ABSTRACT
The project of the Critical Museum – the art institution which uses its own multiple resources to encourage and host the debates on the issues that are crucial for contemporary societies – was the most significant battle undertaken by Piotr Piotrowski when appointed as Director of the National Museum in Warsaw (2009–10). It was presented in the volume From Museum Critique to the Critical Museum (eds P. Piotrowski and K. Murawska-Muthesius, Ashgate 2015/Routledge 2017). This text argues that the Critical Museum project, originated from Piotrowski’s wide curatorial experience, gained locally and internationally and that it formed part and parcel of his programme of the Horizontal Art History, targeting the assumed universality of art history values and geography. Although the Critical Museum model had been devised for East-Central Europe, the text discusses its wider relevance, as confirmed by a new definition of museum which, proposed by ICOM in 2019 and still hotly debated at the time of writing of this abstract, engages directly with the key concepts of the Warsaw Museum-Forum project.
