Tese de mestrado, Educação artística, Universidade de Lisboa, Faculdade de Belas Artes, 2012Museums are a complex social institution with a prominent role on our cultural
environment and also on contemporary cultural policies. However museums are lately affected by profound and speedy transformations that have been changing not only its internal and external practices, but also changing its relationship with society, the public sphere and its overall discourses. This study aims to identify some of the museum's discourses. For that it uses casestudies, including six museums and four other national cultural facilities: a Theater, a Music Hall and two Theme Parks. It was possible to establish relationships between museums and its discourses on three different levels: the ones it produces, the ones carried out by other players and the outside discourses that takes for its own. From this research we can conclude that museums and other cultural institutions are presently very similar in its core: its concerns, its needs and the type of strategies are coincident, even amongst different kinds of institutions. It is also possible to conclude that there is an ever expanding spread of topics, narratives and discourses outside the museum field, and sometimes even outside the cultural circuit, that have made some inroads on museums as an object of questioning, reflection and production. Finally we have noticed other "infections", this time internal to the cultural circuit: it really comes down to understanding which discourses are shared with the other cultural institutions, find out its origin and recognize some of its dynamics, direction and meaning
