After Libeskind - A Museum for the Twenty-first Century

At the Jewish Museum in Berlin the space within the building and how it is organised is as significant as the objects that fill it. So the architect Daniel Libeskind neatly reverses the first principal of traditional museology, that it's what is on display not the building that gives a museum its identity. Libeskind's Berlin building, and his proposed extension to the Victoria and Albert Museum in South Kensington questions the cultural assumptions that have underpinned the ways in which traditionally we have been encouraged to think about museums as places for scholarship, ideological narrative, spectacle or entertainment. In this lecture I will explore how these traditions are being reworked, drawing on examples from three museums which include the Jewish Museum and the Hong Kong Museum of Art. I would conclude with the idea that information technology which plays an essential communications role in all museums, may even liberate us from the need to ever use museums at all, that it possible to curate a personal meta-museum on an internet website