(21)--V1_11_Change 博物馆学概论.pdfVIP

11 Change and Continuity art Museums and the Reproduction of art‐Museumness Ien Ang The proliferation and diversification of museums in the past few decades have led museum theorists to reject the abstract notion of “the museum” (in the singular) in favor of a pluralist perspective which emphasizes the rich diversity and specific- ity of actually existing museums (in the plural). As Sharon Macdonald (1996, 4) puts it, “the museum does not exist.” Similarly, Andrew McClellan (2003, 40) argues that: “Increasingly different in themselves, museums serve different purposes, for different people; and of course they also serve different purposes for the same peo- ple.” Tony Bennett (Chapter 1 in this volume) also endorses a perspective in which “the museum” as such disappears as a possible object of analysis: “What any par- ticular museum is, what it does, what it is possible for it to do, who it can act on, how it can do so: these are not matters that are given by some invariant form of the museum.” The malleability of museums is, for McClellan at least, precisely a reason for declaring their longevity as a type of institution: “It is the diversity and flexibility of art museums – their ability to give various publics a variety of experi- ences across a broad museological landscape – that will ensure their survival in the long run” (McClellan 2003, 40). In the fast changing world of the twenty‐first century and beyond, art museums will surely face major challenges to their existing ways of operation, one of the biggest of which is the digital challenge (which has already begun to transform museum practices today). But the survival of art museums in the foreseeable future may not just be due to their adaptability, but because they are part of the established institutional landscape of cul