Ideas and Ideals

The modern museum is not only in the sphere of mass interests, but also serves as a reflection and expression of certain mass trends. While maintaining the status of a classical cultural institution, it was to a large extent precisely the museum that has become an arena of public discord on determining the strategies of cultural reproduction. This issue gains a pronouncedly contentious character due to the rapid development of information formats of traditional leisure now including interactive technologies, arbitrary historical reconstructions, elements of theatricalization. In “Escape from Amnesia” (A. Huyssen) the ‘society of total spectacle’ demands searching for new means, which often contribute to loss and substitution of values.

The visitor’s interest towards the history of the quotidian greatly influences the dynamics of changing the creative potential of a museum, predominantly a memorial museum. Long-term practices of modeling the historical space reveal the internal form of the concept of ‘ex-position’. This is the natural cause of an internal conflict, when being ‘arranged in a straight line’ replaces the principles of accurate and documentally verified positioning of memorial objects. ‘Museumness’ should not supplant ‘the quotidian’, ‘the existential’; however, the functional principle of arranging the objects, their ‘pattern’ is often replaced by the composite approach, in which ‘decorative’ or ‘design’ solutions become dominant. This trend actively competes with the key theoretical foundations of museum source studies, and the traditional museum is increasingly transforming into a kind of parallel model of culture.

The memorial object, as a fact of intellectual history, is significant within the material culture and spiritual heritage. At the same time, the alleged meanings and false semiotization often substitute the biographical realities, when ‘fit for exposition’ is everything that the mass museum visitor connects in his mind with his arbitrary understanding of the past.

These are key aspects of the subject of modern museum criticism. This article discloses our understanding of the memorial exposition as a self-organizing system with a certain aesthetic code. Methodologically significant is the existential turn towards ‘evidence paradigm’ - giving up the impersonal demonstration of old things. This is a turn towards the model ‘things-speak’ (self-awareness, self-disclosure of things) - towards the structure that communicates ideas and life meanings. It is where the memorial object, understood as ‘message’, ‘material communication’, can disclose the fullness of its historical authenticity.

The article is devoted to the study of the problem of alienation of culture in a modern museum and the processes of actualization of objects and phenomena of history in the space of the paramuseum. In the center of the author’s attention is the theme of creating the illusion of existential comfort. It explores the contradiction between the need for museification of culture in order for a modern person to be able to appeal to it when building one’s own identity, and the constant desire to place the culture of the past on a safe reservation. The issue of aestheticization of cultural objects in the museum space and the role of a museum in interpreting, preserving and distorting their meaning is raised. The museum, created as a repository of antiquities, a collection of masterpieces, today has become the most sensitive system that responds to changes in the life of culture and society. An axiological analysis of modern museums shows their growing popularity as an element of the entertainment industry, while their aesthetic, analytical, and intellectual role is becoming obscure. Respect for the museum as a keeper of cultural memory, for the focus of scientific life is disappearing. Instead, a simplified “attraction museum” and paramuseum is coming to the fore, creating endless games with historical objects, reconstructions, visitors and interpretations of the events of history and culture. The authors of the article are among the first to turn to the concept of “paramuseum” and give it a comprehensive assessment. For the first time, a scientific classification of paramuseums (on the example of paramuseums of northwestern Russia) is proposed. Their main features and characteristics are identified. A synergistic approach to the processes of actualization and alienation of cultural objects in the museum environment made it possible to include the viewer, the recipient, as the third, necessary component of this system. This made it possible to conclude that museum values are alienated or updated not by themselves, but only in relation to the “person watching.” Thus, modern museums and paramuseums are a form of value-based self-consciousness of society, demonstrating the total stratification of post-culture society, its fragmentation into value clusters that can represent culture as a whole only in the process of analytical consciousness, but not in the collection of subject series.

The article is devoted to conflicting assessments of the state of the museum in contemporary museum criticism: museums are experiencing either a protracted crisis or the Golden Age. The public is also criticized: people prefer to come to museums in order to be entertained with the help of new technologies and to achieve a scientific goal, and not in order to fulfill their civic duty (appreciating national treasure).

In general, among the objectives of the museum (to form a “national imaginary”, to support a state ideology, to serve as a scientific and educational center, to entertain and give pleasure), the aesthetic is in the last place, but the current negative views about the state of a museum as a sociocultural institution are caused by the general suspicion that aesthetics has come to the fore as the most important factor.

In order to correctly assess what is happening, modern approaches to the duties of the museum and the needs of the general public need to take the existing points of view on this subject in both Russian and international specialized literature into account. The analysis of the situation also involves data from Internet resources specializing in reporting on the modern art market, which is closely tied to museum politics. The article compares various approaches to the current situation: the goals and objectives historically attributed to the museum, a review of current exhibitions and of the technology used, a change in museum policy as a whole (in particular the fact that what was considered a profanation of a great idea 10 years ago has become a cultural norm today).

Based on the results of the study, the following conclusion can be made: modern museums are indeed extremely commercialized. The most unexpected souvenirs are sold in museum stores. Para-museums openly parasitize on the tourist flow of large museums. More than that, nobody thinks twice about making a profit in any possible way, while simultaneously grumbling about the fall in cultural demands of the public. However, interest in museums among the general population remains unchanged, so asserting the widespread crisis of the modern museum is a very big stretch.