Subject:– International Conference on Cultural Economics

              (Chicago, June 2-5 2004)

 “History of the museum and of the museum organizations”

I.                   “From Temple of Muses, to Gallery of nobility, to polyfunctional Firm: the Museum in the course of time and in the history of culture”.

Abstract

Sometimes we discuss about Museology or about museum Management without considering the connection that exists between the museum sites and the historical time, the mentality of the epoch in which they are created and enjoyed.

The fair world of Paris, badly putting up with the stale air of churches and workshops, invented the Impressionists’ ein plein air painting. The Futurists, children of the machine civilization and in the name of the idea of never ending progress, banished academies, museums and libraries because they defended the intrusive and pernicious past. The anarchist and protester society of the Sixties let art out of the places that were traditionally deputed to art itself and casted it towards the reality of common life.

Looking at the “comparitive stories of museumology” becomes an indispensable hermeneutic instrument for the museum Management.

This study intends to suture the connective tissue which links the facts of time with the places of time, reviewing the chronotopological evolution of the museum, from the beginnings to Pergamum and Alexandria of Egypt, where it is born as sacrarium dedicated to the muses, magnificent goddesses of the Thought begotten by the union between Zeus and Mnemosyne, it turns into a school, a library, a training ground for the arts and then a space open to intellectuals and to cultures, through the Italian Renaissance in patrician hall, exhibition gallery, to then rise to rank of “case of the human memories” which characterized it up to our days.

Museums are now real firms in which experts belonging to different disciplines operate and from containers of values they have turned into value producers, cultural and economic.

The museum becomes ECOMUSEUM, integral part of the surrounding environment, it even becomes one thing only with the environment itself, just like it had become many times in the past too.

The most attentive museums form alliances with the anthropical communities and create networks and districts to favour the interactions of a system whose boundaries dilate and narrow flexibly.

Of course, variegated phenomenologies do not lack, excessively speculative drifts that risk to lose sight of the Mission or the primary goal of the museum activity, which mean cases of serious deficit of minimum standards of protection and exploitation of the historical-artistic wealth. During all stages of its history, the museum has been expression, architectural also, of the uses, customs, and traditions of the peoples that, time after time, have decided to preserve their own ethnical and cultural wealth as a memory for the future generations or as a greater entertainment and delight for the living people.

Index

I. “From Temple of Muses, to Gallery of nobility, to polyfunctional Firm: the Museum in the course of time and in the history of culture”. (Enzo Varricchio: see before please).

II: “The museum in the Italian Renaissance”

III: “The private collections between the Seicento and Settecento”

IV. “The Romantic and Renaissance myth”

V. “The ideological museum in the great dictatorships”

VI. “The deconstruction of the museum idea: the historic vanguards”

VII. “Intellectuals and museumografy in the Novecento”

VIII. “The proletarian museums and the breaking of the ‘68”

IX. “The accession of the third Rome: fashions and customs of the United States market”

X. “The museum firm in the global/local era”

XI. “Artists, patrons, merchants, collectors, museologists :the difficult relationship between the actors of contemporary art »

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