Rethinking the Museum
There are many who claim that the museum, as an institution whose purpose is collection and exhibition of art treasures, is no longer relevant in the present era. This claim is in contradiction to the current renewal processes of existing museums, and especially to the establishment of new museums throughout the world in impressive architectural buildings and with enormous budgets. In addition, the millions of visitors to museums, both renovated and new, attest to the fact that the museum is still relevant.
Rethinking the Museum examines the changes museums are undergoing, and proposes to see many of them as an expression of paradigmatic transformations originating in the cultural effects of the new technologies, and in the resulting adjustment of museums to their target audience. The analysis proposed in the book is based on the study of the history of art and of museal culture, on theories of new media and on critical approaches in the social sciences and humanities. From these, the contemporary museum in Israel and abroad is revealed as a hybrid space, in which the real and virtual are inextricably joined.
The changes that the museums undergo are examined in relation to seven “envelope concepts” from the field of museology. The changes imprinted therein can be understood through the various processes of hybridization that characterize the museum today: the museal space and the new space-time relationships, mechanisms of representation, the museal object, the collection and the archive, methods of structuring the narrative, sight and vision, and concepts of the experience of the body and of presence. The book proposes to see these processes as an opportunity for social reflection and preservation of local identity, even in the age of globalization with its mechanisms of cultural automation.
The last part of the book deals with the two big museums in Israel, the Israel Museum in Jerusalem and the Tel Aviv Museum, which in recent years have undergone asignificant processes of renovation with the aim of adjusting to a renewed thinking about the character of the museum and the significance that this implies.