Kultura (Skopje) (Mar 2015)
THE INTERPLAY OF MUSEUM DISCOURSE AND POPULAR CULTURE: HOW, WHEN AND WHERE HISTORY COMES ALIVE?
Abstract
Museum as an institution has been, throughout history, inevitably connected with ideology, involved in establishing and shaping of cultural memory, and crea-tion and affirmation of collective identities, based on scientific knowledge and interpretation of the past. Nowadays, other, more effective media are involved in those processes, e.g. film, which is examined in the paper as such a medium. Also, museums and media have been used for spreading different prejudices and stereotypes – some of our identities are often based on such preju-dices, either about our own or somebody else’s past or present. Nevertheless, museum as an institution has an aura of highest authority, based on scientific knowledge and legitimized by museum collections. Museum is seen as trustworthy, unbiased and objective. Such privileged status of museums is argued and contested, and the complexities of museum discourse are traced through critical analysis of the current policy of the American Museum of Natural History in New York and this muse-um’s participation in the production of a movie Night at the Museum (2006). As part of a “global village,” museum visitors are impacted by certain stereotypical images circulating within and outside of museums, which are a dense package of ideas (rooted in science, folklore, ide-ology, politics, etc.) that thrive in cultural memory and collective imagination. These are constructed and circu-lated as commonsense or consensus narratives, en-trenched in the minds of the public, and they can take hold persistently against current scientific opinions. Mass media images that museum visitors bring with them to the museum are inevitably shaping their inter-pretations of exhibitions. What happens then, when a museum gets involved with Hollywood industry? What are the consequences of such an interaction? This pa-per’s aim is to shed some light on those consequences in the particular case of the AMNH.
