Introduction: Challenging the silences: Confronting taboos in museums and museology (original) (raw)
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2022
On the occasion of the 20-year anniversary of the /ecm Master Program in Exhibition Theory and Practice at the University of Applied Arts Vienna Thursday, May 5, 2022, 10am–9pm The museum is dead. Long live the museum. This, or something similar, could be the brief summary of numerous conferences, debates, and publications in the field of curating and museum studies over the past 20 years. The critique of the museum has been widely discussed. We have heard a lot about crisis and departure, we have heard about “tired museums” and the “end of the museum,” only to debate in that same breath untapped possibilities for thinking about the museum in new and different ways – as a space of assembly and as a contact zone, as a place of criticism, polyphony, and negotiation. Something seems to be on the move, and so it is not surprising that talk of the “museum of the future” is booming. Claims of diversification, digitalization, and democratization have become ubiquitous, while at the same time institutions are more than ever focused on privatization, economization, competition, and precarization. How can we as critical curators and museologists think and act within these contradictions? And how can critical theory become critical practice?
Museologica Brunensia
The significant interest of the Czech (or Czechoslovak) museum sphere in the form and continuous revision of the existing international museum definition was already evident during Jan Jelínek's tenure at the head of ICOM in the 1970s. The effort to get involved in international debates resonates with Czech museum workers, museologists, academics and students even now, especially in connection with the planned revision of the key concept at the Prague meeting of this most important professional museum organization. The attitudes towards the existing and the optimal form of the museum definition were also examined within a local Czech questionnaire survey, which was carried out by Brno museologists in the first half of 2021 in cooperation with the Czech Committee of ICOM and the Czech Association of Museums and Galleries. The paper presents the main outcomes of the research, including the key terms that the museum definition should contain according to representatives of (not onl...
Muzealnictwo, 2020
aThe topic discussed in the paper is the change and evolution the concept of museum (Greek: museion, Latin: musaeum) has been undergoing for over 2500 years, as well as many of its different meanings: from the definition of a spot in space, including a place of worship, up to the name of learning form, research and knowledge centre, collection of texts and poetry, music and theatre festival, synonyms of a dictionary and encyclopaedia, library and a secluded study spot, up to large institutions co-creating culture and educating socially. Once museums had become social institutions, the process of defining their organizational form and their mission limits began. The International Council of Museums (ICOM), as an organization grouping museum employees and museologists, namely both practitioners and theoreticians, ever since its establishment in 1946 has on a number of occasions initiated works on a shared definition of museum. The paper assembles all the ICOM-proposed definitions in 1946–2007 presented both in English and Polish. The latest proposal submitted at the Kyoto ICOM General Conference on 7 September 2019 (Annex 1), however, for the first time aroused a heated debate and was not finally voted on by the ICOM General Assembly; instead, the debate has continued on the proposed phrasing since. The historical overview of the museum concept and the history of the ICOM museum definition presented against the opinions of invited Polish museum professionals is the ‘record of time’, documenting the considerations on the role and tasks of museum in contemporary society.
The Future of Museums: Recover and Reimagine (A Conversation)
Museum Worlds, 2022
The following conversation took place on 18 May 2021 during a panel discussion to coincide with marking the six months since the opening of the Chau Chak Wing Museum at the University of Sydney, along with the annual occurrence of International Museum Day. Craig: The past two years have been a period of profound change and upheaval for the GLAM (gallery, library, archives, and museum) sector internationally, resulting from a combination of the pandemic, politics, and tightened purse strings. For the University of Sydney these changes have included positives, like the opening of the new Chau Chak Wing Museum (CCWM) in November 2020, and negatives, such as limitations on student experiences during lockdown and digital teaching. International Museum Day on 18 May 2021 marked the six-month anniversary of the opening of the CCWM. The day has been organized by the International Council of Museums (ICOM) since 1977 to raise awareness of the role of museums in society. In 2021 the theme was "The Future of Museums: Recovery and Reimagine. " As part of the CCWM's public outreach program, I have asked four academics who work in and with the GLAM sector and are involved in the University of Sydney's Museum and Heritage Studies program to join me in a live panel discussion on International Museums Day. 1 Meeting in Sydney's newest cultural institution, it gives us an opportunity to reflect on our own experiences of museums and galleries in the age of COVID-19 and to comment on how museums can best recover and reimagine from an Australian perspective. To open the discussion, as many people in our audience will have known, ICOM as an organization has been struggling over the past five years with the actual definition of a museum. Helena, could you give us a little background on that broader debate? I guess the question for all of us is, how can we celebrate International Museum Day when those of us in the sector can't even agree on what a museum is?
International Journal of Heritage Studies, 2021
What is a museum? Though seemingly obvious, the answer to this question has eluded the international museum sector since a controversial redraft of the official definition, put forward by the International Council of Museums (ICOM) in 2019, was dramatically rejected by its own member- ship. As deliberations about what constitutes a museum continue ahead of ICOM’s next General Conference in 2022, this article provides a quantitative content analysis of 269 definition proposals submitted by ICOM’s international membership during the 2019 consultation phase, in order to evaluate how closely the wording of the eventual proposed definition mirrored the priorities of ICOM’s stakeholder base. The research finds that contributors favoured the content of the standing ICOM definition over terms and concepts that characterised the proposed revision. In the light of these findings, the article proposes ways in which ICOM can improve its consultation processes in order to more faithfully gauge the perspectives of its constituents ahead of the 2022 conference.