ABSTRACT
The troubling of settled notions in the art museum’s relationship to culture and society, which has been argued so far, can be summarized in three key understandings. Firstly, the utility of transmediation, as the emergent form and lexical index of cultural communication in the many-to-many environment of online media, is leading to the demise of singular forms of cultural authority previously mediated by traditional institutions. Secondly, the established and normative notion of spectator-ship entailed in aesthetic modernism, based upon the idea of a singular and exceptional transaction between two foundational subjects in the encounter with the work of art, is unsustainable in the face of new subjectivities engendered by transcultural conditions and its new trope of the transvisual. Thirdly, a combination of the transmedial and transcultural, and the global economic and technological conditions in which they are entailed, is unsettling the system of representation which has hitherto stabilized the relationship between subject and object. A consequence of this confluence of related factors is that rethinking audience becomes the urgent task since the spectator has been put in a new relationship to traditional objects of cultural value.
