MUSEUM FATIGUE

The main idea of Benjamin Ives Gilman’s “Museum Fatigue” (1916) is that the exhaustion experienced by museum visitors arises largely from the physical strain required to look at objects displayed in poorly designed cases, rather than from any natural limit of human attention. Through photographic documentation, Gilman shows that visitors must bend, crouch, twist & stretch simply to see objects or read labels because cases are too deep, too low, too high or overcrowded. He argues that these traditional case designs function more like storage than true exhibition, making meaningful viewing nearly impossible. After 100 years later, we have all the hi-tech, well-designed, highly-secured museums, yet we still suffer from museum fatigue.

I liken today’s museums architecturally to shopping malls, structurally to cemeteries, and functionally to prisons (1). Museums, pressured to compete with commercial entertainment, have transformed into event-like, interactive attractions - often driven by spectacular architecture - yet in doing so they risk losing their distinctive character and becoming increasingly similar to shopping malls. Visiting a museum resembles visiting a cemetery, as the same reverent silence reflects the idea that artworks are “dead” objects given their final resting place within its walls. We know that statues also die, but maybe they don’t belong to museums? They are highly secured by the guards and security systems as like prisons.

Screenshots by the author

“But the most significant announcement was that the Mona Lisa will be moved into a specially built room - with a separate entrance fee.”

Museum fatigue is not simply a matter of physical strain; it is a symptom of deeper colonial and capitalist structures that shape what museums display and how we experience them. Museums are struggling to reckon with their colonial past and increasingly failing to meet the needs of society. Even as calls for decolonization grow louder, institutions like the Humboldt Forum continue to open nearly 250 years after the founding of the British Museum. Meanwhile, free museum days are disappearing either canceled outright or narrowed to specific times, conditions & age groups through sponsorships. Simply accessing a museum today has become a challenge in itself.

The Soviet film “Visitor of a Museum” (Konstantin Lopushansky, 1989) portrays a post-apocalyptic world shattered by an ecological disaster, where the remnants of humanity - both ‘mutants’ and the last survivors of an earlier civilization - struggle to endure. Its protagonist, one of the few who still thinks and looks human, attempts to reach a mysterious museum hidden deep beneath the sea and accessible only at low tide, an ‘ethnographic museum’ preserving the ruins of a lost world. Though framed as science fiction, its depiction of a distant, nearly unreachable museum echoes the growing disconnect between museums and the people who seek them today.