From a world in a box to a world without borders: art museums, media technologies and cosmopolitanism

Abstract

This was an invited lecture given at the Muzeum Sztuki. It addresses the notion of universality in museum practices, in an age of electronic communication, globalisation and artistic multiculturalism. The art museum tasked to be a "universal museum" to map the development of art, historically resorted to the use of reproductions. The paper discusses how the universal museum project relied both on hand-­‐made facsimiles and technical reproductions (such as photographs); how we map or visualise a history of modern art, and how the ways in which we do this are related to the media technologies of our time. It considers the idea of the museum as a container (or box) in which all the world’s stuff is stored, and as a kind of narrative journey. Finally it addresses the ways in which the notion of cosmopolitanism has been proposed as an alternative to the perceived Imperial aspects of the universal museum, and briefly comments on the situation today for museums as public spaces in a global context and their responsibility to their publics