ABSTRACT

Practitioners and theorists have been grappling with the issue of museum exclusivity arguably since the first public art museums opened in the nineteenth century. However, what has been described as new museum, or critical museum, theory has contended that the processes and policies of museum professional practice reflect entrenched value systems that are ‘encoded in institutional narratives’. The reality is that museum practices have moved on since the 1960s and are continually evolving. The relationship between knowledge and power and research’s role within that, as described theoretically, is but one reason to review how institutional and visitor knowledge is constructed within art museums. The art museum of the twenty-first century needs to address multiple agendas. The ambition is to support all those who are committed to generating emancipatory processes of knowledge production within the art museum. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.