Re-imagining meaning in the contemporary museum: from things that go beep in the case to the artist ex machina

Abstract

In late 1997 the director of one of Australia’s oldest and largest state museums was perfectly happy to enter into the public record his intense dissatisfaction with most museums on the grounds that: I’m often bored out of my mind. I can’t find where you eat, and when you do the food’s lousy, it’s never what I wanted. The shops are full of the same junk you find in shops everywhere else... You see things tucked behind glass which are communicated in a patronizing way in far too many words. Here I am, highly educated, with a great passion for life, and I’m bored. And so I walk out feeling guilty.