The Importance Of An Inquiry Into Musingplaces

Speaking as I do from a place outside where some would argue that I no longer have any business to be speaking about musingplaces – NSW musingplaces that is. I challenge that perception and as they say, I have form – and I have company. These places belong to many and those with interests in them are as far flung as they are near.

To a large extent my life has been shaped by musingplaces of many kinds and in many places, sometimes overtly, other times subliminally, on others covertly. Sometimes the experiences in, and via, them have been awkward and tenuous – peculiar even.  Mostly however, despite their sometimes inadequacies, they are nourishing places.

Over time just about every personal interest along with most private passions and somewhat insulated sentiments have in some way been ‘dealt with’ in one musingplace or another. This is not unusual as I have lots company. However, very often all this happens at a subliminal level and slips by as if it mightn’t have happened. 

More and more all this happens outside the built environment and within ‘cyberspace’. Yet the usefulness of access to ‘real things’, ‘proper books’, ‘haptic experiences’, etc. is unlikely to subside any time soon. Its these things that are launching pads for the test of something not previously considered.

Our musingplaces, and in particular our museums, art galleries and heritage sites, have become ‘bureaucratised’ – and counterproductively so … arguably. 

Debatably, there has been a creeping diminishment and a concerning trivialisation of these musingplaces’s cultural significance in their 21st Century context.

For reasons not too difficult to imagine they have very often been translated into (reimagined as?) ‘theme parks’ of a kind. It’s particularly so when the value of ‘tourist dollars’ are in the sights of whoever sees that as some kind of pragmatic fiscal imperative.

Likewise, the scholarship imperative is too often displaced by "the delightful" and the experience of  "enjoyment and amusement".  Now there is nothing all that much wrong about all that and these 'feelings' are absolutely legitimate. It is just the case that there is more to musing than just that – and its a democratic activity.

Clearly there has been ‘community kick back’ arising out of the NSW Government’s decision to sell-off a musingplace to the highest bidder. Given that it is sited in an area with high real estate values it seems it is imagined that it can be ‘transport’ it to somewhere else – imagined and sold as relocation. 

Why do it? Well on the face of it, it’s in order to achieve some political imperative, via a symbolism of some kind. However, at many levels that tells us a great deal all by itself. 

Musingplaces are in fact ‘treasure houses’ but the gold in them is hidden in sometimes the unlikeliest of places. In fact much of the ‘treasure’ is in their ‘placemaking’ and their ‘placemarking’. In turn, and quite unsurprisingly, all this resists relocation. The unmaking of 'place', especially musingplaces, is ever likely to be contested.

The risk inherent in this inquiry in NSW is that it might focus its attention on just one case study – the Powerhouse Museum. And there is another risk to do with the status quo. However, as the terms of reference indicate there is more at stake than just that – and the inquiry is both timely and very much welcomed. 

In the 21st Century there are very good reasons to reimagine musingplaces – the Powerhouse Museum included. Their 21st Century purposefulness needs to be imagined as something more than the status quo. Entrepreneurship is so often seen as something misfits do as they make their way in the world – and always questioning the status quo. Even Ronald Reagan knew it for what it was when he said "you know, status quo is Latin for 'the mess we're in'".  

Bureaucratically and politically it's typically convenient to regard musingplaces as ‘cost centres’ and consequently a drain on ‘the budget’, and therefore an unproductive and a questionable indulgence.  It's aid "they just cannot make a profit". Accordingly, they are subjects for rationalisation along with their modes of operation and reasons for being. For the most part this kind of thinking bypasses the ‘values’, cultural and social values, that are invested in musingplaces. Moreover, it bypasses the profits to be had – the fiscal, cultural and social dividends. 

Typically, cost centres cannot succeed, as they can only survive, they, by design, can never succeed – or even be allowed to do so. Nonetheless, the communities within which musingplaces exist typically want theirs to succeed. In a 21st Century there is no reason to believe that they cannot succeed. There are some new dynamics in play.

However, the yardsticks by which 'success' is measured is important. Dickens's Micawber Principle and the 'cost centre concept' are intertwined.  Based as they are upon the observation: "Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds nought and six, result misery" they consign far too many musingplaces to mediocrity - albeit that there are some virtues to be found in the safety offered by the Micawber Principle.

Nonetheless, Micawber's investment in survival needs to be challenged if productivity is what underpins success.

Ray Norman