Museums and Art Worlds

Abstract

While any claim about trends at an international level must come with a heavy qualification that local practice differs, as ethnographic work shows best (e.g. Coleman, 2010), nevertheless museum scholars suggest a changing role for the museum’s public and consequently for the institution itself. The change is summed up in the idea that museum visitors should ‘tell their own story’. In this chapter, I ask what self-representation in museums is made of, what work it is doing and what tensions of mediation process it is constituted from. In Chapter 2 I suggested that there is an international discussion in the field of museum studies about the status of the museum institution and, at the same time, there appears to be a repeated construction of a self-representing public of museum visitors in spaces in which representations by elites previously dominated. The analysis presented points to a convergence across cultural sites (of broadcasting and museum and art worlds) onto what is now, arguably, a recognisable generic form. And yet attending to the processes of mediation delivers a picture of complexity as to the meaning, purpose and role of self-representation in this particular (and varied) part of contemporary digital culture.

People should come here and feel like it’s about them

Sarah Gudgin, Assistant Curator of Oral History, Museum of London