After Canons: Writing on the Wall

Abstract

The essay concerns the fate of the historical and sociological connection between aesthetic experience and the strategy of a museum display. The alliance of the theoretical and practical, or more precisely the institutional side of interpretation and maintenance of artwork/collections play up to the same interests. The isolation of artworks from everyday life and from their social contexts served the interests of the undisputed domination of the Western canon. The museums have remained the guardians of the – sometimes empty – norms and forms, the last and extremely popular “Institution” of the conservation of tradition and the advertisement of Order. But the multicultural challenge and relativism have definitely undermined that tradition. The critical reinvestigation of the dominant forms of collective memory sometimes resulted in the crisis of museological practice. The classification and collection of strategies proved too empty, meaningless, abstract and power-oriented. New Museology offered new kinds of theorems for collection, classification, visual display and museum pedagogy and proposed a new contract with the multicultural word, where European traditional perception is only one of many. New Museology abandoned the concept of a separate high culture and classical arts, but in exchange for the loss of exceptionality, a new and promising traffic has begun between art and anthropology in the age of postcultural hierarchy.