Over de rol van kunst in een globaliserende samenleving

Framer Framed

Inclusive Museum

Founded in 2008, the Inclusive Museum knowledge community brings together an annual conference, a scholarly journal, a book series and an online community of museum practitioners, researchers and thinkers. Since 2008, the International Journal of the Inclusive Museum has established itself as an authoritative source on the changing relationships of museums to its constituent and communities, publishing some 200 articles across a range of museum disciplines and practices around the world.

Mission
At this time of fundamental social change, what is the role of the museum, both as a creature of that change, and perhaps also as an agent of change? The International Conference on the Inclusive Museum, The International Journal of the Inclusive Museum and the On Museums Book Imprint and News Weblog are places where museum practioners, researchers, thinkers and teachers can engage in discussion on the historic character and future shape of the museum. The key question addressed by the community: How can the institution of the museum become more inclusive?

Several dynamics emerge in our contemporary context, each of which may portent a more inclusive museum:

Visitors 
No longer the universal individual citizen of our recent modern aspirations, visitors of today are recognisably diverse. The dimensions of this diversity are material (class, locale, family circumstances), corporeal (age, race, sex and sexuality, and physical and mental characteristics) and symbolic (culture, language, gender, family, affinity and persona). These are the gross demographics, the things that insist on our attention. But if we take the time to look more closely at today’s public, it is qualified by intersections and layers of identity which immediately turn the gross demographics into, at times, dangerous oversimplifications. The paradox of today’s public is that, in an era of globalisation, actual cultures are diverging: dispositions, sensibilities, values stances, interests, orientations, affinities and networks.

So how can one speak to audiences? How does participation work? How can we create meanings which are germane?
‘Inclusivity’ names part of the answer, a paradoxically two sided answer. One side is to recognise particularity. Who and what should be in the museum? What is it to be comprehensive? What is canonical and definitive? To answer these questions today, we need to move beyond the divisions of high as opposed to popular culture, the techno-scientific as opposed to the everyday, the national-modern as opposed to the ethnographic-traditional. No longer can we solve the problem of difference, of ‘us’ and ‘them’, by putting them in separate categories and spaces unto themselves. We need to anticipate the particularities of visitors.

The other side of this answer requires us not just to catalogue of differences, to check them off from a list of potential points of dissonance. It demands that we create a new and paradoxical form of universality, the universality of inclusivity. How do we create a museum where the text is open, where every visitor is allowed the space to create their own meanings, where no visitor is left out? The answer in part is in to devise new …

Forms of Engagement

What is the role today of the reader, the viewer, the audience, the citizen, the customer, the patron?
Our recent modernity was premised on relatively passive readers, viewers and audiences; relatively compliant employees and dependent citizens; and relatively appreciative customers and patrons. To take just a few touchstones of change, the new media turn readers, viewers and audiences into users, players and characters. Workers are supposed to personify the enterprise and citizens to take responsibility for themselves. And customers are always right—and for their differences, products and services have to be customised—and the quirks of patrons always patronised.

The change represents an evening up of balance of agency and a blurring of roles, between producers and consumers of knowledge, between creators and readers of culture, and between the person in command and the person consenting.

In museums, more than simply ‘interaction’, visitors need to place themselves in the exhibition, to belong in the space and to join the cultural dialogue. For museums, this is the basis for a new communicative frame of reference and a new pedagogics. This will be made possible at least in part through the new …

Modalities of Representation
The emerging communications environment—in which image, sound and word are all made of the same stuff, and communicated using the same, digital technologies—provides new openings for museums, and new challenges.

Not only are museums challenged to preserve heritage which is increasingly ‘born digital’. It is also the case today that there is no collectable object, no site-specific experience, which cannot be reproduced and made available to ‘visitors’ at the ends of the earth though digital means of representation.

This creates unique challenges in the realm of intellectual property, the practicalities of relating to visitors who are more diverse than ever, and exploring the communicative affordances of the ‘mutliteracies’ of digital representation.

In meeting these challenges, museums are destined to reflect their changing world, and also—at times provocatively, riskily—change that world. The Museum Conference, Journal, Book Imprint and News Weblog provide a forum for the discussion of these and other fundamental questions which will surely determine the changing shape and future role of museums.