A museum, like any other element of the general metasystem of culture, can have ambivalent characteristics. On the one hand, it is perceived as a positive embodiment of knowledge, progress, enlightenment, and the emancipating power of human creative potential. On the other hand, as a mechanism of conservative restraint of creative impulses, aesthetic and scientific segregation, and epistemological “mummification”. The article examines the embodiment of such a negative view of the museum in the form of temporary museum exhibitions. The author analyzes four projects from the 1990s and 2000s (“Mining the Museum”, “The Brooklyn Museum Collection: The Play of the Unmentionable”, “The Museum as Muse: Artists Reflect”, “Into the Heart of Africa”). Their possible typology is proposed and potential communication difficulties are analyzed.
museum; exhibition; critique; institutional critique; contemporary art.