These are the notes and slides for a keynote speech I'm giving this Saturday at MuseumNext in Indianapolis. If you'll be there, I look forward to discussing these issues with you. If not, please share a comment and let's talk online. The theme of this conference is inclusion. All weekend, we've heard uplifting stories about amazing work you all are doing to involve people from all walks of life in museums. And yet. Here's my beef with inclusion: it's too good. No one is "against" inclusion. There is no other museum conference going on somewhere else in the world today where professionals are sharing proud case studies and helpful tips on how to exclude people. But museums do exclude people. All the time. If everyone is "for" inclusion, does that mean it automatically happens? No. But if no one is against it, how do we make sure that we actually are doing it, that we aren't just paying lip service to the idea? The answer, I think, is t

Blessing of the Replica Boards, July 19, 2015, 8am. Photo by Jon Bailiff. Relevance is not an end unto itself. It is a bridge. When you open the path, people flood in. You open the potential for something more. But a bridge to nowhere is quickly abandoned. Relevance only leads to deep meaning if it leads to something significant. Killer content. Substantive programming. Muscle and bone. This summer, we opened two exhibitions at my museum that are highly relevant to local culture. One is about the Grateful Dead ( Dear Jerry ), the other about the dawn of surfing in the Americas ( Princes of Surf ). Dear Jerry is relevant because Santa Cruz is a hippie town, UC Santa Cruz maintains the Grateful Dead Archive, and the Dead did their final tour this summer. Princes of Surf is about the young Hawaiian princes who brought surfing to the Americas 130 years ago--relevant because they did it in Santa Cruz, with boards shaped from local wood, on waves I bike by every week. Both of these exhibi