Berlin’s Museum Island: Marketing the German National Past in the Age of Globalization

Abstract

According to Hou Hanru, the award-winning curator and Director of Exhibitions for the San Francisco Art Institute, the central issue in current artistic and cultural debates within museum studies is the question of how the local and the global interact and are implicated in one another. Rather than seeing the local and the global as “two sides of the same coin,” as Hanru contends they should be seen, many museums are currently caught up in debates that posit the local and global as antagonistic and unable to exist simultaneously.¹ As Mark Rectanus points out, many museum scholars, directors, and curators disagree about the status of global contexts and local meanings of artworks and their presentation within museums. Some believe that the “translatability” of artworks from the local or national to a transnational or even global context is of the utmost importance; others defend the need to preserve an artwork’s locality, its local and national context, in order to prevent it from becoming a “signifier of cultural politics” on the global level.² Museums throughout the world are currently undergoing architectural, administrative, and curatorial transformations that will make them more accessible to the global public. These transformations allow for new networks of exchange and collaboration, but they also “challenge and re-map the relations between culture, identity, and nation.”³