Why I don't like Museums

Interestingly, I’ve started this draft during the last writing challenge in November but hasn’t gotten past an outline. But also, I’ve gone to more museums since!

Excerpt from 2025-11-27

Unless the museum puts in effort to be interactive in good ways, not just for the sake of having interactivity, I can no longer accept standing in front of glass-encased items and reading little plaques as a free-time activity!
By now, the bar for what a museum should set for itself should be so much higher that it actually competes with a documentary. Hell, some museums have great videos done by their curators and conservationists now, which are SO much more interesting, informative, and engaging than the museums themselves!

Culture
I’ve gone to a decent amount of museums over the last 7-or-so years and I think the key motivation to go was to feel cultured. There’s a certain prestige to museums and going to them, spending one’s free-time in them, has some of that prestige and culture rub off onto oneself. At least that’s the premise.

Enjoyment
However, I’ve rarely enjoyed myself there; I mostly find it uncomfortable to read whilst standing, shuffle to the next item and then just stand around some more. When with others there’s also social pressure to not take too long. In a more recent visit to [[Why I don’t like Museums#[Futurium](https //futurium.de/en)|Futurium]] we mostly just chatted w each other as we walked through the museum, which made it nice, but now it’s just backdrop.

Interactivity helps with this and more museums try to implement things, but too often I see them make things interactable for interactivity’s sake¹. For the most part these make it slightly more novel and intriguing, but still not better than other activities².

Knowledge
But even when reading the little signs, I usually didn’t get all that much out of them. Most museums have not been good at really making me learn things I didn’t know, nor making me care about new things.

But not reading anything in there means that now I’m just paying to walk around indoors and look at random stuff I don’t really know anything about. This doesn’t even constitute a good free-time activity if it were for free.

Guides can help with this: a good guide that doesn’t just give context to the individual items and relates them to each other but also tells a story makes a visit much more worthwhile. But unless this is a small group where questions can be asked freely, we’re only reaching YT video/documentary levels of learning, but are still less convenient and more time intensive.

Conclusion
On enjoyment, museums mostly fall flat. On edification, they’ve been outcompeted: a good documentary or a museum’s own YT channel teaches more, is more engaging and convenient, and all that in less time and for free. Museums have to be better

Some specific museums

Museums I really liked

• Spy Museum in Berlin
  • has good vibes and if you go there during off-hours then you can do interactive/acitvity things like the laser parcour thing a couple of times in a row, rather than having to stand in line.
  • Has cool artifacts to see (e.g. the enigma machine) but I’d still only go if it’s at least non-busy
• Video Game Museum in Berlin
  • shows the history of video games
  • has old arcade machines to play on
  • pong, but you get electro shocked each time you lose – you know its gonna be a great museum experience if you have to sign a waver! :D
  • overall a quite small museum

Museums I still enjoyed somewhat

• A japanese history and art museum in I think Cologne
  • whilst I didn’t really learn anything, looking at paintings irl is much better than on a (phone/laptop) screen
• Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum³ in Cologne w cultures of the world
  • they had large scale dioramas to see what e.g. a village in country/culture/time-period x might have looked like (seeing it in full scale and 3d is actually sufficiently impressive and engaging)
  • overall, I still think a documentary would’ve been better
• British History Museum
  • dinosaurs and cross-sections of enormous trees! Their scale only really hits you when you’re in front of them

Museums I didn’t enjoy

• so many, in so many different cities and countries
• I don’t remember all their names since I didn’t even like them
• e.g. museum in Athens about Athens and Greece; the Acropolis (basically an outdoor museum – it’s no fun to be in ancient ruins if everyone is there and its allowed! Which leads me to What I don't like about travel)
• even novelty museums like on chocolate production, incl seeing it getting made and packaged, just wasn’t worth it to me given that YT exists

Update January 2026

Samurai Museum

• they did a really good job at making it more interesting
  • cute ghost fox projection was guiding you through the museum
  • the exhibited items were cool to look at
  • displays on which you could select items, see info on them, little quiz options for children
  • some things were animated in cool ways
  • experimental things like having a screen you could only see when holding a hand-fan-like thing w a polarization filter in it in front
  • a large interactive map to learn more about specific places
• but in the end it didn’t change that you look at static objects you cannot interact with, read lots of text of which some parts are intriguing but where I’m lacking so much context that’s not provided that it’s partially meaningless, but then also info I don’t care about one bit
  • e.g. for one item it was said that it was important in some specific context, but then instead of telling me what the context was it goes on to describe the material composition instead
  • and the holographic tea ceremony was kinda cool but could just have been a regular monitor. the holo video was novel but didn’t really add anything else for me. Besides, it was muted, no context was given and it’s unclear where in the ceremony/video we were (the seamless loop made it entirely unclear)
• for a museum it was really cool, but in the end I feel like I could’ve learned so much more in a 10 min high-production-value YT video

Futurium

• since it’s a free museum it works fine as a place to meet up w and do something
• since it’s trying to show the near future but seems to not really have been updated since opening in 2019, it’s quite dated
• was still a fun experience, including the giant swings and cuddle corners (for whatever reason), but mostly due to the ppl w which I was there and the conversations we’ve had; cannot recommend to go alone
• at least had many interactive elements, which is nice

Footnotes

1. I’m not entirely sure what good interactivity is, but just replacing the plaque w a screen I have to click through isn’t it ↩

2. see Update January 2026 ↩

3. I’m fairly sure it was this one ↩