"The Louvre Museum of Vietnam" - When will we know?

(Baonghean) - Once I took a French family to Vietnam for a visit, they insisted on visiting all the museums in the city without missing any. Then, they were surprised: Why are the doors closed, the lights turned off during working hours, and where do the employees go? Why are the museums in our country, which are free to enter, deserted like a temple, while in their country, many museums require tickets, but visitors line up in long lines? Why and why?

Museum culture is a two-way culture, with a transmission and a reception direction (like other types of mass media culture). The deep-rooted problem of museum culture in Vietnam is not only that of the audience but also of the organizers. First of all, it must be recognized that investment in museums is still modest. This situation is most clearly reflected in the maintenance of artifacts as well as the display facilities. The construction of facilities should be systematic from the design stage to the maintenance stage: that is, what kind of artifacts are on display, do they need any special display conditions? For example, if it is a painting, what lighting conditions are needed, what temperature conditions are needed; if it is an antique, ceramic, glass or living organism specimen, what conditions need to be adapted to ensure that the specimens are always in optimal preservation condition? Building facilities and equipment is one thing, maintenance is another.

To do this, it is necessary to have qualified human resources, and this factor seems to not be up to standard in every museum in Vietnam... When the paint is good, the wood must also be good, let's look at what our museums display? Usually, the quantity and variety of specimens in museums are poor, limited, the annotations are sketchy, dry and do not leave any impression on visitors. Not only is the quantity not diverse, the content displayed over time has not changed much, added more so it is not attractive to viewers, or maybe they only come to see it once, not a second or third time.

Because it is not attractive, it is understandable that it does not receive public attention. But we can also reverse the problem, because Vietnamese people do not have the habit of going to museums, or in other words, the museum culture has not been built in the community's consciousness, so society has not paid much attention and favor to improving the quality of museums. Museum culture is built by foreigners in a quite natural and effective method, which is the method of inheritance and integration. Inheritance is building the habit of visiting museums right in the cradle of the family, children are taken to visit museums by their parents, are explained and explained by their parents, making going to museums not heavy, rigid but cozy like a relaxing weekend outing. It is beneficial for both sides, children absorb knowledge easily, parents have the opportunity to supplement their knowledge to... set an example for their children.

Integration means cleverly weaving exhibitions into community activities. For example, the curriculum can suggest students to go to museums to find materials for homework, or require students to attend an ongoing exhibition (related to the content being studied). This method is applied quite frequently and effectively by schools (from high school to university) abroad, to the point that a recent photography exhibition in Paris gathered students from almost all of Paris's universities of communication, journalism and art! Another way for exhibitions to integrate into community life is to popularize the form of exhibition, instead of organizing exhibitions indoors, you can organize exhibitions outdoors. "Playing big" is planning a dedicated area for exhibitions, "saving" is organizing temporary areas, in the premises of a park, a square with many people...

Museums or exhibitions are places to preserve and display cultural values, in other words, they are mirrors reflecting the history, culture and development process of a community. So how can a nation that is proud of its thousands of years of civilization show its poor cultural face to international friends to admire? Above all, a community must learn to respect its own values ​​before aiming for external values, or more ambitiously, wanting external streams of thought to recognize and honor it. If the French had not hailed it as a national cultural treasure, the Louvre Museum would never have had the opportunity to be known and admired by the whole world!

Hai Trieu (Email from Paris)