Passage 2

When Americans stood in line for hours to see King Tut in the 1970s, a new kindof museum exhibition took hold: the blockbuster (盛大展出). Featuring spectacular artifacts from the tomb of the ancient Egyptian pharaoh, the“Treasures of Tutankhamen”traveled to six cities across the United Slates between November 1976 and April 1979, and drew millions of people into museums, many for the first time.Large-scale, artifact-rich exhibitions like these, whether permanentreinstallations of major collections or traveling shows that toured to five or six cities, were the heart of the museum enterprise for more than 30 years. Now, however, the field is changing.While exhibitions were traditionally the mainstay of the museum field, many organizations now see them as only the beginning point of a larger conversation with the public. Leaders in the field began moving in this direction over a decade ago, giving new priority to community engagement and placing less emphasis on large-scale exhibitions. There are many reasons for this, not least of which is that exhibitions are expensive to produce and expensive to put on tour. A national exhibition tour, perhaps conceivable in the 1980s, is today beyond the reach of most institutions.More fundamentally, the change speaks to a shift in the relationship between a museum and its public audiences. If you walked into a large museum in the 1980s or 1990s, you would have seen galleries full of objects from the museum's collection, carefully chosen and arranged by a curator (博物馆馆长), with a label written in the authoritative voice of the curator, explaining what you were looking at.Today this kind of static display seems almost antiquated. Museum goers now have the expectation, when they walk into a museum, that they will be interacting with the content on display—curating their own virtual exhibits, sharing information about museum artifacts via social media, or participating in some kind of public dialog around issues important to them. Institutions like the Cleveland Museum of Art have pioneered new approaches to draw visitors into the curatorial process: Cleveland’s innovative Gallery One invites visitors to explore objects in the collection through a 40-foot-high touch screen. iPads in museum galleries, interactive tables, and creative uses of social media all offer visitors a more immediate and participatory role.Museums are also realizing that if they want to bring new audiences into their institutions and reflect the diverse communities around them, they need to break down the gallery walls. Leading urban institutions such as the Oakland Museum of California, the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, and the Brooklyn Historical Society have collaborated with their communities to create exhibits that reflect the experiences of many different kinds of people. In all three cities, those exhibits have served as springboards (平台)for powerful and important community dialog.It's not only that museums are changing how they think about their audiences; it’s also that their audiences are changing how they think about museums. The role of the museum is being reimagined from within and without, amounting to an epic shift in expectations. Their dedication to art, history, and culture remains, but their social function is different from what.

What was the exhibition of “Treasures of Tutankhamen” like in the 1970s?