ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I address the shift towards participation in cultural policies in Denmark from the perspective of a smaller, literary and cultural history museum, The Bakkehus Museum (close to Copenhagen). The question on which this chapter is based is whether or in what sense this agenda can be said to initiate a process of democratisation? The answer is to be found in the ways in which the agenda is interpreted by specific cultural institutions and embedded in local priorities and daily communicative practices, not least in the minor museums. The Bakkehus Museum is chosen as an example of such a minor museum due to its role as a mediator of the Danish Golden Age in literature, art and culture – and the obvious obstacles it is therefore currently facing. The museum has hitherto derived its legitimacy through a nationally framed ‘Bildung’ in which the national past has been canonised and made part of the museum’s general educative function. Now, it has to reinvent itself in a post-nationalist context, driven by, on the one hand a demand for other types of learning, as a result of the general pressures of modernisation and globalisation and, on the other, a demand for personal relevance and involvement, brought about by the corresponding pressures of a consumer society and the ‘experience’ economy.
