Mummified museums and sclerotic exhibitions
The issue of the unchanging nature of permanent exhibitions in the 21st century
MúzeumCafé 50.
One of the tasks of museums is preservation, which suggests immutability – objects have to be bequeathed in an unchanging form, like relics, from one generation to another. The museum thus becomes a ‘cemetery of antiquities’. Yet prior to their arrival in museums antiquities had more than one use, more than one meaning. Thus the different denotational contents are constantly renewed by virtue of their becoming museum items. The fading away of traditions lends importance to the museum effect. In the final decades of the 20th century an increasing number of museums were founded, as had happened a century earlier. Thus it can be called the second wave of museum creation. It can also be understood as the accelerated institutionalisation of the past. At the same time, the continuous feeling of change has increasingly grown – the past is strongly differentiated from the present, and this process is faster than before. Events and experiences happen much more quickly, and more speedily become part of the past. The future can be envisaged increasingly less, its roots in the present are continually decreasing. In the 1990s the opinion spread that museums are not opponents of modernity, much rather parts of a cultural, creative industry. The society of experience, therefore, needs museums. The public has grown up with visuality. In the changing media landscape, museums have to offer a special, individual experience. For a long time many disciplines have employed the ‘transnational’ concept. The narrative of this became dominant only at the end of the last century. In museums, this concept appeared increasingly strongly at the end of the 20th century. In the 21st century the general public has a firmly positive feeling about museums.