Can civil society live without museums, and will this dissolve or break the cultural promise to future generations? What are the interactions between society, museums, citizens, artists and curators?

– Mischa Kuball

Starting from Mischa Kuball’s fundamental questions regarding the role/goal of the museum today, I thought that looking back in the history of the museum as a modern institution, we are able to identify some interesting points/aspects.

Jean Louis Déotte thematizes the paradox embodied by l'Abbé Grégoire, the constitutional bishop, author of reports on vandalism and the destruction of cultural and political property (1794), instigator of the museum and conservator of arts and crafts, by mentioning the "strange complicity between the museum and human rights".

The educational dimension was from the very beginning, the classic principle of museums twinned with art academies. For one of the museum's four missions in its early days was to become a "place of inspiration for artists and scholars”.[1]

A current discourse in contemporary museology recalls the "museum outside the museum”[2]: the museum, outside the traditional exhibition space, represents in a certain sense an act of freedom finalized in an act of artistic research. Which would be a form of liberation from “museological tyranny”. And if we take the term ‘muséalisation',[3] which implies creating a correspondence between the museum and the world by placing objects in spaces other than the museum, we are witnessing a genuine delocalization of museology, a temporary, often definitive conversion of places that are unusual, disparate, open.

In an attempt to redefine the museum, Bernard Deloche proposed the following formulation: “the museum is a specific function, which may or may not take the form of an institution, whose objective is to ensure, through sensitive experience, the archiving and transmission of culture, understood as the set of acquisitions that make a human being genetically human”.[4] Without dwelling on all the connotations, I would mention only the distinction between function and institution, which, according to the author, opens the way for many substitutes to recognize the status of museum, given that there are other means of exercising the same function.

The debate around the new definition ICOM of the museum was - and still is - emblematic for the controversies around the museum as a fundamental institions. The ICOM definition was never accepted (Kyoto, 2019), proposed a radical transformation:

Museums are democratising, inclusive and polyphonic spaces for critical dialogue about the pasts and the futures. Acknowledging and addressing the conflicts and challenges of the present, they hold artefacts and specimens in trust for society, safeguard diverse memories for future generations and guarantee equal rights and equal access to heritage for all people.

Museums are not  for  profit.  They  are  participatory  and  transparent,  and work in active partnership with and for diverse communities to collect, preserve, research, interpret, exhibit, and enhance understandings of the world, aiming to contribute to human dignity and social justice, global equality and planetary wellbeing.[5]

The former ICON definition, formulated in 2007, reaffirmed the conventional status of the museum: a museum is a non-profit, permanent institution in the service of society and its development, open to the public, which acquires, conserves, researches, communicates and exhibits the tangible and intangible heritage of humanity and its environment for the purposes of education, study and enjoyment.

I think that Costanzo’s and Deloches’s statements may be regarded as strong reactions to this definition and I am convinced that their message is still actual. Mischa’s installation, in the proximity of two museums form Bucharest (the Museum of the Romanian Peasant and the Museum of Contemporary Art) is another response to the dilemmatic condition of the museum in our troubled time. The involvement of the public was in both cases crucial, in a performative act that assumed o political, cultural and - last but not least - an ironic response. Thus, Mischa’s own statement interacted with the numerous anonymous voices of the public. Combining artistic research with a curatorial challenge, Mischa Kuball created a reachable “museological’ installation outside the museum, delocalising the canonic museology and challenging the museological tyranny in an act of artistic freedom.

Ruxandra Demetrescu (b. 1954), art historian, professor of art history and theory at the Department of Doctoral Studies of the National University of Arts in Bucharest, Romania, where she teaches art theory, museum studies and modern Romanian art. She was the Rector of the National University of Arts in Bucharest (2006–2012) and the first Director of the Romanian Cultural Institute in Berlin, Germany (1999–2003). Her research focuses are the history of art theories in German-speaking space (Konrad Fiedler, Alois Riegl, Aby Warburg, Walter Benjamin) and Romanian interwar artistic modernity. She held the Arnheim Professur at the Humboldt University in the fall of 2012. She coordinated research projects: VISART, Platform for Conservation of Contemporary Art, (2012-2016); Dismantled museums in Bucharest. Museological concept and European models at the beginning of the 20th century. The case of the Kalinderu Museum (2007-2008). In the last decade, she curated solo shows of contemporary Romanian artists and published numerous texts in Romanian contemporary visual artists’ exhibition catalogues.