The Dangerous Museum. Participatory practices and controversy in museums today (original) (raw)
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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?
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In the fast-paced and ever-chang ing w or ld, museums p lay a s ig nificant r ole in collecting, preser ving and researching in to ar tefacts and mater ials that are of imp ortance to mankind, and educating and exhib iting them to the pub lic. N owadays, many museums have b een attemp ting to include pub lic eng agement and allow dialogues between museums and p eop le . In r eality, however, are museu ms really that participator y in nature ? Ar e those appr oaches really effective? In the first part of this paper, a br ief histor y as we ll as the definition of museums w ill be g iven. To w hat