ABSTRACT
By the late twentieth century the museum was no longer understood as a neutral site for presenting objective knowledge. Many traditional values had already become destabilised by factors such as the generalised diminution of trust in meta-narrative and universal truth and insecurities about representing others. Many significant interventions have been made by artists from sections of society and global culture once marginal to the museum's concerns or, indeed, represented as an object of study. Perhaps more than any other intervention it garnered positive responses from both the museum sector and the art world, and simultaneously increased visitor numbers and audience diversity. The intervention, in what was until the 1980s a private museum, a members-only domain, with a turbulent history of race relations, offered a critical appraisal of a museum attempting to join the public sphere but bringing with it a history that spoke strongly of power relations and racial inequity.
