ABSTRACT
Museums are spaces where people can explore personal beliefs in amongst universal truths. Aesthetic modernism in the art museum is founded on two related principles: first, that art is a form of highly developed individual self-consciousness. Second, there is a received body of knowledge about the formal rules and logics of art which can be acquired and which is held within the discipline of art history, the underlying knowledge domain of curatorship. Further, in encountering the museum, they actively resisted fixed notions of identity and embraced more fluid, complex and unresolved modes of subjectivity rooted in reflexive stances within their contemporary urban contexts. In contrast, the research pointed up that the application and currency of specialist knowledge in the organisation of exhibitions and displays does not take account of what can be termed the 'social reception' of the museum. Ethnographic studies undertaken by the 'Tate Encounters' research point to the fact that valued material cultural artefacts, including works of art.
