engleski

Changing the Social Politics of Art Museums

The paper adopts the view that interpretation in art museums is a set of practices that constitutes different knowledge systems and a development of social politics of the institution. Grounded in sociological and critical theory of the social reality of art museums, the paper gives a comparative analyses of the current interpretive practices in art museums and galleries in Croatia and abroad. The theoretical framework is based on the interpretive acts of differentiation, narration and evaluation defined by Whitehead (in his book Interpreting Art in Museums and Galleries, 2012). These acts, which can be taken as processes inherent to the museum institution in general, determine relation- ships between objects and knowledge. They are greatly depended on a wider socio-cultural context and are therefore examined in reference to social politics of the art museum. The paper goes on to suggest that current displays in the majority of art museums and galleries in Croatia reflect disciplinary art historical interpretation practices that support the stability and universality of the modern(ist) thought that deprives art works of their socio-historic context, and alienates the institution from a wide range of non-expert visitors. Such exclusionary art museum interpretation characterizes modernist principles of cultivation and ignores the role that cultural institutions should have in contemporary society. As an alternative to the pure aestheticism of the present display, the author propose different modes of interpretation which broaden the field of the traditional art historical discipline, often insufficient enough for any sort of socially and culturally inclusive practice, into the fields of cultural history, literature and critical theory. With such conceptual expansion, interpretation would be more process than product based. In other words, interpretation of art as predominantly preoccupied with the pictorial would be complemented with interpretation through art/heritage as a way of introducing new frames of reference that can be more or less related to wider socio-cultural, political or economic domains and thereby make the institution more inclusive.

art; museum; interpretation; social role

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