ABSTRACT
The museum has been influenced by its relations to cultural institutions which, like the museum itself and like the early international exhibitions, had a rational and improving orientation: libraries and public parks. The visitor, as Thomas Struth emphasised in his Museum Photographs is therefore both the subject and object of vision, he recognises himself, enrolling in a movement that contributes simultaneously to form a new public and a new vision system. Universal Exhibition in contemporary society is a multicultural and migrating society that needs to create a terrestrial citizenship but which is increasingly marked by ethnic, religious and nationalistic conflicts and contradictions that perfectly match the processes of cultural globalisation once again based on the fetishism of commodities and the fetish of financial capital. As Arnold Gehlen suggested, the temporality of post-histoire, marked by a globalisation that has little to do with mondialisation and the creation of worlds advocated by Jean-Luc Nancy.
