Collections. Institutions. Messages.

This week's theory lecture looked at how institutions such as museums and galleries convey messages to its visitors or consumers. I had never thought about the agendas that institutions have before this lecture and it will definitely be something I'll bear in mind the next time I visit an art gallery or museum.

As part of the lecture, we were given an exhibition project that we had to do in group. This involved selecting objects from a list we were given, and placing them in an exhibition space of our own choosing. Our exhibition had to have a theme or message and we had to consider the audience and also the appropriateness of its location.

In my group, we decided to focus on the nature of value. Our exhibition was going to be interactive with visitors being asked to place a token in a glass box surrounding the exhibit they believed to be the most valuable. The exhibits were a credit card, a t-shirt, a safety-pin, the earliest example of human writing, a jewellery chest and the Venus d'Milo. The aim was that as the tokens piled up around the objects that were considered most valuable, the objects themselves became obscured and hidden from view. This reflected the notion that the more popular something becomes and the more it is used, the more meaningless and the more devalued it becomes. This exhibition would be a pop-up in Trafalgar Square as our audience would be international and from all walks of life. They would all be able to relate to the exhibition, the objects and the message as it was not as exclusive as a more traditional museum or art exhibition.