Escape From Amnesia

The battle against the museum has been an enduring trope of modernist culture. Emerging in its modern form around the time of the French Revolution that first made the Louvre into a museum, the museum has become the privileged institutional site of the three centuries old “querelle des anciens et des modernes” (quarrel of the ancients and the moderns). It has stood in the dead eye of the storm of progress serving as catalyst for the articulation of tradition and nation, heritage and canon, and has provided the master maps for the construction of cultural legitimacy in both a national and a universalist sense. ¹ In its disciplinary archives and collections, it helped define the identity of Western civilization by drawing external and internal boundaries that relied as much on exclusions and marginalizations as it did on positive codifications. ² At the same time, the modern museum has always been attacked as a symptom of cultural ossification by all those speaking in the name of life and cultural renewal against the dead weight of the past.