ABSTRACT
Enlightenment Museums were founded and constructed to educate the public and to further national development of science and the arts. The edifices housed broad collections that were embedded in building typologies containing circular routes, enclosed in classical configurations and tectonic details. Paralleling the encyclopaedists’ ideal that all the knowledge of the universe could be captured on paper, the first museums equally suggested that the physical presence of a wide range of objects would stand for all that was known or worth knowing.
Enlightenment Museums were socio-political instruments of decontextualisation of appropriated cultural objects. Their spatial syntax supported the presentation of a holistic, universal, panoramic typology, reflecting the Western curatorial concept of a self-contained tour d’horizon, thereby expressing cultural hegemony, that is, the Western European privilege to determine what represented the universe. The edification of the public, claimed as a priority, exhausted itself in guided tours for the selected few, or short labels for everyone else. For the longest time, exhibits remained deracinated mute objects.
With the expansion of knowledge over the past two centuries, museums have spawned and become specialised, thus dismembering the idea of a unified body of knowledge. Museums of the late 20th and early 21st century have returned to the splendour of over-articulated Rococo galleries to become part of the entertainment industry, particularly with the advent of temporary exhibits. Moreover, in the fierce competition for public attention, the museum, once at the core of the traditional system of cultural diffusion of social norms, has, like numerous other media, ceded ground to the Internet.
Given the disappearance of both scholarship and skills of critical discernment, the sole qualifications of a cultural object – its authenticity and aura – have been compromised by digital reproducibility. Thus, in the future, museums only have a raison d’être if they display original cultural works in an authentic location. The rest is available on the Internet.
