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28 | 2016
Le musée et le politique

Museums and Policy
Edited by Dominique Poulot
Culture & Musées 28 | Le musée et le politique
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ISBN 978-2-330-07578-1

Throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, museums were part of a system of moral and social control: they were intended to consolidate public virtues and to work towards industrious prosperity. Museums were also a part of global rivalries, as much out of a fear of cultural perdition as part of a competition surrounding new types of collections to be amassed. This ideal, however, began to be more and more contested in the 1960s and 70s. There was a desire to reveal the hidden political agendas of museum, tied to political, industrial and financial powers, and to instead cultivate the utopia of the museum as a forum. New museology thus maintains close ties to political considerations and social theories, the development of new fields (such as ecology, material studies and anthropology) as well as postcolonial and multicultural studies.

Within modern democracies, “museum policy” is a category or subsection of more general cultural policies. New national museums testify to the rewriting of traditional themes such as the State, the nation and identities, while on the contrary “European”, world or global history museums attempt to propose new narratives. The staging and choice of exhibitions can provoke strong debates, leading in some cases to an event’s cancellation, the closing of an institution or one’s ultimate failure to open. Processes of collection and interpretation can be opened up to wider participation with the aim of cultivating a sort of direct democracy. Pressure, linked to certain populist groups or lobbies, surrounding the acquisition and organization of certain types of collections can shed doubt on the very existence of an institution whose survival seemed approved by general consensus concerning the professional capabilities of curators and conservators. This is issue proposes a panorama of the variety of configurations that have, for the past two hundred years, linked museums and policy.

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