MUSEUM IN THE PROCESS. SELECTED TENDENCIES IN 20TH-CENTURY MUSEOLOGY

Abstract

The debate on the museum definition undertaken at the 2019 Kyoto ICOM General Conference points to the role played contemporarily by museums and the expectations they have to meet. It also results as a consequence of changes happening in museums beginning as of the 19th century until today. Extremely important processes took place in the past century. Initially, the changes covered the museum operating methods, mainly within museum education and display, however, they also had an impact on the status of objects in museum collections in the context of artistic and ethnographic collections. One of the most interesting ideas for museum’s redefinition was that proposed in the 1st half of the 20th c. in the formula of Museums of Artistic Culture. However, the departure from the traditionally conceived museum towards a ‘laboratory of modernity’ proposed by the Russian Avant-garde was still too revolutionary for its times. Beginning as of the 1960s, next to the reflection on museums’ operating modes, there increased the emphasis on the role they played and the one they should play in modern society. It was phenomena of political, social or economic character that had a direct impact on the transformation of the shape of museums, these phenomena appearing under the banners of globalization, liberalization, democratization, glocalization. Criticism of museums and their up-to-then praxes drew attention to the essential character of the relation between the institution and its public. The turn towards society allowed for such formats to appear as an ecomuseum, participatory museum, open museum. The solutions derived from the New Museology not only point to the necessity to move the level of the relationship between museum and society, but first and foremost to reflect on museum’s activity which is assumed to create an institution maximally transparent and ethical. It is for various reasons that not all the solutions proposed by museums meet the criteria. Museums continue to face numerous challenges, yet they boast potential to face them.