Janet K. ZwolinskiIntroduction to Public HumanitiesFall 2009Blog Paper In Witcomb’s “Re-Imagining the Museum: Beyond the Mausoleum”, she offersinsight into what she call “an antagonism between museum professionals and intellectualcritics,”

based on theories and practices involving power, meaning and community inmodern museum practices and museum histories.Through her experience as a curator and museum consultant, Witcomb presents aseries of essays that reject the current arguments that museums are either instruments of power for conservative or elitist values or that new media and interactivity have made the‘new’ museums populist and democratic.Through the use of theoretical discourse, Witcomb examines and tests variousmodels of understanding within the field of museum studies. Particularly, she rejects thetheory that museums have been stagnant and now need to achieve a level of change tomake meaningful connections with ever-changing audiences. She puts forth JamesClifford’s theories that museums, in fact, experience continual change in response to boththeir internal and external communities.It is through the use of this discoursive model with theorists that Witcomb seeksto make her own contribution to the history of museum studies. As a centrist in thedebate, she contends that contemporary museums are not representing a radical departure

Andrea Witcomb,

Re-Imaging the Museum: Beyond the Mausoleum

(London: Routledge, 2003), 168.

from historical precedents

. They are, in fact, informed by “what museums have been.”

Witcomb very successfully navigates what Randolf Starn calls “a flood of literature on the theory, practice, politics, and history of museums.”

Since the 1980s,there have been innumerable texts addressing the development of museums and theongoing battle between museum curators and academic historians.In the American Historical Review, Starn presents an annotated guide to what hecalls “the newer museum studies.”

Like Witcomb, he seeks to show that “museums arenot neutral.” In the ever-changing world of museum studies, “…today’s challenge to theidentity of the museum… mean(s) that we can learn from seeing how transformationshave come about (or not) in the past.”

Beginning in France in the 1980’s, the New Museology was defined as “amovement of criticism and reform incorporating new developments in the social andhuman sciences with the aim of revitalizing techniques of display, exhibition andcommunication, and ultimately, altering traditional relationships between the institution[of the museum] and the public.”

And as a call to action, the New Museology desired a “breaking with the past,”under the “implication that the history of museums was not steady and continuous.”

Aided by a re-appropriation of Foucaultian genealogy, this view has been long dominantin museum studies, although “Foucault himself paid scant attention to museums, but, by

Ibid, 165.

Randolph A. Starn, “A Historian’s Brief Guide to New Museum Studies,”

The American Historical Review

110, no. 1 (2005),http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/ahr/110.1/starn.html.