I was fascinated by E. & A. Alexander’s discussion of human’s instinctive fascination with collections and collecting. In second and third grade, my friends and I spent our recesses scouring through the playground tanbark for “interesting” objects like a rubber band, a plastic bead, half a candy wrapper, etc. Sometimes we’d try to assemble something aesthetically pleasing with the knick knacks, other times we’d line up our findings on a stone bench. We literally called ourselves “The Collection Club.” I’ve never thought of it this way (well I haven’t thought back to The Collection Club in a long while), but our act of collecting was inseparable from the act of curating. The things we collected were usually things considered as trash to be thrown away, but to us it had enough value to be curated in an intentional way. At the end of the day, objects in museums are just physical objects. It’s the curator who these objects value and meaning.

Anthropologist Michael Ames argues that by “‘museumify[ing]’ other cultures and our own past,” museums “limit their audiences’ abilities to make sense of collections and place them in broader social context” (12). I feel like the term “museumifying” carries negative connotations of sanitization and suppression. Is this inherent to all museums? To be honest, I’m not sure — I think that no matter what, the curator decides what stories the objects/exhibits at a museum tell. It’s possible that the curator tells a single story and ends it there, and that would align with the idea of museumifying. But what if these stories are told in such a way that encourage the museumgoers to contribute their own stories, as described by Nina Simon? What about “other forms of expression such as stories, song, and speech” as brought up by Elaine Heumann Gurian? The curator still gets to decide which of these forms of expression to present and the way they are presented, but I think that having literal voices is different from curated voice for nonsentient objects. Maybe what it means to “museumify” something will evolve with museums themselves to place more emphasis on public participation rather than preservation/sanitization.