Abstract:
Perhaps there is always an unspoken, hidden question at the heart of any
call for papers, and certainly there was in this one. The original call was
necessarily broad. It began with the general observation that the museum
institution has been marked by constantly changing emphasis throughout
its history. From there it moved to a brief enumeration of some of the
museum's functions - as an archive for research, a place of education and
edification, a site for the ritual performance of citizenship, and as a space of
entertainment, amongst other things. While these functions have most
often overlapped and interacted, each has carried different implications for
the museum object, both at the level of artefact and of architecture. More
particularly, each has implied a different relationship between inanimate
museum object and animate museum subject - that is, the museum visitor.
