Peter Weibel
is participant at
The Global Future of Local Art Museums - The Cultural Practice of Local Memory and the Rise of Global Art
Abstract
Museums as Sites of Cultural, National, and Religious Identity
The present globalization of art production concerns not only artists – whether they stay in their country or emigrate – but also involves museums, as it leads to a new landscape of institutions, which outside the West are redefining their own profile. The nationalization of art history goes together with the invention of local avant-gardes. In the West, art museums function at present as international centers of attraction. Outside the West, museums often continue colonial patterns or struggle for new roles in their present environments, to which Western models are not necessarily helpful.
The nationalization of art history helps to shape cultural identity. But the same strategy easily produces rather than solves problems. Cultural identity becomes a field of competition instead of cohabitation. The history of 20th-century art especially in an epoch of voluntary or forced emigration, makes it difficult to qualify an artist by his or her nationality or origin. Today, patterns of cultural identity are hybrid.
Religious identity plays an equally important role, and whether an artist applies Protestant ethics, Catholic imagination or Jewish aniconism, he or she always enters a hidden part of art theory. We have become accustomend to images of Jesus Christ in our art museums, but images of Buddha and other extra-European religious idols or the art of calligraphy are not equally tolerated in an art environment.
This triple identity, namely national, cultural and religious, suffers a crisis in the age of globalization, in which such concepts must be transformed into adequate answers for contemporary needs. In particular, the role of visual art museums needs rethinking. Ethnological and popular production may not be easily available for a retrospective construction of local or national art histories, especially since nations are often of recent origin and may represent the outcome of colonial history. Today we expect artists in Western and non-Western societies to create a new public. It is the purpose of the ZKM-project “Global Changes in Museum Politics” to provide insight into the ongoing global change of the museum model especially in terms of representing (and sometimes inventing) cultural identity.
