ABSTRACT
In current debates around the changing nature of contemporary culture, many of the defining fictions of our everyday world have been identified as under threat: the legitimacy of the ‘grand narratives’ of science and reason are in decline; there is a fragmentation of taste and style; representation and classification have become unprecedently problematic; and what were once called ‘truths’ are increasingly being dubbed ‘fictions’. The museum has not occupied a particularly strategic position in these debates. Indeed, in our own everyday sense of the key institutions of the modern world, the museum would probably take its place a long way down the list. Yet recent discussions of the museum from both within the profession and from outside it have begun to focus on the museum as a potentially interesting and important site for the examination of cultural change (Lumley 1988; Vergo 1989), and recent reports in the nation’s press have focused on the major structural changes that seem to be affecting-and affecting in a very public way-the present status of, in particular, the national museums in British society. Something is happening in the world of the museum which from inside is often seen as a crisis, above all a crisis of funding and identity,2 but which from outside (and increasingly from inside too) appears to be expressive of a wider set of concerns. These concerns-with problems of authenticity, representation and the active demanding reader/viewer/visitor-are central to current discussions in the analysis of other cultural industries. Yet the museum should not be regarded simply as a somewhat specialized, or even esoteric, refraction of the issues raised by those other cultural industries. By dealing with the legacy of past or declining fictions, and in their attempts to write new ones, museums’ concerns lie at the centre of the issues surrounding contemporary cultural change.
