Eleventh International Conference on The Inclusive Museum

Abstract

Museums are held increasingly accountable to the public as cultural institutions with a social function, but also as commercial enterprises with their own clienteles. Such expectations necessitate institutional policies of integrity, transparency, accountability, and demonstration of ethical standards for curatorial practices, collection policies, and engagement with the public. These standards are often most clearly manifested in the ‘grey’ literature, documents such as codes of ethics, strategic directives, mission statements and other policy documents adopted both by individual institutions and across the professional sphere of museums. Since the American Association for Museums published its Code of Ethics for Museum Workers in 1925, many institutions and nations have developed their own ‘grey’ literature governing museum ethics, and/or have adopted the International Council of Museum’s code of ethics. What are the central ethical values or mandates presented in this ‘grey’ literature? Are these values uniform across institutional or national boundaries? Are they adequate as an ethical resource in a context where museums must negotiate complex social, political, and cultural issues that extend beyond the purview of the museum’s ‘traditional’ domain of objective and apolitical collection, interpretation, and display? This paper examines such questions, and proposes that abstract discussion from the academic literature relating to museum ethics, as well as theories from classical moral philosophy may be able to bridge gaps in the ethical guidelines provided by the ‘grey’ literature.