Eleventh International Conference on The Inclusive Museum

Abstract

This review begins with the Deloche’s parallel museums that emerged from the Museo Cartáceo or “paper museum” of Cassiano dal Pozzo (1606-1689) to the applications of virtual reality and augmented reality of the twenty-first century. The parallel museums renegotiate the ways of archiving and showing works in different media and question the limits of the institution, pose new institutional forms, and show that what differentiates the museum is not the building or the collection but the ends that guide its meaning. Then museology is no a science but an ethic, a practical philosophy responsible for defining both values and behavior for the field of the museum. A new digital museology would therefore be in charge of establishing an ethic for the new images, something that today any app does implementing functions, terms of use, and privacy policies. All the institutions inherited from the modern national state that gave birth to the museum are being affected by the ethics of the new images. But institutional museums remain oblivious to the debates on open access, open data, open government, open science, or digital commons. The absence of an ethical positioning is affecting more incisively to contemporary art museums because the proliferation of contemporary art museums and their dependence on large private capital are the two central characteristics of the twenty-first-century museum. As Claire Bishop has analyzed, the museum’s spectacular architecture staged a diversity devoid of frictions that bears the values of an outdated multiculturalism. The radical museology alternative is to strengthen the historical collections. But historical collections are held only by those who have political and economic power. If the sacralization of the work is maintained, the criticisms of the twenty-first-century museum would survive in its radical version. A radical museology has to face the challenge that contemporaneity poses, the invention of new institutional forms. For the first time the institutional museum could learn from other people’s lives instead of teaching us about them.