Danse macabre i musernas hus – om museernas roll och villkor idag

Danse macabre on the museum scene – notes on the decline and fall of the museum idea The museum idea in Europe is closely linked to the concept of the nation state. Now that this concept is losing its dominant role, the role of the museum and its public funding is also being questioned. The crisis in societal credibility is foreshadowed by the real or imminent bankruptcy of museums (specific Danish and Swedish instances are quoted in the text). The battle to regain public confidence and approval is well under way. The scene is set for the danse macabre. Different methods are being chosen. Many museums cling to their traditional functions of preservation and education – and their pedagogical work is most easily accepted, encouraged and subsidized when the space for history teaching in compulsory school is continuously shrinking. Others concentrate on acquiring sponsoring from trade and industry and of course seek support from various foundations. A regrouping of Swedish national collections was suggested as early as 1920 by Gregor Paulsson to better adapt the museum institution to the needs of contemporary society – into a quality museum (for the general public), a study museum (for researchers) and a museum of the present (to serve the need of future orientation). This was a proposal that pointed the way forward and is still relevant.The crisis in the museums is principally political and financial resulting in an institutional lack of resoluteness and uncertainty about purpose and societal legitimacy. To survive it will be necessary to acknowledge the end of the national saga and the reality of cybernations and the Dream World, Museums could find their raison d’être serving as dynamic houses of culture, as Kenneth Hudson suggested in the 1980s. The institutions should accept the museum as medium and think of themselves as process-oriented entities whose job it is to support and inspire their communities and visitors/users. They should obviously adapt to the virtual reality produced in a dynamic digital process where the content is similar to an open oral tradition. The museum should be the cultural storyteller and commentator in its community and tradi- tional museum education should be given up in favour of these new roles. According to Kenneth Hudson the museum should become a club, or perhaps – as Bernard Déloche suggests – a café philosophique. Another possible way forward is such cooperation as that pro- moted in the ABM project where archive, library and museum are amalgamated into a historical workshop. For the e-topia imagined by William Mitchell the paper concludes with conceiving a museum of the future consisting of a physical building supplemented and expanded to a virtual museum.