy and contentious idea! It is especially so if you are left out of the loop.

However there is another way, and an inclusive way, to think about all this. If we think about musingplaces as having Communities of Ownership and Interest – layers of cognitive owners including stakeholders – we might then begin an interesting conversation with each other with musingplaces as facilitators of a kind.

Cognitive ownership is more a matter of ‘lore’ rather than law. It’s something inalienable and it is never up for sale and it has no price.

There is no need to invent and then market this idea as if it were something new. Cognitive ownerships have been a part of humanity's understanding of the world for a very long time and these ownerships have shaped cultural realities and social relationships for just as long.

Cognitive ownership is hardly a dangerous idea in search of a safe place to be. When we look closely, or closely enough, clearly musingplaces have extraordinarily large, extensive even, Communities of Ownership and Interest (COI) – all cognitive owners. All that really needs to be done is to acknowledge the COI as being present and begin the conversation. It isn’t rocket science! It is simply about being inclusive rather than exclusive. Importantly, accommodating the paradigm shift that comes with the acknowledgement is an imperative.

Acknowledging a COI is a cultural mindset. It is not a bureaucratic process – rather it is a participatory process. Mapping the ‘ownerships’ shared in musingplaces enriches them rather than anything that might dilute or downgrade them. Nonetheless, the tensions between Intellectual Property, Cultural Property and the Public Domain will not dissolve. They simply need to be managed in more sensitive ways when these‘owners’ are acknowledged in the ‘cognitive ownership’ layerings – multiple layerings with some owners claiming several ownerships.

Do musingplaces shape culture or do our cultural realities shape our musingplaces?

The cognitive ownership model demonstrates the richness of places – musingplaces in their geographies here – as an alternative to the poverty of perspective embedded in adversarial bureaucratic planning processes. 

Cognitive ownership calls for cooperation and collaboration rather than hierarchical obedience and blind authority.

A close examination of cognitive ownerships in musingplaces would surely reveal confluences and conflicts in ownership claims. If we abandon the notion that there can be a hierarchical or a ranked structure to the ownerships of place, – musingplaces here again – it is possible that the managers and the custodians of cultural property can begin:

• To work towards accommodating and celebrating ownership claims in the context of coexistent cognitive ownerships;
• To resolve conflicts and tensions over usage and access; and
• To establish more appropriate and inclusive, – participatory even – policy sets, planning processes and management systems.

Who are the cognitive owners of public musingplaces? 

The simple answer is almost everyone but a list of those that come immediately springs to mind is useful just so long as it is an ‘open list’ including, but not exclusively and in no particular ranking or order:

• Curators and others who operate with and within the musingplaces – establishment personnel, freelance curators, independent curators, and ‘citizen curators’;
• Citizens – tax & rate payers – of the place it is located;
• Enthusiasts of all kinds, local community historians and other historians;
• Researchers and academics;
• Tourism operators and a range of entrepreneurs;
• Government –Locals State & Federal
• Ethicists and auditors; 
• Sponsors and donors;
• People almost anywhere

Alert to the inclusivity of the listing process, and with its purpose in mind, a list is ever likely to grow over time. Like thorough interrogative research, which leads you everywhere, all at once an all the time and in unpredictable ways, inclusive cognitive ownerships are held by unlikely people and conceivably in unlikely places.

It is worth remembering that in Australia most musingplaces currently depend upon ‘the public purse’ for their existence. Self-generated income however, in a 21st C context, is likely to be a credibility yardstick – a performance indicator – that will shape musingplaces and the public funding they can expect to receive in the future. Nonetheless, this income by and large comes from ‘the public’ loyal to the institution – and it'll be hard won.

After that there are the donors and benefactors – private and corporate – with ‘cultural investments’ held in musingplaces and their collections. In the end, one way or another, it is the public who pays the salaries, builds the infrastructure, acquires the objects in their collections, pays for the conservation and so on.

Given that museums do not exist to generate cash profits, or dispersible fiscal dividends, the public might well ask, were are our social or cultural dividends? If they are not engaging with the organization, what might this be telling us? Musingplaces are simultaneously like banks and mines. Musingplaces store and accumulate the wealth then others take it away and use it in a multitude of ways to add value to their lives. 

Often, any interest and royalties that might be due have been paid for in advance. Yet there are dividends, tangible and intangible, to be won.

Public musingplaces operate under a social licence. Yet there are some musingplaces that imagine themselves as being somehow independent of, or isolated and insulated from all of this – and on the odd occasion, as some kind of fiefdom. This is possibly something handed down from the 16th Century when the Wunderkammer catalogued nobility’s precedence, infallibility and power gifted by God as a divine right – an idea that has lost its way over time.

About Joseph Beuys