ABSTRACT
Anti-museums were not the only museological change in the second half of the twentieth century. Change accelerated through the 1970s and 1980s when new forms of visitor experience and curatorial practice emerged within the conventional public museum sector in response to new demands to widen attendance, improve engagement, adopt new technologies and commercialise. The anti-museum concept was conceived and in circulation from around the late eighteenth century. Initially, critics such as Quatremere de Quincy aimed to liberate the objects and artworks from the museum-as-mausoleum–from the way it disconnected them from their origins, contexts and their social life beyond the museum walls. In the late 1960s, Donald Judd and others developed forms of ‘anti-curation’ and ‘anti-museum’. Through the 1970s, anti-museums aimed to transform the role of art in society, refocus on the subjects and subjectivities of art, support artists themselves, revolutionise how art was exhibited and expand how art might be experienced and engaged with.
