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Les musée aujourd’hui et demain ? Definitions, missions et déontologies

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Les musée aujourd’hui et demain ? Definitions, missions et déontologies

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TOPIC

The Extraordinary General Assembly of the International Council of Museums (ICOM) hold in Kyoto on September 7 decided to postpone its vote around the "new definition of the museum", which had led to intense debates that were widely reported in the international press.

To be described in a few words and inspired by a rather critical vision of some 20th century museums - especially Western ones - the "new" definition proposed to shift the centre of gravity of museums: from institutions conserving collections and dedicated to the transmission to the public of their artistic, historical, scientific and natural heritage, the museum became a multi-purpose institution, serving human rights as a whole. A proposal breaking away from the definition that had hitherto appeared in ICOM's statutes as well as the regulatory texts of many member countries, distancing itself from the professional anchoring of the organization, and which caused a postponement of discussion.

A large majority of the members realized that beyond the words they were discovering, it was their common vision of the museums of tomorrow, their missions and their own ethics that were being called into question.

Among the 4,000 present representatives of ICOM's national and international committees out of the 44,000 that the organization has in 135 countries, many left with a sense of urgency to redefine, not so much the word "museum", but what links museums together and their perspectives for a shared future: "definition" is an operational tool, not a parable; as a tool, it must be simple and consensual, and obviously free of misunderstandings, unclear terms or gaps. Managing to define what brings museums together in a common project is another challenge, a decisive one for a world organization that represents them: what makes a museum singular today and distinguishes it from other "polyphonic and inclusive" places, such as those being created every day in all regions of the world (cultural centres, performance halls, etc.)? In what way the "collections" and the specific work they require, are precisely what makes the meaning of museums and the strength of the social bond they create? What new skills and qualifications are today the basis for professional excellence that guarantees the public's trust in museums to transmit their history? What updating of the code of ethics, the common culture of museum professionals, is made necessary by these changes at work?

Since Kyoto, these questions have taken place, sometimes intensely, within the many committees of ICOM and even beyond, with other professional museum organizations and among cultural actors, journalists, associations, public officials...

It is the fruit of this work that ICOM France intends to collect, in March, in Paris. Of course, it will express different and even divergent convictions and proposals. Among the 135 member countries of ICOM, there are so many different cultural models! It is not about trying to harmonize. It is about moving in the same direction and carrying values that bring people together. This is what has united ICOM for over 70 years, and allows professionals, whatever their position in their organization and the position of their organization in their country, to dialogue and to practice their profession.

The working day was devoted to giving the floor to the representatives of the national and international committees and the alliances who have led discussions with their members over the past six months: expressed positions, expectations and proposals for the future. Round tables compared the approaches and restart the prospective approach.

PAPERS

Bruno David,Chair, Musée national d'histoire naturelle
Regine Schulz, Chair, Advisory Council of ICOM

Juliette Raoul-Duval, Chair, ICOM France

François Mairesse, Professor, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle

Chaired by Marie-Laure Estignard, Director, musée des Arts et Métiers

Marie Cornu, Jurist and Research Director, CNRS / or her representative

Jean-Louis Chiss, Professor, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle

Chaired by Emilie Girard, Vice-president of ICOM France

Marion Bertin, ICOFOM Secretary

Juliette Raoul-Duval, ICOM France

ICOM France,ICOM Germany, ICOM Europe & ICOFOM

APPENDICES

Morning documents

Synthesis by Florence Le Corre, conservator

Afternoon documents

Chaired by Emilie Girard, Scientific Director, head of collections, MuCEM - Vice-president of ICOM France
Rapporteur :Céline Chanas, Chair, FEMS

Participants: Daniele Jalla (ICOM Italy) ; Ech-Cherki Dahmali (ICOM Marocco / ICOM Arab) via Skype ; Arja van Veldhuizen (ICOM Netherlands) ; Marie-Clarté O'Neill (CECA) ; Philippe Büttner (ICOM Switzerland) ; Markus Walz (ICOM Germany)

Chaired by Alberto Garlandini, Vice-president, ICOM International (via video and Skype) & Emilie Girard, Scientific Director, head of collections, MuCEM - Vice-president of ICOM France

Participants: Burçak Madran (ICMAH) ; Chedlia Annabi (ICOM Tunisie) via Skype ; Koré Escobar Zamora (ICOM Spain) ; Alexandre Chevalier (ICOM Belgium) ; Elke Kellner (ICOM Austria) via Skype

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Museums, today and tomorrow ? Definitions, missions, ethics | ICOM France

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The Extraordinary General Assembly of the International Council of Museums (ICOM) hold in Kyoto on September 7 decided to postpone its vote around the "new definition of the museum", which had led to intense debates that were widely reported in the international press.

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ICOM new museum definition – update on the next steps

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ICOM new museum definition – update on the next steps

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At the Extraordinary General Assembly (EGA) on 7 September 2019 in Kyoto, the decision was made to postpone the vote on the new ICOM museum definition in order to continue discussions. ICOM UK and other committees came to Kyoto having carried out consultation with their memberships. Since then, more International and National Committees have been taking action and conversations around ICOM's new museum definition have continued around the globe. ICOM has acknowledged the enthusiasm and benefits that will come from such discussions. Last week ICOM UK hosted two discussion meetings (in Edinburgh and London) and ran a survey for members. The summary findings will be shared with members in the coming weeks.

ICOM has now set out the next steps for the museum definition consultation process, which were agreed at the ICOM Executive Board (EB) meeting on 9 December 2019:

To endorse the continuation of the MDPP (ICOM Standing Committee on Museum Definition, Prospects and Potentials) to address the next stage of the museum definition process;

To suggest that this Standing Committee be called MDPP2 to distinguish it from the first stage of its work;

To augment the membership of the MDPP2 to include more representatives from the membership;

To set a term of three years from 2020 to 2022 to carry forward this important work into the next stage;

To establish some parameters to guide the MDPP2 in the development of the next stage of its work.

The ICOM President and the EB asked the MDPP2 to revisit the roadmap sent to the EB in September 2019 and to develop an open, transparent and consultative process to work with the National and International Committees over the next two years. MDPP2 will be chaired by Jette Sandahl.

ICOM President and ICOM Executive Board believe that the membership, the EB and the MDPP2 seek a common museum definition that reflects the purpose and position of museums in the 21st century. From the first stage of its work, the MDPP (2017-2019) distilled eight (8) criteria within which a new museum definition should be considered. The ICOM President and the EB believe that these valuable criteria should continue to provide a basis for developing definitions. However, to these criteria, other considerations need to be added. These include:

Legislative aspects (with reference to the ICOM Statutes)

Ethical aspects (with reference to the ICOM Code of Ethics)

The intended result is a museum definition which will address normative, legislative and ethical criteria, will be generic and whose final version will begin with the phrase "a museum is...". The definition needs to be defensible against these criteria.

ICOM UK will ensure the information from the museum definition roundtable held in Edinburgh in 2018, the recent discussions meetings in London and Edinburgh and the summary results from the survey are shared with ICOM as part of the consultation process and in preparation for discussion at the ICOM general meetings, 10 - 12 June 2020 in Paris.

There will not be an EGA or a vote for a new museum definition at the June meeting. There will be an extensive discussion which will enable participants to communicate, exchange and refine their views for a new definition and discover points of convergence for a shared one to be developed fully in the following year. ICOM is aiming for an EGA and a vote for a new museum definition in June 2021, the year of ICOM's 75th anniversary.

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At the Extraordinary General Assembly (EGA) on 7 September 2019 in Kyoto, the decision was made to postpone the vote on the new ICOM museum definition in order to continue discussions. ICOM UK and other committees came to Kyoto having carried out consultation with their memberships.

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A RISKY CONTROVERSY OR A POTENTIAL CONVERGENCE?ICOM’s proposed new museum definition [Part II]

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A RISKY CONTROVERSY OR A POTENTIAL CONVERGENCE?ICOM’s proposed new museum definition [Part II]

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Sandro Debono

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I think there may be an interesting possibility emerging from this controversy which I briefly summarise in two points.

1. I think that the proposed definition is more of a declared ambition than a stock-take of the current global museum landscape.

I don't think that the double barrel definition is all encompassing to be defined as a definition proper and reactions have been very much indicative in this respect. Some museums might find it a perfect match, others may relate to parts or particular phrases but I find it very hard for all the sector to acknowledge in toto. An ex-member of the MDPP, François Mairesse expressed himself in relatively clear terms with The Artnewspaper about this matter

"A definition is a simple and precise sentence characterizing an object, and this is not a definition but a statement of fashionable values, much too complicated and partly aberrant"

I wouldn't mind the reference to fashionable values given that there is, in any case, the need to a continuous cycle of review and discussions that needs to take place for such a complex and polyphonic sector. Might be complicated too, but am not too sure whether to call it aberrant.

2. Then why not go for a declaration of principles which would acknowledge the very same polyphonic museum landscape that the ICOM is struggling to define?

In the run-up to the proposed double-barrel definition close to 250 proposals were submitted by the various national committees that form part of ICOM. National definitions have always been the case, even beyond this extensive exercise The United Kingdom Museums Association for one has its very own definition of museum which is, in any case, a variant of the universal ICOM definition. The list of submissions has also been made public by ICOM.

It is not my intention to review the long list of submissions made public at this point in time although a quick read through suggests nuances and subtle variations that reflect the diverse culture ecologies that jointly make up the museum landscape. Why not give more weight to the national submissions and adopt, instead, a set of guiding principles, values or declared ambitions which museums should strive to embrace?

Jette Sandahl does acknowledge the difficulty of finding an all-encompassing definition, the need of an open and fluid process and for the discussion to continue.

'You cannot define something once and for all' claims Sandahl. That is so very true... but perhaps a bottom-up approach can keep the sector focused on the challenges ahead rather than end up mired in controverssy about something that all agree is a daunting task to define.

In Short ...
I think that rather than go for a definition, ICOM should adopt a declared ambition built on values that have shaped the museum insitution historically and those that it should now aspire to. Recognising and acknowledging the definition proposed by each ICOM National Committee would promote and endorse a more democratic museum landscape, acknowledge the enormous and inherent diversities that shape the museum landscape today and empower the world museum landscape to shape its future ambitions. The choice of pictures featured here is by Italo-Swiss photographer Christian Tagliavini. We thank him for his consent to be part of the Humanist Museum Project.

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A RISKY CONTROVERSY OR A POTENTIAL CONVERGENCE?

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I think there may be an interesting possibility emerging from this controversy which I briefly summarise in two points. I don't think that the double barrel definition is all encompassing to be defined as a definition proper and reactions have been very much indicative in this respect.

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Sandro Debono

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A closer look at the International Committee of Museums' proposal

'The Scholar' by Bill Gekas

A few weeks ago, following months of research and public consultation, the International Committee of Museums (ICOM) launched the proposed new double-barrel museum definition. This time around, ICOM went for a major overhaul rather than a cyclical review happening every so often. The discussion on the proposed definition has been, since then, rather intense and described as a hotly contested debate by international press such as The Art Newspaper. A handful of national branches have asked ICOM to postpone the official vote scheduled for early September in order to deliver a "new proposal." So what is this new museum definition all about and why has it stirred so much controversy?

Let's start with the first thing that comes to mind ... and that, to me, might sound like a very obvious question. Why was there the need to change the current museum definition in the first place?

The need seems to have long been felt, also in view of the sector's significant developments and the rapid changes that contemporary societies have witnessed over the past decade. Way back in 2014, I did comment, along with others, that the current definition was becoming reduntant in the face of an ever-growing need to decisively relocate the public to the centre of the museum experience and to humanise the museum, particularly the art museum institution ...

The definition of museums promoted by the International Committee of Museums describes the museum institution as a 'non-profit institution at the service of society'. This is a general requirement for museums but rather than being a static and un-reflexive upholder of a tightly bound culture [the humanist museum should aim] to build on the potential synergies and constant interface with the community.'

What I claim here is that museums and their corresponding communities have oftentimes ran adrift. Just being 'at the service of society' implies a passive role which does not address the current needs and aspirations of contemporary societies more keen on participatory and engaging access.

Maria Vlachou, Executive Director of Portughese Organisation Acesso Cultura, has recently pointed out, that the current definition

'... has not served the museum field, and society at large, for a long time now, as many museum professionals have failed to understand that "to acquire, conserve and research" is not an aim, a purpose in itself, bur rather a tool, in order to fulfil the purposes mentioned by the definition.'

Vlachou's comments refer to collections as a resource and a means to an end rather than an end in itself. In short, putting together a collection and ensuring access over time should not and is not the main objective and mission of museums. Rather, it is the public, its needs and aspirations that collections should be there for, a resource rather than an art history book on display.

Jette Sandahl, chair of the ICOM standing committee for the new museum definition, feels that the current definition is more inadequate rather than wrong. In Sandahl's own words ...

"The museum definition thus seems to need to be historicised, contextualised, de-naturalised and de-colonialised."

Let us turn to the proposed double-barrel definition. The phrasing used and the key words that can be underpinned can provide us with insight as to whether this definition speaks for where the museum landscape stands today or whether this is more akin to an ambition. The first part reads eloquently well.

"Museums are democratising, inclusive and polyphonic spaces for critical dialogue about the pasts and the futures. Acknowledging and addressing the conflicts and challenges of the present, they hold artefacts and specimens in trust for society, safeguard diverse memories for future generations and guarantee equal rights and equal access to heritage for all people."

1. '... democratising, inclusive and polyphonic'

This I consider to be very much in line with the ambition of a human-experience or human centred museum or, better still, a museum at the service of humanity. I particularly like the word polyphonic, which reminds me of an orchestra with its various components playing a given repertoire. The individual components may just be playing a script, somewhat boring or perhaps incomprehensible when hear in isolation, but harmonious and inspiring when heard together. Questions nonetheless beckon. How much are today's museums inclusive and polyphonic not only in their programming and events but also in the collections they develop or get entrusted with? How much is the art museum representative of the polyphony of cultures that constitute a given community?

2. '... spaces for critical dialogue about past and futures.'

Yet again, this is about the ways and means how museums can and should should aspire to become cultural spaces where publics meet collections and material culture on display. It is within these spaces, at the intersection of these encounters, that new ideas and thoughts about our past and futures are incubated. Sadly, however, this is not so common as one might expect. More often than not, it is the token visit that counts for millions of visitors to museums, and that special encounter with a masterpiece that is oftentimes on a tick-box list of to do's.

3. '... safeguard diverse memories ...'

This too is something that museums struggle to engage with. It is a fact that the vast majority of museums, particulary those with national status, strive to safeguard the official memory of the state rather than the polyphonic narratives of a history that should by now be read beyond the victor-victim paradigm. Indeed, when will the memory of the vanquised and that of the victor be celebrated within the same cultural space that is the 21st century museum?

4. '... guarantee equal rights ...'

I think museums at large are still far from universally acknowledging this valie and giving such a guarantee. Equal rights ambitions have so far revolved around such things as bespoke programming for 'special needs' visitors and minority communities. Such guarantees would eventually need to inform what is collected and goes on display, which in the case of national museums is oftentimes in response to the endorsed and institutionalised narrative of the state. Indeed, equal rights would concern not only access but also representation and display. Are museums doing so universally? I doubt it.

The second part of the proposed double-barrel statement is even more ambitious and equally vision-driven.

"Museums are not for profit. They are participatory and transparent, and work in active partnership with and for diverse communities to collect, preserve, research, interpret, exhibit, and enhance understandings of the world, aiming to contribute to human dignity and social justice, global equality and planetary wellbeing."

5. 'They are participatory ...'

The participatory museum is certainly gaining traction and has been doing so for well over a decade. The European Union has also legislated on Participatory Governance of Cultural Heritage. Indeed, this ambition seems to have much more institutional clout than most of what has been featured in the double-barrel definition. Notwithstanding this endorsement, the level and extent of participatory practice remains uneven across the global museum landscape.

6. '...work in active partnerships with and for communities...'

This may be that part of the double-barrel definition which is most tangibly relevant. The vast majority of museums have, indeed, forged partnerships across the cultural spectrum, be they financial, programming or outreach related, educational or otherwise. How much and to what extent these partnerships with and for communities are effective and relevant is a different matter altogether.

7. '...contribute to human dignity and social justice, ...'

That this part of the definition is politically loaded seems to be immediately self-evident. Human dignity is, indeed, about a person's intrinsic worth and value within a given society ... about being human. This reminds me very much of Neil Postman 's statement

'As I see it a museum is an answer to a fundamental question... what does it mean to be a human being?'

Social justice is a much more challenging statement for museums, particularly those that are not within full-democracies or instituted by authoritarian governments.

'Maid it' by Bill Gekas

The question beckons ... is ICOM's double-barrel proposal really a possible definition, a declared ambition or a proposed vision?
Our blog posts shall, from now onwards, be intermittently featuring works of art in varied media. The choice of pictures featured here is by Australian photographer Bill Gekas. We thank him for his consent to be part of the Humanist Museum Project.

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A closer look at the International Committee of Museums' proposal A few weeks ago, following months of research and public consultation, the International Committee of Museums (ICOM) launched the proposed new double-barrel museum definition. This time around, ICOM went for a major overhaul rather than a cyclical review happening every so often.

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Há já algum tempo que a definição de museu de lá de casa está fixada. É o local onde o pai, ou melhor, para onde o pai trabalha. Além disso é o local onde vamos para aprender (ou pelo menos tentar), para nos divertir e para conhecer objectos e, através destes, a História, o nosso passado comum e, acima de tudo, pensar um pouco sobre os nossos dias.

Lá em casa, como imagino que em grande parte das casas por esse país fora, a definição de museu é algo que não é verdadeiramente importante. Perdoem-me os meus colegas de profissão, mas é assim que vemos as coisas. O que é realmente importante é o que são na realidade os museus que visitamos, as histórias que nos contam, a forma como nos fazem pensar em assuntos importantes, a ajuda que podem ser, para mim e para a prole, no desenvolvimento dos nossos conhecimento, espírito crítico e consciência social.

Sei, no entanto, que a definição de museu, tal como a definição de um outro termo qualquer, é importante em diversos casos, dos mais práticos, aos mais académicos, e merece a atenção de todos, em especial, dos que neles trabalham e a que a eles se dedicam de qualquer forma.

Uma nova definição e uma velha definição

o ICOM decidiu, na conferência trienal de 2016 em Milão, criar um grupo de trabalho para estudar e propor uma nova definição de museu. Deu-lhe um prazo de três anos, findos os quais seria levada uma definição nova a Kyoto, este ano, para ser votada em Assembleia Geral. O processo, liderado pela equipa de Jette Sandhall, foi aberto, inclusivo e teve o mérito de "ouvir" todos os que gostariam de propor uma nova definição. Foram feitos debates em quase todo o mundo, Portugal incluído, onde todos os que se interessavam pelo tema, poderam ser ouvidos e debater a necessidade, ou não, de mudar uma definição que carrega o peso da História e cuja necessidade de mudança, relembro, foi votada (se bem me lembro por grande maioria) favoravelmente em Milão.

A definição de museu (ainda actual) que se propunha substituir é:

O museu é uma instituição permanente sem fins lucrativos, ao serviço da sociedade e do seu desenvolvimento, aberta ao público, que adquire, conserva, investiga, comunica e expõe o património material e imaterial da humanidade e do seu meio envolvente com fins de educação, estudo e deleite.

A definição de museu proposta pela equipa de Jette Sandhall foi a seguinte (tradução da página do ICOM Portugal):

Os Museus são espaços democratizantes, inclusivos e polifónicos, orientados para o diálogo crítico sobre os passados e os futuros. Reconhecendo e lidando com os conflitos e desafios do presente, detêm, em nome da sociedade, a custódia de artefactos e espécimes, por ela preservam memórias diversas para as gerações futuras, garantindo a igualdade de direitos e de acesso ao património a todas as pessoas.

Os museus não têm fins lucrativos. São participativos e transparentes; trabalham em parceria activa com e para comunidades diversas na recolha, conservação, investigação, interpretação, exposição e aprofundamento dos vários entendimentos do mundo, com o objectivo de contribuir para a dignidade humana e para a justiça social, a igualdade global e o bem-estar planetário.

Confrontados com esta proposta de definição, como seria de esperar, a discussão gerou-se. Desde a simples, talvez simplista demais, crítica a uma posição política/ideológica entrelaçada nas palavras da proposta, até às mais sectoriais, como a inexistência da palavra "educação", chegando às mais processuais, onde se apontava a falta de tempo existente para a discussão desta nova proposta, foram muitos os críticos a este novo texto. E, pese embora a existência de apoio por parte de alguns comités à nova definição, era claro (bastava ter participado nas várias sessões em que o assunto se discutiu em Kyoto) que a proposta apresentada à votação não era consensual e que os comités (Nacionais e Internacionais) preferiam adiar a sua votação.

Museu numa destilaria de Sake - Kyoto, Japão

Eu concordo, devo desde já dizer, com o adiamento da votação. Não porque ache que a proposta é "ideológica", com alguma agenda escondida (certamente ingenuidade minha), ou não concorde com a visão expressa naquele texto sobre o que os museus devem perseguir, mas sim porque o acho mais do que uma definição de "museu" e, assim sendo, é importante (na discussão de uma definição) não esquecer a definição de "definição":

Explicação clara e breve.

Decisão em matéria duvidosa.

[Retórica] Exposição dos diversos lados pelos quais se pode encarar um assunto.
"definição", in Dicionário Priberam da Língua Portuguesa [em linha], 2008-2013, https://dicionario.priberam.org/defini%C3%A7%C3%A3o [consultado em 13-09-2019].

Ora de forma clara e breve, não é assim que se descreve o que é um museu. Não arrisco dar aqui, porque acho que é um trabalho que deve ser feito em equipa, com base em leituras várias (que reconheço não ter feito e que mesmo que tivesse, não arriscaria numa interpretação a solo), a ouvir os profissionais, mas também quem nos visita e utiliza os nossos recursos (sejam eles investigadores, escolas, visitantes, políticos, etc.) de uma forma aberta, sem receios injustificados e com um processo tão inclusivo quanto possível.

Não me interpretem mal. Eu acho que o processo que o ICOM seguiu teve os seus méritos e as suas falhas, mas perguntem aos vossos filhos, aos vossos familiares, a amigos que não trabalhem em museus, ao senhor do pão e ao mecânico, quantos deles ouviram sequer que discutimos, nos últimos tempos, o que é a definição de museu? Sou capaz de apostar que poucos saberão, mas posso estar errado. Não seria interessante chamar a sociedade a esta discussão? Não teríamos aqui uma oportunidade para que nos olhassem com maior atenção? Uma atenção que poderia dar frutos no futuro, sabendo as pessoas o que é, na realidade, um museu?

Para alguns, bem sei, esta é uma discussão técnica. Não deve ser tida fora daqueles que conhecem o museu no seu âmago, as suas entranhas e a indiscutível necessidade da sua existência como instituições permanentes que têm como maior propósito levar aos seguintes, o que os anteriores nos deixaram. Entre esses, como é óbvio, também eu estou, mas não posso esquecer nunca que o que nos deixaram os nossos antepassados pode, aliás deve sempre, permitir que questionemos o nosso passado e presente e, desta forma, abrir horizontes para um futuro melhor. Não utilizar as colecções dos museus para nos questionarmos, é negar o que grande parte dessa enorme herança significa em termos da construção da sociedade ocidental, democrática e plural.

Museu Nacional do Manga - Kyoto, Japão

Não arrisco, como disse atrás, uma nova definição, mas sei, com certeza, que museu quero para os mim e para os meus filhos. Quero um museu que me faça pensar, que me permita admirar, que me ajude a criar, que me faça chorar, que tenha locais para ler e conviver com amigos e família, que seja pro-activo e não reactivo, quero um museu aberto e inclusivo, quero um museu que me queira, que queira os meus e faça tudo o possível para os chamar a conhecer as colecções e a pensar com elas o passado e o presente.

Isto não tem nada a ver com a definição de museu. Tem a ver com aquilo que cada museu realmente é ou quer ser.

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Há já algum tempo que a definição de museu de lá de casa está fixada. É o local onde o pai, ou melhor, para onde o pai trabalha. Além disso é o local onde vamos para aprender (ou pelo menos tentar), para nos divertir e para conhecer objectos e, através destes, a História, o nosso ...

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What is a museum? And why did ICOM fail to answer the question in Kyoto…

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What is a museum? And why did ICOM fail to answer the question in Kyoto…

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Ever so often, the museum profession updates its answer to this question. At its very start in 1946, ICOM defined a museum as collection; from 1951 it was defined as an establishment, only to become a permanent institution in 1961. The current version 6 of the definition was adopted in Vienna in 2007. It included intangible heritage. Asian colleagues had forcefully put forward that notion at the previous 2004 ICOM meeting in Seoul. It was a well prepared update that did not encounter any resistance.

At the recent Kyoto ICOM conference, however, things went wrong. After four hours of discussion a two thirds majority referred the proposed new museum definition to the waste basket; at least, they postponed the vote for a year. As the Dutch proverb goes, procrastination is cancellation...

What had gone wrong? Obviously, the majority could not identify with the new definition. Why not? What did people disagree about? Three years ago, ICOM had created its new Standing Committee for Museum Definition, Prospects and Potentials (MDPP) with the task of updating the museum definition. Led by my former colleague Jette Sandahl, who once created the impressive Museum of World Culture in Gothenburg; and consisting of an impressive selection of heavyweights from the world of ethnological museums and world cultures museums. These world cultures museums are very new developments; they address issues of cultural identity and diversity and are driven by social responsibility issues. And the (European) ethnographic museums have all gone through a huge crisis in recent decades. Once they realized - around 1990 - that they had to drastically shake off their legacy from the colonial past, they had to reinvent themselves. There was a shift from presenting others without including them towards people and world cultures. A new legitimacy was found in universal declarations, such as those about human rights (UN), cultural diversity and intangible heritage (UNESCO) and climate change (IPCC). A new museology was introduced in which polyphony, partnership, inclusion and social responsibility and the sharing of knowledge and collections with museums in countries of origin played a major role. These were stunning and electrifying developments; I have myself participated enthusiastically. This transformation has served the ethnological museums very well. They are proud and vibrant institutions again. Take the recently reopened Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren near Brussels as an example (or Weltmuseum Wien for that matter)!

And now all these innovations from this section of the museum world have suddenly been loaded into in the new museum definition. Oops! In comparison, all previous adjustments were small beer! The permanent institutionhad to make way for democratization, inclusive and polyphonic spaces for critical dialogue about pasts and futures (yes, plural, because everyone has their own past and future of their own ...). And then a small essay with good intentions follows.

What went wrong here? I would say, a vanguard of museums that has just invented or reinvented itself has run wild. It has tried to make its beautiful vision the universal criterion for an institution to qualify as a museum; and thus be admissible to ICOM. Here, the museum definition has become a means of action. ICOM has made a crooked stroke with a straight bat. That is not what our museum definition is intended to be used for. Let it please denote what is universally accepted and remain the greatest common denominator that binds all ICOM members. The new ICOM Executive Council is facing the momentous task now to boil down the inspiration of the MDPP to a universally acceptable update of the museum definition. And by all means avoid another such fiasco as in Kyoto.

Steven Engelsman

Steven was director of the Museum of Ethnology in Leiden and the Weltmuseum Wien in Austria. He is now chairman of the Museumpeil Foundation in the Netherlands and Flanders.
This text is a revised and translated version of a column originally published in Dutch in the online newsletterof Museumpeil.

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Current 2007 definition

A museum is a non-profit, permanent institution in the service of society and its development, open to the public, which acquires, conserves, researches, communicates and exhibits the tangible and intangible heritage of humanity and its environment for the purposes of education, study and enjoyment.

Proposed 2019 definition

Museums are democratising, inclusive and polyphonic spaces for critical dialogue about the pasts and the futures. Acknowledging and addressing the conflicts and challenges of the present, they hold artefacts and specimens in trust for society, safeguard diverse memories for future generations and guarantee equal rights and equal access to heritage for all people. Museums are not for profit. They are participatory and transparent, and work in active partnership with and for diverse communities to collect, preserve, research, interpret, exhibit, and enhance understandings of the world, aiming to contribute to human dignity and social justice, global equality and planetary wellbeing.

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What is a museum? And why did ICOM fail to answer the question in Kyoto... - Museumpeil

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Ever so often, the museum profession updates its answer to this question. At its very start in 1946, ICOM defined a museum as collection; from 1951 it was defined as an establishment, only to become a permanent institution in 1961. The current version 6 of the definition was adopted in Vienna in 2007.

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A new definition of "museum"?

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Episode 39: A new definition of “museum”? by Museopunks

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The season for existential crises continued this past month when the International Council of Museums (ICOM) announced that a working group had proposed a new definition for museums and that said definition would be voted on at the ICOM Triennial in Kyoto, Japan. We followed the many conversations that unfolded over the next few weeks, and asked a diverse group of museum colleagues around the world to share their thoughts on the issue with us. What does it mean to be a museum? Who does that definition exclude? And who is the audience for that definition? 

Guest Contributors
Hannah Heller, Armando Perla, Anna Leshchenko, Linda Norris, Maria Vlachou, Jasper Visser, Paul Bowers, Margaret Middleton, Joan Baldwin, Seema Rao and Luis Marcelo Mendes.

Never miss an episode! Subscribe to Museopunks on iTunes, Stitcher or Spotify

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New definition for museums will give them boldness to argue

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New definition for museums will give them boldness to argue

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A conference on democracy at the National Museum of Saudi Arabia; a display on homosexuality at the National Museum of Iran; or an exhibition on the disputed Ramjanmabhoomi-Babri Masjid at Delhi's National Museum? Unthinkable? But changes are afoot and the moral challenges that museums of cultural history often face when trying to host sensitive, taboo laden topics, might soon be over.
"Museology is currently undergoing a great shake up," said Vinod Daniel, chairman of AusHeritage, Australia's international cultural heritage network, and the only person of Indian origin on the board of the Paris-based International Council of Museums (ICOM), a United Nations-style apex body for museums, representing over 43,000 museum professionals and 20,000 museums from over 140 countries. He was referring to the general assembly of ICOM in Kyoto earlier this month where he witnessed a long and divisive debate over a new definition of 'museum'.
"Once upon a time museums had a straight forward role where they'd collect, preserve, research and educate as a non-profit organisation. In the big heated discussion in Kyoto, many of the museums wanted to go beyond its static role of just conserving. They stressed on their need to be democratic, make a stand on social issues, have multiple voices and communicate," explained the Chennai-born, Sydney-based museum specialist who was in Mumbai last week for a two-day workshop at the CSMVS on governance, conservation and infrastructure in the country's museums.
For almost 50 years, the ICOM has defined the museum as "a non-profit institution" that "acquires, conserves, researches, communicates, and exhibits the tangible and intangible heritage of humanity and its environment for the purposes of education, study, and enjoyment." But museums as simple repositories of artefacts may no longer work. Evident from the new alternative meaning proposed by more than 60 different countries, they need to tell stories of people's movements, be seats of inclusion and a platform for people to exchange ideas.
Although the new definition has split the consortium across ideological lines, Daniel is hopeful that the new definition - expected to reach a conclusion in this triennial period - will do away with restrictive museum practices. "Many countries still find it hard to put certain things on exhibition because there are regulations. This new definition would give museums more flexibility to show what they want and the boldness to argue with the authorities," explained Daniel. "But ultimately what they exhibit will be defined by the skill set of the people working there," a hurdle that museums in India are yet to overcome.
In spite of valiant attempts made of late by museums in Mumbai, Delhi, and Kolkata to reinvent themselves as open-ended cultural spaces, they are still considered poor cousins of the world at large. And although 'funding' maybe a common gripe, what really ails Indian museums according to Daniel is "lack of leadership and continuity" as much as "trained manpower,'' he is quick to point out.
"Even if funding expanded ten times, all of it would be useless if a museum didn't have the right leader, training programs and human resource," deadpanned the unlikely museum specialist with a degree in chemical engineering. Daniel, who has worked for over 20 years with the Australian Museum and J Paul Getty Trust in Los Angeles keeps returning to India "every month" to work "pro-bono" with some of the major museums - National Museum in Delhi, Victoria Memorial and Indian Museum in Kolkata, CSMVS in Mumbai and credited with the restoration of a 2000-year-old mummy in Hyderabad.

Talking about how India fares in the global museum movement, Daniel who calls CSMVS a "star" says that it was able to reorient itself "because of the leadership," something that he feels is sorely missing in most museums in India that work under a government system. "Many places believe that an administrator or an IAS person can do the job because museums are like any other public service entity. Many a times it's also punishment posting for bureaucrats. They come with no vision, passion or idea and before long they move on without implementing anything. And there lies half the problem. You need a leader in place for at least ten years. Instead in some museums I've seen four directors in one year and most don't last for more than a year."
Indian museums, he insists, have no dearth of valuable collections but "our struggle is to maintain and preserve them," he points out. "India, if it wants to be self sufficient in conserving its collection, needs a pyramid model with 1000 people on top who are degree holders with good analytical skills; and a cadre of 9000 conservation technicians with a diploma or certificate, working on specialised categories be it wall painting, metals or textiles. Every state should have people at both these levels," he advises. "Unfortunately we don't have more than 200 in the top end category and not more than 500 in the second."

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'New definition for museums will give them boldness to argue' | Mumbai News - Times of India

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A conference on democracy at the National Museum of Saudi Arabia; a display on homosexuality at the National Museum of Iran; or an exhibition on the disputed Ramjanmabhoomi-Babri Masjid at Delhi's National Museum? Unthinkable? But changes are afoot and the moral challenges that museums of cultural history often face when trying to host sensitive, taboo laden topics, might soon be over.

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di Roberta Capozucca

6' di lettura

Quando si pensa ai musei, si immaginano luoghi custodi delle testimonianze del passato o delle opere dell'ingegno del presente. Nonostante la cultura materiale sia ancora la componente chiave attorno cui ruotano le narrazioni museali, negli ultimi decenni una maggiore enfasi è stata posta sul pubblico, aprendo il dibattito alla domanda: quale ruolo ha il Museo nella società moderna?

Proprio di questo si è discusso alla 25ª Conferenza generale del Consiglio internazionale dei musei () riunitasi a Kyoto dal 1-7 settembre, dove i rappresentanti di 119 paesi hanno dibattuto sul ruolo del Museo contemporaneo, cercando di approvarne un nuova definizione. Dopo circa 12 anni e in questa complessa congiuntura storica, l'Icom ha infatti suggerito ai suoi membri una revisione della definizione di Museo; l'ultima risale al 2007 e dichiara: "il Museo è un'istituzione permanente, senza scopo di lucro, al servizio della società, e del suo sviluppo, aperta al pubblico, che effettua ricerche sulle testimonianze materiali ed immateriali dell'uomo e del suo ambiente, le acquisisce, le conserva e le comunica e specificatamente le espone per scopi di studio, educazione e diletto".

Grazie al lavoro del Committee on Museum Definition, Prospects and Potentials , tra il 2017 e il 2019 sono state raccolte circa 269 definizione alternative proposte sia dai Comitati dell'Icom che dalle singole istituzioni museali, confluite poi nella proposta di Kyoto che enuncia: "Museums are democratising, inclusive and polyphonic spaces for critical dialogue about the pasts and the futures. Acknowledging and addressing the conflicts and challenges of the present, they hold artefacts and specimens in trust for society, safeguard diverse memories for future generations and guarantee equal rights and equal access to heritage for all people. Museums are not for profit. They are participatory and transparent, and work in active partnership with and for diverse communities to collect, preserve, research, interpret, exhibit, and enhance understandings of the world, aiming to contribute to human dignity and social justice, global equality and planetary wellbeing". Ma questa formula, che si distacca totalmente dalle definizioni precedenti , ha spaccato a metà l'opinione dei membri del Consiglio Generale, che hanno chiesto il rinvio dell'approvazione per poter continuare a lavorare sul tema insieme a tutti gli organi dell'Icom. Secondo alcuni, infatti, la proposta rappresenterebbe una degna dichiarazione di missione che finalmente riconosce ai musei un ruolo attivo nella società civile, mentre altri hanno espresso preoccupazione per il fatto che la definizione non tenga conto delle funzioni tradizionali di un museo, condannandone il tono politico. Per approfondire la questione abbiamo parlato con Tiziana Maffei, presidente di Icom Italia e direttore della Reggia di Caserta .

Qual è il senso di trovare una definizione di Museo condivisa a livello internazionale?
Dare una definizione significa circoscrive un'entità concettuale attraverso gli elementi che la qualificano, definire il museo consente quindi di caratterizzarlo rispetto ad altri istituti culturali, stabilendone i campi di azione sia sul piano sociale che professionale. A ciò si deve aggiungere il valore che la definizione assume nel momento in cui entra nelle legislazioni nazionali e conduce a conseguenze non sottovalutabili anche dal punto di vista operativo. Icom, che è la più grande rete internazionale di musei e professionisti museali, opera proprio attraverso la definizione di standard e pratiche riconosciute in tutti i paesi che ne fanno parte; i suoi documenti sono, infatti, espressione di un lungo lavoro di condivisione, aggiornamento e affinamento, funzionale a un applicazione diffusa in tutti i contesti culturali e normativi interessati.
La definizione attuale, che risale al 2007, riassume concetti ancora oggi fondamentali per un Museo come il suo essere istituto permanente al servizio della società, anche in rapporto ai poteri politici del momento; è evidente, però, che i grandi cambiamenti del XXI secolo richiedono una diversa considerazioni di tematiche che emergono con sempre maggiore potenza in ogni settore di attività come l' accessibilità, l' inclusività, la partecipazione, la tutela attiva e, a mio avviso, la responsabilità sociale.

Una delle questioni cruciali che riguarda il Museo contemporaneo è il tema della sostenibilità, cosa ne pensa?
Innanzitutto, bisogna ricordare che il concetto di sostenibilità non è riferito esclusivamente agli aspetti economici, ma piuttosto al rapporto costi e benefici. Credo sia ormai chiaro che il valore prodotto da un istituto museale non si misuri solo in termini di redditività, ma anche d'impatto sociale. Il museo, nella propria azione culturale, deve essere infatti capace di assicurare la propria legittimazione attraverso il perseguimento della finalità pubblica; parlare di sostenibilità economica in un museo vuol dire, quindi, utilizzare in modo efficiente le risorse di cui dispone, ancor più se pubbliche, misurando l'efficacia delle proprie azioni. Insomma, non è la parità dei conti che deve interessare, ma i risultati in termini di crescita cognitiva degli individui e della comunità. Detto questo, l'attuale mancanza di risorse ministeriali porta a fare riflessioni sulle criticità del settore, tra tutte l' allocamento delle risorse, che in primis devono tener conto delle problematiche gestionali, non solo in termini di risorse finanziare da assicurare nel tempo al museo, ma anche e, soprattutto, di risorse umane professionali, considerandole un investimento anche in termini di ricerca e innovazione.

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L'Icom non raggiunge un accordo sulla nuova definizione di Museo

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Com'è cambiato il Museo e cosa rappresenta oggi per la società: se lo chiede l'Icom, che sta cercando di comporre una nuova definizione nel rispetto delle funzioni tradizionali di questa istituzione, ma anche del ruolo politico che ha assunto nella società moderna. Intervista a Tiziana Maffei, presidente Icom Italia

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This month we've been thinking about "What is a museum?" (I'm not alone there. Paul Bowers' post and Mike Jones' posts are worth reading.)

I've been visiting museums my whole life. I've worked in them my whole adult life. Does that make me the best judge of museums?

On one hand, I have the knowledge base to help me frame the issues. I know the subtle nuances and big issues all too well. But, I'm also very close to the issue. It's my livelihood and my love, my avocation and my vocation. I suspect if you are reading this, you might be in a similar boat.

I'd posted on twitter a while ago about how one of my challenges with ICOM's definition is that I wasn't sure how visitor-centered it was. I might change that position slightly. I wonder how people-centered it was.

This a field about people.

People are the defining characteristics of museums. I get that they are places. But places are sites for people to congregate paid for by people and planned by people. I get they are collections. Collections are collected by people to be exhibited for people and saved for people of the future.

I've worked with and at plenty of museums that can sometimes feel empty. When the galleries are quiet, with my clipclop shoes the only sound, the museum feels dead. It is only enlivened by people, visitors and staff alike.

With that in mind, I turned the question of "who is a museum" to the people, here and on my social platforms, even my personal ones. I thank everyone for their awesome replies.

Many people, particularly family and friends from non-museum world, talked about museums at places to visit, like a cousin-in-law, Tina Cappel who said, "A museum is a place that captures existence for people to wander and wonder, to enjoy and to be educated." Tina isn't even a plant, despite being a local member. Her answer is what many a museum professional would want people to say. It's a place for people to explore. I'd hope more people in the world, particularly potential museum visitors to North East Ohio ;>) go with this definition.

A place to go see stuff was a common thread in general, both in museum-workers and non-museum workers. I spoke a bit last week about the action of observation, and how our work turns the collection (nouns) into visitor actions (verbs). The collections are often authentic and singular, surprising and thought-provoking. They can also be confounding and banal. Our collections are often our greatest strength, though we also often choose to showcase them in ways that bore even the interested. But, when done right, our collections are there to awe. As one old colleague, Lex Lancaster, related, "When I worked at the NGA for a summer, a heard a little kid walking out say, 'I've seen some things I can't unsee.' That about sums it up."

A college friend, Nora Rooney, added something important. Museums though can feel very museum like other educational spaces, despite the careful curation. She said, I think that Disney could be a museum to someone who goes there to learn, so what a museum is depends on the frame of reference I suppose." Shaelyn Amaio, a museum worker, agreed, as do I.

A place of community, conversation and connection

- Scott Stulen (@middlewest) September 21, 2019

To non-museum goers, the line between museum and not-museum is blurry. Museums are quality learning spaces, but so are libraries. Museums are experiences, but so is Disney. Museum house things, but so do libraries. Museums are adjacent and overlap so many other things. These adjacencies are essential in the ways we function and the ways our visitors understand us. But they also give us a bit of parallax as we try to create a discrete and singular definition. And, let me say, you all did a great job debating the definition. I could not possibly distill all the threads into a singular and discrete definition.

Many museum-workers talked about the community museums foster. Chris Totten summed up many of these threads well. He defined museums as "a lifeline between its community and the wider cultural landscape. It's a place where people can go to see ideas from the wide world and where the wide world can bring itself to local communities." Museums can be of the place and outside the place currently; this simultaneously sited in multiple emotional locations is often an important beacon to people seeking a community they can find no where else.

The position of community to museum for many people hinged on the collections. For many people museums are purveyors of and intercessors with history. The museum is in all the times, past, present, and future, simultaneously.

- Martin B. Djupdraet (@mdjupdraet)

To me, museums are room for debate, that they are institutions where the world and one's own life are put into perspective, and that they are filled with works and stories where values, such as equality, sustainability, democracy and justice. can find nourishment.

September 22, 2019

The museum is therefore an intersection of space, thought, and action. Scott Stullen succinctly stated museums are "A place of community, conversation and connection." But this effort to create community and connection between people and things doesn't happen by accident. As Adrienne Lalli Hills points out, a museum is: "....A sustained and intentional effort to facilitate interactions between people and ideas (including objects)" Many people offered time-machine like definitions like Nicole Balsdon, who said museums are "Time machine to take things and ideas from the past and today to today tomorrow and beyond!" But J Collins was quick to point to the fact that objects without people are just things. They defined museums as "object-based, contextual stories. Without context and stories, you're just a warehouse."

Some of the most interesting debates about the issue were about where we want to go in the field. Dr. Sushma Jansari pointed out it is also a where new thoughts and ideas grow, "they are places for experimentation & conversation. A place where knowledge grows in collaboration w/ a broad range of people both within & beyond the museum, from scientists to children & all in between."

Aron Ambrosiani many people's definition nicely, "I think the duality of museums is key to understanding/defining what they are. A museum is _both_ an experience venue _and_ a repository of knowledge. Stray too far away from either aspect and the special thing is lost." Museums aren't one thing, but they are not all things. In defining too broadly we lose, and being two strict we lose.

- Art + Museum Transparency (@AMTransparency) September 21, 2019

Museum Transparency brought up the fact that museums are work places. They most certainly are. Many people shared how this act of defining seems silly given the real work places challenges. Others talked about how museums are often defined in one way for "the average" people and another for donors. Still more reminded us that definitions mean little if there isn't any follow through on the mission to the people working in the organization.

Many important conversations also centered around what is the point in creating a definition. For some the definition is sort of navel gazing. Bob Beatty said, "I'll be honest when I say I think we are the only people who *really* care what can appropriately dub itself as "museum." It's the most inside of inside baseball." The challenge with these debates is that they take us away from big issues. Museums are colonial constructs, Wendy Ng points out, [and] debating the definition does not change this fact." Luis Marcelo Mendes pointed to the socially constructed nature of museums, "A museum is a fiction we choose to believe."

The flaws in museums came up a few times. Alli Burness mentioned how museums could be so much, can be, might even become that, if we allow ourselves: "I've always approached them as a creative medium to explore and reflect on our world and the human experience of it. And in so doing, build understanding, connection and belonging. Some hold and use a collection of objects to achieve that, others don't. Museums dont see themselves that way tho." Bronwyn Coulston also talked about the cracks and our ability to heal our field, "An imperfect idea, developed in inherently flawed times and cultures. Constantly evolving and occasionally managing to repair historic damage caused."

In the end, all of this discussion is fruitful to the museum workers to keep us intellectually stimulated but mean nothing if we don't put them into action for visitors. Many of us are making them central to life and communities. As Kajsa Hartig said, "Museums could be: A tool for humanity to (in participatory, educative + entertaining ways) make sense of life + society, to use for a better now and future, An experimental arena where public, private and civil society can meet in unique ways. A 24/7 resource always top of mind."

Though museums cannot be the ideal for today and tomorrow if we don't start and end with people. Our visitors, our staff, our posterity. Every single person who has or might be part of the collection and the organization. All these people are our raison d'etre. They use us how we imagine and in many ways we can't. As Cynthia Heider said, "A museum is whatever the people who use it want it to be."

Why does all this defining matter? Well, because our work matters. Museum matter. We aren't just museum workers. We aren't just buildings with collections. We are all the things listed above and more. We are the places people go to learn. We are the people who collect for the future. We are conveners of communities. We are the real in a world full of fake. We are the best of society and the worst-all there to remind people about both. We are humanity on display. We are nature in its most wonderous. We are what society needs today, tomorrow, and hopefully forever. As the Secretary of the Smithson Lonnie Bunch said, way better than me,

However we define them, I believe that museums are more important now, at this time of change, than ever. We have an obligation to use our expertise and our platforms for the greater good.

- Lonnie G. Bunch III (@SmithsonianSec) September 17, 2019

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This month we've been thinking about "What is a museum?" (I'm not alone there. Paul Bowers' post and Mike Jones' posts are worth reading.) I've been visiting museums my whole life. I've worked in them my whole adult life.

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"The reactions to the proposal to change the official International Council of Museums (Icom) definition of a museum have been revealing"...

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"The reactions to the proposal to change the official International Council of Museums (Icom) definition of a museum have been revealing"...

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The reactions to Icom's proposed museum definition show us what is really at stake

The reactions to the proposal to change the official International Council of Museums (Icom) definition of a museum have been revealing. I hadn't really been paying attention - until I saw that Icom UK and MA members in online polls voted resoundingly against it.

I checked the media. Several articles in the French arts press detected an attempted coup against the traditional idea of a museum. The Art Newspaper quotes the chair of the Icom Museology Committee, who dismissed it because it reflects "fashionable values".

Online polls, with self-selecting participants, have no representative value. A quick look at the Icom website showed nothing as interesting as a coup - the proposal results from a two-year transparent process commissioned by Icom's executive board, with an entire issue of Museum International devoted to the intellectual background.

So, what is going on? When the new definition comes to a vote at Icom's Extraordinary General Assembly on 7 September in Kyoto, is the issue really fashionable values versus tradition?

The current definition is a functional, minimal vision of what museums are. It says what museums are, and is somewhat tautological - museums carry out museumy functions and bring museumy benefits to society. The new definition is maximal and says what museums can do. It retains the technical core - stewardship, collections, preservation, exhibition - but adds an explicit set of values and ambitions.

While some may react to the language - even "human rights" has acquired negative connotations in our polarised politics - dismissing a commitment to human dignity and democracy as "fashionable" surely misrepresents museums' humane essence.

It seems to me that what is at stake is whether museums are part of society or, somehow, separate from it, occupying a neutral space. This detached status is what is meant by 'the traditional museum'.

While some museums were founded to provide places of refuge from the cares of the world, many espoused a level of ambition to engage with and improve society that even now seems extravagant.

Henry Cole's vision for the Victoria and Albert Museum was to place it at the centre of Victorian social reform, an institution of urgent relevance to many social issues - he boasted proudly of opening times and amenities that meant it attracted far more working class families than the National Gallery. This vision was dropped when he retired. Those who took over privileged serving the already-educated and developing their own interests over benefiting society.

The new definition is an attempt to tap into this other tradition and its sense of urgent relevance and ambition. If you were asked to list the major issues facing the world - climate crisis, migration, the future of democracy, clashing identities - and then how museums are responding, you might identify temporary exhibitions, events and education programmes. These are however transient forms of relevance, supplementing the traditional core, which is unchanging in its focus on internal concerns and institutional identity.

While defending what has been achieved may be a natural response in what WH Auden called our age of anxiety - and museums in particular should be cautious about change - the new definition demands a braver, more generous response. It implies that, in a world of increasing inequality, neutrality is impossible. Because all the benefits of society accrue more readily to those who are already doing well, if you are not working to reduce injustice, you are actively supporting its increase.

This may mean being more overtly political - but not necessarily. Museums offering a spiritual refuge don't have to become activists but they have to address issues of equality of access to the refuge, and take care not to create a haven for complacent indifference.

And museums that address history or science have to be alert to the fact that "neutral" narratives are easily co-opted to protecting exclusivist ideologies.

The new definition offers a vision of museums that do more than bolt on meaningful engagement with reality, that have the courage to rethink how they work and the generosity of spirit to put their contribution to society before the comfort of those staff and audiences who have already benefited most from the status quo.

The new text calls for a more profound response to our times, drawing on all museum assets - collections, expertise, public spaces, audiences - to meet the cultural needs of a globalised world.

Mark O'Neill is an associate professor at the College of Arts, Glasgow University. He previously worked as director of policy and research for Glasgow Life and as head of Glasgow Museums

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The reactions to Icom's proposed museum definition show us what is really at stake The reactions to the proposal to change the official International Council of Museums (Icom) definition of a museum have been revealing. I hadn't really been paying attention - until I saw that Icom UK and MA members in online polls voted resoundingly against it.

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Fernando Almarza Risquez

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What are museums really for? | Apollo Magazine

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The perceived role of museums in society has grown enormously in recent years - but how far does that reflect what they actually are and what they can do?

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è necessario ridefinire il museo e la sua missione?

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è necessario ridefinire il museo e la sua missione?

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Un vif débat anime depuis plusieurs mois le milieu international des musées. L'ICOM, le conseil international des musées, s'est donné pour mission de rénover la définition des musées existant depuis 2007.

Celle-ci, communiquée à tous les membres nationaux de ce conseil en juillet dernier, devait être votée lors du congrès international de Tokyo le week-end dernier. À l'initiative de la section française de l'ICOM, la nouvelle définition a été repoussée à plus tard.

Cette querelle porte en elle des visions du monde et du musée très éloignées les unes des autres : nous allons tenter ce soir avec nos quatre invités de préciser les termes de ce débat et les conséquences qu'il peut avoir dans les années à venir sur les institutions muséales du monde entier.
Pour aller plus loin:
" La révision de la définition du musée : un défi" par l'ICOM, le 24/11/2017

" Pour les modernes, il faut faire tomber le dogme de l'artiste occidental, blanc, masculin, dominant ", Le Monde, le 06/09/2019

"(Re)définir les musées ?", par Laure Pressac, le 26/08/2019

De l'importance de la définition du musée, entretien avec Jette Sandhal
Interviews et articles de nos invités:
" Retour sur la mission Musées du XXIe siècle", entretien de Samuel Cordier, directeur de l'Ocim avec Jacqueline Eidelman, La Lettre de l'Ocim, mai-juin 2017

Rapport de Jacqueline Eidelman "Musées du XXIè siècle", remis à Audrey Azoulay, Ministre de la Culture et de la Communication, le 02/03/2017

"Inclusif et polyphonique : la nouvelle définition du musée proposée par l'ICOM" par Didier Rykner, sur son site La Tribune de l'Art, le 02/08/2019

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Est-il nécessaire de redéfinir les missions du musée ?

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"Inclusif", "polyphonique", contribuant à la "justice sociale"... La proposition d'une nouvelle définition du musée n'a pas été adoptée début septembre. Surtout, elle a mis au jour une grande division entre les professionnels culturels, partagés sur le rôle et l'avenir des musées au X[...]

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In the Room Where It (sorta) Happened: ICOM's Museum Definition...

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In the Room Where It (sorta) Happened: ICOM's Museum Definition...

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Last week, along with 4,000 or so other museum folks, I was in Kyoto, Japan for the triennial International Council of Museums conference. Both before and after the conference, there has been a great deal of discussion--among museum colleagues and in the public sphere--about a proposed new definition of museums. I tweeted --and retweeted others--pretty extensively during the loooong general assembly about the definition. Now that I've been back a week and had some time to reflect, I wanted to share some thoughts about process and product.

What is ICOM anyway?
To begin, more than a few Americans wondered about why anyone would care about what ICOM did in the first place--and who were those people voting? The US is fortunate to have a strong collection of professional organizations--AAM, AAMD, AASLH and state and regional associations. But in many places in the world, the ICOM national committee might be the sole functioning professional organization. In the same way that many US museums look to AAM for standards and guidance, so do museums around the world look to ICOM.

There are 119 National Committees and 30 International Committees, along with 6 Regional Alliances and a number of affiliated organizations. There is an Executive Committee and a Secretariat, which is based in Paris. Voting is done, not by members, but by these committees, alliances, and affiliates. National committees have the most votes, but, in American terms, it's like the Senate, not the House, with each country having the same number of votes. As I was in Kyoto representing the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience, an affiliate, I was able to cast two votes.

If you're a working professional or a student--you can become an ICOM member (link for US membership)-and participate in any international committee. It's a great way to connect with colleagues around the world and, as it happens, an ICOM membership gets you into almost any museum in the world for free. So the "them" is in fact us, if you choose to participate. The conference itself is cheaper than many US conferences. From my perspective, even before I began working for the Coalition, I found it extremely valuable to learn from colleagues around the world--particularly as the US museum system is quite distinct from most other places. ICOM plenary sessions took on important issues: climate change and sustainability and decolonization. It's important that these discussions take place with colleagues from around the world able to participate. Dozens of international committee sessions also explored a wide range of issues.

The Definition
But now, to the proposed new definition and the debate around it. For a comprehensive look at coverage of the definition process, thanks to Anna Marras and Ana Carvalho for gathering all the press coverage and discussion into one place. It keeps growing, so check it out!

During the week, a plenary session was held when those on the definition-writing committee (Museum Definition, Prospects and Potentials Committee) spoke in favor of adopting the definition and space was also given to those who were opposed. The new definition proposed was:

Museums are democratising, inclusive and polyphonic spaces for critical dialogue about the pasts and the futures. Acknowledging and addressing the conflicts and challenges of the present, they hold artefacts and specimens in trust for society, safeguard diverse memories for future generations and guarantee equal rights and equal access to heritage for all people.

Museums are not for profit. They are participatory and transparent, and work in active partnership with and for diverse communities to collect, preserve, research, interpret, exhibit, and enhance understandings of the world, aiming to contribute to human dignity and social justice, global equality and planetary wellbeing.

And the current definition, adopted in 2007:

A museum is a non-profit, permanent institution in the service of society and its development, open to the public, which acquires, conserves, researches, communicates and exhibits the tangible and intangible heritage of humanity and its environment for the purposes of education, study and enjoyment.

Full disclosure: as a representative of the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience, an affiliated organization, I was prepared to vote for the definition. I considered it too long and not straightforward enough, but I believe in the ideas it puts forward. However, through a series of maneuvers, not clear to most of us in the room, the vote on the definition was postponed, with 70% voting for postponement.

From my perspective, objections to the new definition vote fell into four categories:

1. Process
Although this was described as the most open process ever at ICOM, many national and international committees felt there was not adequate time to consult with members before the vote. It's important to note, that as far as I know, voting delegates were not bound by the consultations with their members, if they happened. ICOFOM, the international committee focused on museology, took initiative and held a series of roundtables about the museum definition. The summaries are here, but notably, the roundtables were unevenly distributed around the globe (heavily weighted towards Europe) and the approaches were varied.

I'm not sure what the process should be going forward, but I do know that if it is to be a global definition, then the conversation needs to be global. The vast majority of those speaking in the General Assembly were white Europeans or Americans. A more inclusive format needs to be developed and more voices in the conversation.

2. Aspiration or definition? (plus wording)
Do we need a definition? Is this too wordy? Who even uses the word polyphonic? Are museums really this? Is this an aspiration rather than a definition? Some were concerned that the word education was not included, for instance, although to me, it is embedded in the entire definition. I think a definition can be helpful, but I also think that all of you who are doing the work towards real change in our field will keep doing that work no matter what. A definition may or may not matter to you, as you work with communities. But imagine that it might matter to those who are just starting this work, in places where the work of social change is not yet accepted as an effort of museums (that might be specific museums or it might be entire nations).

3. Impact
There were concerns that the ICOM definition is embedded in law in some nations and that a changing definition (for instance, the removal of the word 'permanent') would have critical repercussions. Moving forward, there needs to be clear and substantive analysis of this, and at the same time, ICOM should be prepared to provide advocacy tools and training for countries where this might be an issue.

4. Fear
Although these objections were sometimes couched in the language of the items above, it seemed pretty clear that some of the objections came from those who were afraid of change, afraid of surrendering their institutional power, afraid that museums were becoming too ideological. Of course, museums have always been ideological. In Time magazine, Jette Sandahl, chair of the committee, commented, "We need to work with relevance into the context we live in, and this certainly makes that clearer. There is no apolitical space or point of view. Museums are always political." I remain hopeful that fear will not win the day.

Is the Controversy Bad for Museums?
I think the press coverage is great. I don't think it makes us look silly or divided. I think it makes us look like a field that is thinking deeply about the work we do. It's hard work and I'm happy to see us doing it. I'm impatient with those who fear this could divide the field permanently. In my work at Sites of Conscience, I see people coming together in reconciliation over far more difficult, life-changing issues than a museum definition. Surely we can do the same.

What's Next?
I assume the ICOM leadership and staff have barely had a moment to take a breath since the end of the conference. So we don't know what's next, but it's my hope that whatever next is truly a global conversation, and that the traditional European powers of ICOM step back and provide some additional space for other voices. Together, we can move museums into the 21st century--and not a moment too soon.

Thanks LaTanya Autry and Mike Murawski, creators of #museumsarenotneutral for providing inspiration--and a T-shirt to wear the day of the definition vote (or non-vote).

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In the Room Where It (sorta) Happened: ICOM's Museum Definition

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Last week, along with 4,000 or so other museum folks, I was in Kyoto, Japan for the triennial International Council of Museums conference. Both before and after the conference, there has been a great deal of discussion--among museum colleagues and in the public sphere--about a proposed new definition of museums. I tweeted --and retweeted others--pretty extensively during the loooong general assembly about the definition.

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Why is a Museum Definition so Important?

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Why is a Museum Definition so Important?

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Sunday, September 15, 2019In the Room Where It (sorta) Happened: ICOM's Museum Definition

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Sunday, September 15, 2019In the Room Where It (sorta) Happened: ICOM's Museum Definition

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Last week, along with 4,000 or so other museum folks, I was in Kyoto, Japan for the triennial International Council of Museums conference. Both before and after the conference, there has been a great deal of discussion--among museum colleagues and in the public sphere--about a proposed new definition of museums. I tweeted --and retweeted others--pretty extensively during the loooong general assembly about the definition. Now that I've been back a week and had some time to reflect, I wanted to share some thoughts about process and product.

What is ICOM anyway?
To begin, more than a few Americans wondered about why anyone would care about what ICOM did in the first place--and who were those people voting? The US is fortunate to have a strong collection of professional organizations--AAM, AAMD, AASLH and state and regional associations. But in many places in the world, the ICOM national committee might be the sole functioning professional organization. In the same way that many US museums look to AAM for standards and guidance, so do museums around the world look to ICOM.

There are 119 National Committees and 30 International Committees, along with 6 Regional Alliances and a number of affiliated organizations. There is an Executive Committee and a Secretariat, which is based in Paris. Voting is done, not by members, but by these committees, alliances, and affiliates. National committees have the most votes, but, in American terms, it's like the Senate, not the House, with each country having the same number of votes. As I was in Kyoto representing the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience, an affiliate, I was able to cast two votes.

If you're a working professional or a student--you can become an ICOM member (link for US membership)-and participate in any international committee. It's a great way to connect with colleagues around the world and, as it happens, an ICOM membership gets you into almost any museum in the world for free. So the "them" is in fact us, if you choose to participate. The conference itself is cheaper than many US conferences. From my perspective, even before I began working for the Coalition, I found it extremely valuable to learn from colleagues around the world--particularly as the US museum system is quite distinct from most other places. ICOM plenary sessions took on important issues: climate change and sustainability and decolonization. It's important that these discussions take place with colleagues from around the world able to participate. Dozens of international committee sessions also explored a wide range of issues.

The Definition
But now, to the proposed new definition and the debate around it. For a comprehensive look at coverage of the definition process, thanks to Anna Marras and Ana Carvalho for gathering all the press coverage and discussion into one place. It keeps growing, so check it out!

During the week, a plenary session was held when those on the definition-writing committee (Museum Definition, Prospects and Potentials Committee) spoke in favor of adopting the definition and space was also given to those who were opposed. The new definition proposed was:

Museums are democratising, inclusive and polyphonic spaces for critical dialogue about the pasts and the futures. Acknowledging and addressing the conflicts and challenges of the present, they hold artefacts and specimens in trust for society, safeguard diverse memories for future generations and guarantee equal rights and equal access to heritage for all people.

Museums are not for profit. They are participatory and transparent, and work in active partnership with and for diverse communities to collect, preserve, research, interpret, exhibit, and enhance understandings of the world, aiming to contribute to human dignity and social justice, global equality and planetary wellbeing.

And the current definition, adopted in 2007:

A museum is a non-profit, permanent institution in the service of society and its development, open to the public, which acquires, conserves, researches, communicates and exhibits the tangible and intangible heritage of humanity and its environment for the purposes of education, study and enjoyment.

Full disclosure: as a representative of the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience, an affiliated organization, I was prepared to vote for the definition. I considered it too long and not straightforward enough, but I believe in the ideas it puts forward. However, through a series of maneuvers, not clear to most of us in the room, the vote on the definition was postponed, with 70% voting for postponement.

From my perspective, objections to the new definition vote fell into four categories:

1. Process
Although this was described as the most open process ever at ICOM, many national and international committees felt there was not adequate time to consult with members before the vote. It's important to note, that as far as I know, voting delegates were not bound by the consultations with their members, if they happened. ICOFOM, the international committee focused on museology, took initiative and held a series of roundtables about the museum definition. The summaries are here, but notably, the roundtables were unevenly distributed around the globe (heavily weighted towards Europe) and the approaches were varied.

I'm not sure what the process should be going forward, but I do know that if it is to be a global definition, then the conversation needs to be global. The vast majority of those speaking in the General Assembly were white Europeans or Americans. A more inclusive format needs to be developed and more voices in the conversation.

2. Aspiration or definition? (plus wording)
Do we need a definition? Is this too wordy? Who even uses the word polyphonic? Are museums really this? Is this an aspiration rather than a definition? Some were concerned that the word education was not included, for instance, although to me, it is embedded in the entire definition. I think a definition can be helpful, but I also think that all of you who are doing the work towards real change in our field will keep doing that work no matter what. A definition may or may not matter to you, as you work with communities. But imagine that it might matter to those who are just starting this work, in places where the work of social change is not yet accepted as an effort of museums (that might be specific museums or it might be entire nations).

3. Impact
There were concerns that the ICOM definition is embedded in law in some nations and that a changing definition (for instance, the removal of the word 'permanent') would have critical repercussions. Moving forward, there needs to be clear and substantive analysis of this, and at the same time, ICOM should be prepared to provide advocacy tools and training for countries where this might be an issue.

4. Fear
Although these objections were sometimes couched in the language of the items above, it seemed pretty clear that some of the objections came from those who were afraid of change, afraid of surrendering their institutional power, afraid that museums were becoming too ideological. Of course, museums have always been ideological. In Time magazine, Jette Sandahl, chair of the committee, commented, "We need to work with relevance into the context we live in, and this certainly makes that clearer. There is no apolitical space or point of view. Museums are always political." I remain hopeful that fear will not win the day.

Is the Controversy Bad for Museums?
I think the press coverage is great. I don't think it makes us look silly or divided. I think it makes us look like a field that is thinking deeply about the work we do. It's hard work and I'm happy to see us doing it. I'm impatient with those who fear this could divide the field permanently. In my work at Sites of Conscience, I see people coming together in reconciliation over far more difficult, life-changing issues than a museum definition. Surely we can do the same.

What's Next?
I assume the ICOM leadership and staff have barely had a moment to take a breath since the end of the conference. So we don't know what's next, but it's my hope that whatever next is truly a global conversation, and that the traditional European powers of ICOM step back and provide some additional space for other voices. Together, we can move museums into the 21st century--and not a moment too soon.

Thanks LaTanya Autry and Mike Murawski, creators of #museumsarenotneutral for providing inspiration--and a T-shirt to wear the day of the definition vote (or non-vote).

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In the Room Where It (sorta) Happened: ICOM's Museum Definition

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Last week, along with 4,000 or so other museum folks, I was in Kyoto, Japan for the triennial International Council of Museums conference. Both before and after the conference, there has been a great deal of discussion--among museum colleagues and in the public sphere--about a proposed new definition of museums. I tweeted --and retweeted others--pretty extensively during the loooong general assembly about the definition.

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Leardership Matters by Joan Baldwin(USA)

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Leardership Matters by Joan Baldwin(USA)

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Why is a museum definition so important?

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Position Paper on the proposal for a new Museum Definition

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Position Paper on the proposal for a new Museum Definition

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International Movement for a new Museology MINOM-ICOM

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How can our cultural institutions keep up with a rapidly changing world? Embrace diversity

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How can our cultural institutions keep up with a rapidly changing world? Embrace diversity

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Last November, record numbers of women, people of colour and members of the LGBTQ community won elections in local and statewide races throughout the United States. Voters elected the first Muslim and Native American women to Congress. The 2018 midterm results emphatically endorsed greater diversity and inclusion. More than simply reflecting changing demographics, it also validated the nation's aspirational motto, e pluribus unum: out of many, one. It was an important reminder that, like the US Congress, institutions of all kinds need to represent those they serve, a necessity clearly important for cultural institutions. We cannot be trusted stewards of knowledge and scholarship if we allow any voices among our community to go unheard.

However, the 2017 American Alliance of Museums (AAM) museum board leadership report revealed the disappointing truth that only 9% of museumgoers are minorities. The workforce situation is only slightly better, with minorities accounting for around 20% of museum staff. At the opening of the Whitney Museum in New York City in 2015, former first lady Michelle Obama talked about the impact of this reality. She said, "There are so many kids in this country who look at places like museums and concert halls and other cultural centres and they think to themselves, well, that's not a place for me, for someone who looks like me, for someone who comes from my neighbourhood."

If we are to build more diverse institutions, we will have to begin by openly discussing the state of our profession and honestly admitting when we have not adequately considered the diversity of our audiences. We must then work to change our own culture by fostering a diverse workplace, by curating exhibitions that tell the often forgotten stories of history's hidden figures, and by encouraging an even broader variety of perspectives from our curators, researchers, scholars and educators.

Image: American Alliance of Museums

One of the impediments to diversifying museums and other cultural institutions has been a Western mindset that tends to pervade museum curation and scholarship.

In 2017, the Kunsthalle Bremen museum in Germany addressed its collections' tacit endorsement of a colonial worldview with the exhibition "The Blind Spot". The exhibition's curator, Julia Binter, said: "It isn't until we get to know our own history with all of its dark sides that we can shape the present and the future in a positive way."

The Smithsonian has had to re-examine and refine our practices to be more culturally sensitive and inclusive. As a 172-year-old museum, education and research complex, many of our collections were acquired decades before museum best practices were codified, and before museum professionals thought about the negative impact their work could have on different cultures. Today, led by the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) and the National Museum of Natural History, we have repatriated more objects of cultural patrimony, human remains, funerary objects and sacred items than any other US museum complex with Native American collections.

Cultural institutions are also obligated to apply that rigour to the examination of history, lest we lose the trust of our visitors. The Smithsonian is fortunate to have the support of Congress, allowing us to open entire museums that focus on traditionally underrepresented groups, from NMAI to our newest museum, the National Museum of African American History and Culture. By presenting the unvarnished truth of a painful past, this breathtaking museum has begun to inspire a larger discussion about contemporary social inequities, the role of societal diversity, and the path forward if we hope to heal our national racial divisions.

Museums should also periodically revisit their collections and present them in a way that communicates more effectively to a diverse audience. When Atlanta's High Museum of Art reimagined and reinstalled its galleries, chief curator Kevin Tucker said: "A museum collection is dynamic - always growing and evolving - so this opportunity has allowed us to thoughtfully revisit our existing presentations and reinstall the artworks in ways that resonate anew with our audiences. From design to interpretation, these new presentations embrace equity, diversity and approachability throughout."

We also delve into Smithsonian collections to present them in ways that connect with diverse audiences, from our forthcoming Latino Gallery in the National Museum of American History that will expand our ability to tell the full story of the contributions of the Latino community, to the recently launched Smithsonian American Women's History Initiative, an Institution-wide project to amplify women's voices, reach diverse audiences and empower future generations with our exhibitions and programmes.

Another way cultural institutions must improve their inclusiveness is by diversifying their workforces. Ford Foundation president Darren Walker said: "Museums can't be excellent if their staffs are not diverse." In an effort to broaden the talent available in the museum pipeline, the Ford Foundation and the Walton Family Foundation jointly committed $6 million over three years to 20 programmes that target art museum diversity in curators and management.

As president of two universities and now as Smithsonian Secretary, I have seen the value in diversity and inclusion firsthand in many settings. That's why our Accessibility programme works to bring all people into the workforce, including an often-underestimated group: people with disabilities. To serve everyone more effectively, the Smithsonian has empowered people with mobility constraints to experience an art installation with virtual reality, participated in an internship programme for young adults with developmental disabilities, and developed a programme that allows children with cognitive- and sensory-processing disabilities to visit our museums before they open to the public.

We also wanted to spur that conversation at the Annual Meeting in Davos with Access+Ability, a collaboration between Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum and the World Economic Forum, adapted from a Cooper Hewitt exhibition. It highlights products, projects and services developed by and for people with disabilities. As cultural institutions strive to improve our outreach and impact, we should all seek out ways to make people with disabilities central to the conversation.

For all the reasons to make cultural institutions more diverse, an underappreciated one is that having a diverse workforce yields better results. That is the conclusion professor Scott Page identifies in his book The Diversity Bonus: How Great Teams Pay Off. When we think of diversity, we typically think of "identity diversity" - who we are. He addresses the value of " cognitive diversity " - how we think - which pays off with fresh insights that spur innovation and creativity. Research has proven that among teams working on complex problems, the cognitive diversity of the team members is more important than their overall ability, resulting in a literal bonus in productivity for a more diverse team. Both types of diversity are correlated - so when we increase one type, we increase both.

Institutions, nations and communities all share this truth: diversity is our strength. Embracing this truth is not only the right thing to do, but also ultimately beneficial. However, cultural institutions stand apart from most other institutions in their ability to educate and inspire with the richness of diversity.

Nothing captures the inspirational power of cultural representation more than the viral photos of Parker Curry, the little girl who stood transfixed at Mrs Obama's portrait in the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery early last year. She could see herself in that painting, and although she was likely too young to fully understand why it captivated her, she could identify with the nation's first African American first lady.

One of the most gratifying things I get to see at the Smithsonian is a child's face lighting up with inspiration when an object in our collections ignites her interest. As tellers of history and protectors of culture, it is our responsibility to give flight to the dreams of all generations - no matter their ethnicities, religions, backgrounds or abilities - by letting everyone see themselves in our work, our personnel and our values. When we do, our visitors will only be limited by their imaginations.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and not the World Economic Forum.

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How can our cultural institutions keep up with a rapidly changing world? Embrace diversity

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Only 9% of visitors to American museums in 2017 were ethnic minorities - and their representation among museum workforces is not much better. Here's how our cultural institutions can start to address this, and why it will improve them for everyone.

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Museums might seem like an unlikely contender to "save democracy," having long been concentrations of affluent, white, elite culture. But over the last few years, European museums have set in motion a major change. They are quite bravely putting themselves forward as candidates for providing that "space" that democracy needs to function. Europe's museums are hoping that by embedding their work deeper in society and letting other voices speak, they can empower people to understand perspectives that might be different from their own, to challenge established norms and to propose new values instead.

For a long time museums have proclaimed to be neutral, objective holders of information about the past, but as George Orwell wrote in 1984, "He who controls the past, controls the future."

Museums hold our history, and are therefore in a powerful position. They are the narrators of the stories our civilization is built on and still builds on. They reflect the values we hold. They are repositories of our collective memory. As such, they ultimately decide whose history gets told. Which bits are included, which bits are left out, and whose voices will speak.

Many who visit the Louvre or the British Museum forget that they are presented not just with work of art, but also with a whole range of values and assumptions made by the people who selected those objects. Beyond the immensely problematic history of colonialism that is generally left out on the little captions next to the objects, museum displays also demonstrate implicit choices about what we think is "normal" and what we decided was worth keeping. One might wonder, for example, why we have such little artwork by women in museums. Or artwork that depicts LGBTQ+ experiences. Or even artwork by people who did not go to art school. If the stories that are told in most museums seem incomplete and elitist, that is no surprise: the voices that have recorded European history have been largely white, male and bourgeois.

Over the last fifty years, artists and academics have made attempts at breaking down the image of the museum as the elitist temple of intellectual life by challenging the boundaries of art institutions. But it is only recently that museums have started to push a new wave of change from within.

Calls for museums to acknowledge and rectify their colonial histories and to fill the gaping holes in their collections by including stories from underrepresented communities have pushed them to recognize that it is impossible to be neutral. Increasingly, museums are becoming aware of the voices they represent and are inviting the presence of new voices. As a result, they are building a new, more democratic picture of the history that has shaped our continent.
A new context for problematic histories: Humboldt Forum, Berlin
It is not often that a new major museum is founded, and so there is much anticipation around the soon-to-be-opened Humboldt Forum in Berlin. In a currently austere funding environment its scale is impressive, but the museum has broader theoretical designs as well when it comes to telling the stories of its exclusively non-European ethnographic collections, and interrogating its own role in the history of their acquisition.

As a consequence, the Humboldt Forum is working with the National Museum in Tanzania and artists from Dar es Salaam to tell the story of the German ex-colony from multiple perspectives. Moreover, housed in the former Berlin Palace, the museum actually calls itself "a palace for all" making a great gesture of openness towards including all cultures. How much of this is marketing and how much it will actually live up to its ambitious motto remains to be seen of course, when it opens later this year.
Giving the floor to other people: Tate Modern, London
The Tate brand is known across the globe as a bulwark of institutional power, persistently making its way up the top five most visited museums in Europe. Its exhibitions and other programs are highly curated, but in 2016 it launched a new project to challenge its own power and let other people be in charge.

Tate Exchange is an entire floor in the Tate Modern building that is completely handed over to about sixty "associates" who create a show, event or art installation around a topic that they would like to explore or talk about with the museum and its visitors. These associates can be members of community groups, activists, or staff from festivals, universities, or hospitals (to name but a few), and they collaborate with the museum to make their individual projects happen.

The aim of Tate Exchange is to spark debate, propose new perspectives and reflect on the world through art, but what is really does is to show that a museum can be much more than just a gallery. It can serve as a center that brings together groups and individuals from all across society, working on very different things, to exchange their stories and learn from each other.

Tate's commitment to letting people from beyond the museum contribute content is a real shift towards democratizing culture and has created a model for a new type of space in which public discussion can take place in a supportive setting.
Art as a tool for change: SALT, Istanbul / Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven / mima Middlesbrough
Cuban artist Tania Bruguera once coined the term Arte Útil, or "useful art," by which she meant a type of art project that responds to current social issues and that has practical, beneficial outcomes for the people involved in it. Her work illustrates this idea: she founded the I mmigrant Movement International, a movement standing up for immigrant rights, which the Queens Museum in New York then hosted as an artwork by offering it a community space for its members.

The idea of useful art, and of art being able to create social change, inspired the Van Abbemuseum in the Netherlands and SALT in Istanbul, which decided to dedicate some of their gallery space to hosting exhibitions, archives and workshops around the concept of Arte Útil. The Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art (mima) went even further and started describing their visitors as "users." The goal of Arte Útil is that the museum becomes a useful space that serves the needs of the community, rather than deciding on its own, the terms of how audiences engage with it.

By promoting the idea of useful art, these museums hope to encourage people to use art as a tool for questioning society and shaping it for the better and to challenge the idea of what a museum should be. The open approach they take, shows the potential for museums to have a more civic role, as well as to play quite an important part in forming public opinion.
Museums as civic centers: Toplocentrala, Sofia / CulturePolis, Corfu / JADRO, Skopje
Alternative histories, diverse voices and social change often start as grassroot movements in small, independent forums-not big, national institutions. Toplocentrala in Bulgaria is a great example of a contemporary arts center that is being set up at the initiative of local artists and organizations. Scheduled to open later this year, even the center's architectural design was approached democratically through an open competition. By involving the surrounding community from the beginning, Toplocentrala indicated its focus on maintaining a strong connection with its future users, and in its mission to stay relevant and democratically grounded.

Because many small art centers are independent of public funding, they have the freedom to be relatively radical in their approach. For instance, CulturePolis in Greece is a private organization that connects artists, arts organizations and civil society with the aim of setting up projects that use culture as a tool for improving the local area and strengthening ties between European citizens. Because of its independence, it can focus on the needs of those citizens and take a tailored approach.

Similarly, , in Skopje, is an association that brings together independent cultural organizations and civic groups across Macedonia to make the cultural offer across the nation more socially and politically relevant. It is working to set up the first hybrid socio-cultural institution, the Socio-Cultural Space Center, where arts and culture will support social change. It might turn out to be a useful blueprint for the socially engaged museum of the future.
The Museum as Parliament: the Van Abbemuseum in the Netherlands
So, it does seem that museums are changing. Where historically they were built on the idea that they should teach the people which stories about their countries and heritage are worth remembering and celebrating. Our current political climate demands that they play a very different role. In moving from a role as "educators" to one as "facilitators" or even "catalysts," museums are offering people a platform for exchanging new perspectives and ideas and for forming their own opinions. Moreover, they are making space for different voices to be represented, and giving away some of their curatorial authority to let audiences decide what should be at the top of the cultural, social and political agenda.

The Van Abbemuseum in the Netherlands is taking its democratic role quite literally with their current exhibition, "Museum as Parliament." The exhibit is inspired by the people's parliament of Rojava-an autonomous Kurdish territory in northern Syria-and invites people to come together to imagine new models of democracy. While this is a temporary art project, it is a clear symbol of how museums and other cultural institutions have started to offer their spaces to those who want to move and shake our political systems and redefine our social structures.

While museums are moving towards a whole new realm of political engagement, asking critical questions to an extent that they have never done before, they are also still struggling with their historic image of elitism and static passivity. Many activists, however dissatisfied with the conversations in the media and on other public platforms, would not think to turn to museums for help. But with new, socially engaged museum projects popping up exponentially all over Europe, perhaps these "unlikely" places will show that they are waiting to be used by those who want to change Europe, or the world.

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Can Museums Save European Democracy? - Are We Europe Magazine

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Museums might seem like an unlikely contender to "save democracy," having long been concentrations of affluent, white, elite culture. But over the last few years, European museums have set in motion a major change. They are quite bravely putting themselves forward as candidates for providing that "space" that democracy needs to function.

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ICOM announced the alternative museum definition that will be subject to a vote

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ICOM announced the alternative museum definition that will be subject to a vote

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Dear DEMHIST members,

Last year, ICOM launched a process to revise the current museum definition, on the understanding that it did not adequately reflect and express the complexities of the 21 st century and the current responsibilities and commitments of museums, nor their challenges and visions for the future.

After active listening and collecting ideas the Standing Committee on Museum Definition, Prospects and Potentials conceived a new museum definition. The ICOM Executive Board, at its 139 th board meeting in Paris on 21 st - 22 nd July 2019, agreed on the new alternative museum definition that will be subject to a vote during the ICOM Extraordinary General Assembly in Kyoto on the 7 th September.

The proposed definition is as follows:
Museums are democratising, inclusive and polyphonic spaces for critical dialogue about the pasts and the futures. Acknowledging and addressing the conflicts and challenges of the present, they hold artefacts and specimens in trust for society, safeguard diverse memories for future generations and guarantee equal rights and equal access to heritage for all people. Museums are not for profit. They are participatory and transparent, and work in active partnership with and for diverse communities to collect, preserve, research, interpret, exhibit, and enhance understandings of the world, aiming to contribute to human dignity and social justice, global equality and planetary wellbeing.
If agreed during the Extraordinary General Assembly in Kyoto, this definition will be integrated in the ICOM Statutes.

DEMHIST vehemently disapproves the proposed new museum definition and associated itself to other national and international committees by signing a letter that was sent to the President of ICOM, Suay Aksoy, to the Chairperson of the Advisory Council, Regine Shultz and to the General Director of ICOM, Peter Keller on the 12 th August inviting ICOM to postpone the ICOM Extraordinary General Assembly at least for one year. Suay Aksoy kindly forwarded that letter to the ICOM Executive Board. As time passes it is predictable that more committees will associate themselves to this invitation as well, looking for further discussion and to extend the debate on this matter.

I remind you that the current ICOM museum definition, adopted in 2007, indicates that "A museum is a non-profit, permanent institution in the service of society and its development, open to the public, which acquires, conserves, researches, communicates and exhibits the tangible and intangible heritage of humanity and its environment for the purposes of education, study and enjoyment" which DEMHIST states it better serves the museum professionals' community.

Best regards.
Elsa Rodrigues
(Chair of DEMHIST)
To read the invitation, please, click here

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ICOM announced the alternative museum definition that will be subject to a vote - DEMHIST

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Dear DEMHIST members, Last year, ICOM launched a process to revise the current museum definition, on the understanding that it did not adequately reflect and express the complexities of the 21 st century and the current responsibilities and commitments of museums, nor their challenges and visions for the future.

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Trying to redefine museums: a disease of our times 

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Trying to redefine museums: a disease of our times 

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Trying to redefine museums_ a disease of our times

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La nuova definizione di museo proposta da ICOM non convince gran parte dei comitati. Il fronte dei No si mobilita contro la nuova versione che sarà valutata e votata durante l'assemblea generale di ICOM, che si terrà a Kyoto il 7 settembre. La posizione è chiara: la nuova definizione è inadeguata a definire il museo. La richiesta è altrettanto precisa: rimandare l'approvazione di un anno in modo da avere più tempo per sviluppare un confronto internazionale. "E' una questione di sostanza ma anche di metodo - afferma ad AgCult Tiziana Maffei, presidente di ICOM Italia -. La definizione così come è stata fatta sembra un manifesto, un grande slogan, per quanto bello e intrigante inadatto alruolo che ha la definizione nell'associazione internazionale. E' estremamente rischioso avere una visione così vaga di quello che è il museo. E' evidente che è ancora prematuro quanto proposto e che si ha necessità di una maggiore elaborazione".

IL RUOLO DEI PROFESSIONISTI MUSEALI

Maffei ricorda il percorso che ha portato alla definizione precedente e quei "punti essenziali" che fanno del museo un'istituzione permanente. Necessario, sottolinea, mantenere "le cinque funzioni fondamentali che connotano il museo, anche rispetto all'attività che fanno i professionisti". Con il venir meno di queste cinque "funzioni essenziali" (acquisizione, conservazione, ricerca, esposizione e comunicazione), "viene meno il ruolo dei professionisti museali: il museo rischia di perdere la propria forza d'azione e questo è estremamente pericoloso". Con la nuova definizione, sottolinea la presidente di ICOM Italia, "si rischia di appiattire tutto anche dal punto di vista dei contenuti e viene meno il riconoscimento delle professionalità necessarie per portare avanti il museo. La nuova definizione non fa riferimento esplicito alle collezioni, e non è un problema di proprietà, ma di riconoscimento della testimonianza di umanità, sia essa materiale o immateriale, mobile o immobile, in quanto portatrice di valori da trasmettere nel futuro. Il processo di acquisizione è un processo non di possesso ma di riconoscimento: conoscenza, catalogazione e identificazione, anche nella logica della convenzione di Faro".
La nuova definizione proposta da ICOM
I musei sono spazi democratizzanti, inclusivi e polifonici per il dialogo critico sul passato e sul futuro. Riconoscendo e affrontando i conflitti e le sfide del presente, conservano reperti ed esemplari in custodia per la società, salvaguardano ricordi diversi per le generazioni future e garantiscono pari diritti e pari accesso al patrimonio per tutte le persone. I musei non sono a scopo di lucro. Sono partecipativi e trasparenti e lavorano in partnership attiva con e per le diverse comunità al fine di raccogliere, preservare, ricercare, interpretare, esporre e migliorare la comprensione del mondo, con l'obiettivo di contribuire alla dignità umana e alla giustizia sociale, all'uguaglianza globale e al benessere planetario.

Museums are democratising, inclusive and polyphonic spaces for critical dialogue about the pasts and the futures. Acknowledging and addressing the conflicts and challenges of the present, they hold artefacts and specimens in trust for society, safeguard diverse memories for future generations and guarantee equal rights and equal access to heritage for all people. Museums are not for profit. They are participatory and transparent, and work in active partnership with and for diverse communities to collect, preserve, research, interpret, exhibit, and enhance understandings of the world, aiming to contribute to human dignity and social justice, global equality and planetary wellbeing.

CONSULTAZIONE E DIBATTITO: LA QUESTIONE DI METODO

C'è poi una questione di metodo: a ICOM sono pervenute circa 280 proposte e quello che l'Italia "critica è che siano state messe sullo stesso livello le proposte di comitati che hanno sviluppato dibattiti come ICOFOM, il comitato francese o come il nostro, che hanno lavorato - e lavoro significa anche mediare - rispetto a chi a titolo individuale ha proposto una personale intuizione o ispirazione su cosa sia un muso oggi. Mettere sullo stesso piano l'intuizione del singolo rispetto a un processo di dibattito, per poi non tener presente nulla, non è vera consultazione". Maffei sottolinea quindi il "percorso di dibattito interno" portato avanti dall'Italia per arrivare a una definizione che "mantenesse dei punti essenziali: il vero tema del museo è anche questo suo essere Istituto al servizio di una società di sviluppo, sviluppo visto come sostenibile, non come crescita materiale ma come crescita di una società consapevole. Come italiani, infatti, abbiamo spostato l'attenzione sulla responsabilità". La finalità del museo è "responsabilità, consapevolezza critica,partecipazione, ci rivolgiamo alla società perché cresca culturalmente dal punto di vista della conoscenza e del pensiero critico, anche sul piano di un'ecologia culturale".

UNA DEFINIZIONE CONDIVISA DA TUTTI

Quello che sarà chiesto a Kyoto "con molta forza" è che ci sia "un dibattito internazionale ancora più forte, di posticipare un'eventuale ridefinizione con un lavoro di confronto, che è lo spirito ICOM", prosegue Maffei ribadendo che "la definizione deve essere il risultato di una condivisione reale". L'attenzione è focalizzata anche su alcune parole: ad esempio il "termine polifonico non significa niente in molti Paesi. Ci sono parole che hanno sfumature diverse e il rischio è che alcune siano intraducibili. Così diventa difficile dare un contributo a tutti i Paesi". La richiesta quindi è di rilanciare il dibattito, anche perché "sappiamo che la nostra proposta, come le altre, sono il risultato di un punto di vistaparziale, per questo va ampliato al confronto internazionale".
La proposta italiana
Il Museo è un'istituzione permanente, senza scopo di lucro, accessibile, che opera in un sistema di relazioni al servizio della società e del suo sviluppo sostenibile. Effettua ricerche sulle testimonianze dell'umanità e dei suoi paesaggi culturali, le acquisisce, le conserva, le comunica e le espone per promuovere la conoscenza, il pensiero critico, la partecipazione e il benessere della comunità.

COSA SUCCEDERA' A KYOTO

L'approvazione della nuova definizione di museo è prevista a Kyoto il 7 settembre ma il 1° dello stesso mese si riunirà l'Advisory Council di ICOM: è lì che sarà sollevata la questione. "Faremo una mozione in cui chiederemo di posticipare l'approvazione di un anno dando spazio alla discussione. Chiediamo - spiega ancora Maffei - che il confronto venga riportato nello spazio di condivisione internazionale: il consiglio consultivo, cioè il punto di incontro tra i 113 comitati nazionali e i 30 internazionali. E' una discussione importante che non può essere espressione di un gruppo di lavoro ma occasione per avvicinare esperienze e culture diverse ". Il 1° settembre si cercherà quindi di "superare l'attuale situazione, non deve passare l'idea che ci sono tradizionalisti e progressisti, se viene letta così è un modo negativo di vedere quella che è invece è una grande opportunità per sviluppare il dibattito internazionale". ICOM Europe, inoltre, "si è fatto promotore della richiesta di sviluppare ulteriormente il processo e di fare attenzione al fatto che la definizione debba essere chiara e concisa. E' arrivato il momento - chiosa la presidente di ICOM - di confrontarsi, perché così la definizione non è adatta al clima internazionale".
La definizione attuale
Il museo è un'istituzione permanente, senza scopo di lucro, al servizio della società, e del suo sviluppo, aperta al pubblico, che effettua ricerche sulle testimonianze materiali ed immateriali dell'uomo e del suo ambiente, le acquisisce, le conserva, e le comunica e specificatamente le espone per scopi di studio, educazione e diletto.

L'IMPORTANZA DELLA DEFINIZIONE

Dalla creazione di ICOM nel 1946, la definizione di museo ebbe un ruolo centrale e divenne un riferimento nella comunità museale internazionale. Una definizione che "unisce" e che "ha una visione mondiale della cultura, che era l'obiettivo dei nostri padri fondatori. ICOM - ricorda Maffei - nasce appena dopo la fine del secondo conflitto mondiale, la cultura era stata vista come il modo per superare le dure ferite inferte". La definizione è anche "la spina dorsale di un codice di comportamento": il patrimonio culturale e il ruolo dei musei sono visti come un modo per "evitare l'autoreferenzialità e per mettere la cultura a disposizione dell'umanità", conclude Maffei.

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Museo, nuova definizione nel mirino. Maffei (ICOM Italia): troppo vaga, spazio al confronto

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La nuova definizione di museo proposta da ICOM non convince gran parte dei comitati. Il fronte dei No si mobilita contro la nuova versione che sarà valutata e votata durante l'assemblea generale di ICOM, che si terrà a Kyoto il 7 settembre. La posizione è chiara: la nuova definizione è inadeguata a definire il museo.

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Last week, along with 4,000 or so other museum folks, I was in Kyoto, Japan for the triennial International Council of Museums conference. Both before and after the conference, there has been a great deal of discussion--among museum colleagues and in the public sphere--about a proposed new definition of museums. I tweeted --and retweeted others--pretty extensively during the loooong general assembly about the definition. Now that I've been back a week and had some time to reflect, I wanted to share some thoughts about process and product.

What is ICOM anyway?
To begin, more than a few Americans wondered about why anyone would care about what ICOM did in the first place--and who were those people voting? The US is fortunate to have a strong collection of professional organizations--AAM, AAMD, AASLH and state and regional associations. But in many places in the world, the ICOM national committee might be the sole functioning professional organization. In the same way that many US museums look to AAM for standards and guidance, so do museums around the world look to ICOM.

There are 119 National Committees and 30 International Committees, along with 6 Regional Alliances and a number of affiliated organizations. There is an Executive Committee and a Secretariat, which is based in Paris. Voting is done, not by members, but by these committees, alliances, and affiliates. National committees have the most votes, but, in American terms, it's like the Senate, not the House, with each country having the same number of votes. As I was in Kyoto representing the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience, an affiliate, I was able to cast two votes.

If you're a working professional or a student--you can become an ICOM member (link for US membership)-and participate in any international committee. It's a great way to connect with colleagues around the world and, as it happens, an ICOM membership gets you into almost any museum in the world for free. So the "them" is in fact us, if you choose to participate. The conference itself is cheaper than many US conferences. From my perspective, even before I began working for the Coalition, I found it extremely valuable to learn from colleagues around the world--particularly as the US museum system is quite distinct from most other places. ICOM plenary sessions took on important issues: climate change and sustainability and decolonization. It's important that these discussions take place with colleagues from around the world able to participate. Dozens of international committee sessions also explored a wide range of issues.

The Definition
But now, to the proposed new definition and the debate around it. For a comprehensive look at coverage of the definition process, thanks to Anna Marras and Ana Carvalho for gathering all the press coverage and discussion into one place. It keeps growing, so check it out!

During the week, a plenary session was held when those on the definition-writing committee (Museum Definition, Prospects and Potentials Committee) spoke in favor of adopting the definition and space was also given to those who were opposed. The new definition proposed was:

Museums are democratising, inclusive and polyphonic spaces for critical dialogue about the pasts and the futures. Acknowledging and addressing the conflicts and challenges of the present, they hold artefacts and specimens in trust for society, safeguard diverse memories for future generations and guarantee equal rights and equal access to heritage for all people.

Museums are not for profit. They are participatory and transparent, and work in active partnership with and for diverse communities to collect, preserve, research, interpret, exhibit, and enhance understandings of the world, aiming to contribute to human dignity and social justice, global equality and planetary wellbeing.

And the current definition, adopted in 2007:

A museum is a non-profit, permanent institution in the service of society and its development, open to the public, which acquires, conserves, researches, communicates and exhibits the tangible and intangible heritage of humanity and its environment for the purposes of education, study and enjoyment.

Full disclosure: as a representative of the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience, an affiliated organization, I was prepared to vote for the definition. I considered it too long and not straightforward enough, but I believe in the ideas it puts forward. However, through a series of maneuvers, not clear to most of us in the room, the vote on the definition was postponed, with 70% voting for postponement.

From my perspective, objections to the new definition vote fell into four categories:

1. Process
Although this was described as the most open process ever at ICOM, many national and international committees felt there was not adequate time to consult with members before the vote. It's important to note, that as far as I know, voting delegates were not bound by the consultations with their members, if they happened. ICOFOM, the international committee focused on museology, took initiative and held a series of roundtables about the museum definition. The summaries are here, but notably, the roundtables were unevenly distributed around the globe (heavily weighted towards Europe) and the approaches were varied.

I'm not sure what the process should be going forward, but I do know that if it is to be a global definition, then the conversation needs to be global. The vast majority of those speaking in the General Assembly were white Europeans or Americans. A more inclusive format needs to be developed and more voices in the conversation.

2. Aspiration or definition? (plus wording)
Do we need a definition? Is this too wordy? Who even uses the word polyphonic? Are museums really this? Is this an aspiration rather than a definition? Some were concerned that the word education was not included, for instance, although to me, it is embedded in the entire definition. I think a definition can be helpful, but I also think that all of you who are doing the work towards real change in our field will keep doing that work no matter what. A definition may or may not matter to you, as you work with communities. But imagine that it might matter to those who are just starting this work, in places where the work of social change is not yet accepted as an effort of museums (that might be specific museums or it might be entire nations).

3. Impact
There were concerns that the ICOM definition is embedded in law in some nations and that a changing definition (for instance, the removal of the word 'permanent') would have critical repercussions. Moving forward, there needs to be clear and substantive analysis of this, and at the same time, ICOM should be prepared to provide advocacy tools and training for countries where this might be an issue.

4. Fear
Although these objections were sometimes couched in the language of the items above, it seemed pretty clear that some of the objections came from those who were afraid of change, afraid of surrendering their institutional power, afraid that museums were becoming too ideological. Of course, museums have always been ideological. In Time magazine, Jette Sandahl, chair of the committee, commented, "We need to work with relevance into the context we live in, and this certainly makes that clearer. There is no apolitical space or point of view. Museums are always political." I remain hopeful that fear will not win the day.

Is the Controversy Bad for Museums?
I think the press coverage is great. I don't think it makes us look silly or divided. I think it makes us look like a field that is thinking deeply about the work we do. It's hard work and I'm happy to see us doing it. I'm impatient with those who fear this could divide the field permanently. In my work at Sites of Conscience, I see people coming together in reconciliation over far more difficult, life-changing issues than a museum definition. Surely we can do the same.

What's Next?
I assume the ICOM leadership and staff have barely had a moment to take a breath since the end of the conference. So we don't know what's next, but it's my hope that whatever next is truly a global conversation, and that the traditional European powers of ICOM step back and provide some additional space for other voices. Together, we can move museums into the 21st century--and not a moment too soon.

Thanks LaTanya Autry and Mike Murawski, creators of #museumsarenotneutral for providing inspiration--and a T-shirt to wear the day of the definition vote (or non-vote).

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In the Room Where It (sorta) Happened: ICOM's Museum Definition

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Last week, along with 4,000 or so other museum folks, I was in Kyoto, Japan for the triennial International Council of Museums conference. Both before and after the conference, there has been a great deal of discussion--among museum colleagues and in the public sphere--about a proposed new definition of museums. I tweeted --and retweeted others--pretty extensively during the loooong general assembly about the definition.

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Are Art Institutions Becoming Too ‘Ideological’? A Debate Breaks Out at the International Council of Museums Over Politics in the Galleries

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Are Art Institutions Becoming Too ‘Ideological’? A Debate Breaks Out at the International Council of Museums Over Politics in the Galleries

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Should museums' core mission be preserving the world's cultural heritage, or should they use their collections to promote human dignity, social justice, global equality, and planetary well-being? That is the question facing the international museum community as it wrestles with bringing its definition of what a museum should be into the 21st century.

Next month, thousands of members of the International Council of Museums (ICOM), which represents 20,000 institutions worldwide, are due to meet in Japan to formally ratify a new definition of what makes a museum a museum. The radical new definition, which was accepted by ICOM's board in July, has divided its national members, some of whom are lobbying to get the vote postponed to avoid a possible rift. Critics fear it is too "ideological," while others are concerned that traditional values of research and education are being downgraded.

For the past half century, ICOM's definition has remained the same while the world in which they operate has changed. The current definition states that a museum is: "A nonprofit institution" that "acquires, conserves, researches, communicates, and exhibits the tangible and intangible heritage of humanity and its environment for the purposes of education, study, and enjoyment."

The new definition finalized in July declares: "Museums are democratizing, inclusive, and polyphonic spaces for critical dialogue about the pasts and the futures." The new wording stresses the importance of championing human justice, equality, and the wellbeing of the planet. It also suggests that museums acknowledge and address the conflicts and challenges of the present, while "[guaranteeing] equal rights and equal access to heritage for all people."

A Problem for Museums Like the Louvre?

Last week, some 24 national branches of ICOM issued a petition to postpone the vote. Countries that have voiced "concerns" include France, Italy, Spain, Germany, Canada, and Russia.

Juliette Raoul-Duval, the chair of ICOM France, told The Art Newspaper the new definition on the table is an "ideological" manifesto. François Mairesse, a professor at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle who resigned from the ICOM committee that drew up the new definition, fears it will cause a rift in the organization. He called the new definition "a statement of fashionable values, much too complicated, and partly aberrant." He added that it would be a problem for most French museums, including the Louvre, to embrace the new definition.

Meanwhile, Klaus Staubermann, the CEO of ICOM Germany, which also wants the vote postponed, tells artnet News that he had specific concerns about words that have been omitted. "The previous definition had keywords like 'institution' and 'education,' which the new version does not carry. Both these words are very important, because their presence has a crucial effect on legislation in the German states," he explained. Still, Staubermann says that postponing the decision is less about those specific concerns "and more about giving time to the discussion worldwide to address and accommodate everyone's concerns."

What is at stake at the Kyoto meeting on September 7 is more than a battle over terminology. It reflects a debate that has been taking place for the past four decades around whether museums can ever be ideologically neutral spaces. It also reflects a desire since at least the 1980s for museums to be meeting places where ideas can be discussed, turning the museum from a traditional "temple" to a more democratic "forum." The debate has been given added urgency as institutions in the West face increasing pressure over their colonial-era collections, sources of funding, and historic under-representation of women's history in particular.

Jette Sandhal, the Danish curator who has led the committee drawing up the new ICOM definition, comes from the radical end of the profession. The founding director the Women's Museum of Denmark, she turned the ethnological collections of Gothenburg in Sweden into the Museum of World Cultures. Its inaugural exhibitions included an installation by the US artist Fred Wilson and a show about responses to the AIDS/HIV epidemic around the globe.

Sandhal posted a video in March in which she compared the new definition to a "backbone" that would give institutions strength while maintaining room for flexibility. She predicted that if a new definition is not agreed, the conversation will continue as it has for the past "20 years."

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Are Art Institutions Becoming Too 'Ideological'? The International Council of Museums Is Divided Over Politics in the Galleries

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Should museums' core mission be preserving the world's cultural heritage, or should they use their collections to promote human dignity, social justice, global equality, and planetary well-being? That is the question facing the international museum community as it wrestles with bringing its definition of what a museum should be into the 21st century.

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"Who are we, museums?"

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This month, I want to ask us this question. As a field, who are we?

I have been thinking about this question at work for the past few weeks. I had started a rapid research experiment recently. I invite the whole staff to my office anytime between 2-3 on Tuesdays to answer one question. They get a cookie, and leave their desks for 15 minutes, interact with colleagues from outside their silo, and I get a bit more insight as we build our audience engagement plan. Most weeks, people give me great surprises. But, recently, one of my colleagues, a man with an impressive assortment of checked shirts that I consistently envy, said, "I think we can't do this until we decide who we are." It was one of those record-scratches-to-a-stop moments. I've been thinking about it ever since.

Then, I get home, confined to the couch with a terrible sinus headache, to find ICOM was debating the definition of a museum. A different sort of ache began. ICOM matters because museums are a global phenomenon. Is there a country without at least one? Over the years, I've enjoyed interacting with all the international museum folks at conferences, particularly at AAM. From those scant moments, I've garnered that, like many things, the happenings in America are different than those in the world. ICOM might not seem to matter to our workdays in American museums, but it does matter global. Why? For me, it is a sign at a high-level of what bureaucracy of our field thinks.

I have many thoughts about the ICOM definitions. Procedurally, I worry that many of the people leading this debate are not well-verse in practice (thanks for that clarification Suse Anderson) or in what visitors think. Good leadership is informed by others and on behalf of others. It is not deciding what is in your own best interest. Sure, some of the people working on the definition have been informed. But I'd love transparency on the ways that the ICOM delegates prepared for their role defining museums. As as Katie Eagleton brought up, who is this definition for?

I'm particularly interested in the ways that the possible definitions by ICOM relate to the ways the people of those nations define museums. Susan Spero brought up a good point. Our field is more than casual observers see us, and our future requires us to go beyond the assumptions people make of museums. Absolutely. T ony Butler offers a publication that also resonated with Susan's point. Both of these issues are important. People can only define museums on what we have now. We as professionals get to define museums on the future we will make.

But the gaps between the ICOM definitions and their people's/ visitor's definitions would be telling. Do these gaps happen because we have forward-looking, visitor-centered leaders? Or do we have these gaps because our leaders are not grounded in visitors or practice? The former is my hope, and I'm sure some of the people at ICOM qualify in this group. My fear is the latter is all too common, and I know some of the ICOM definitions reeked of naval-gazing, esoteric stupidity, and backward thought.

Why does it matter to get a definition? Or does it? I don't know. I do think a good definition is a good way to show funders and foundations our collective vision of the field. I also think when museums are taxed, and in countries with different norms for museums, the definition can be a positive way to shine a light on the best path. But with all unfunded mandates, people are not being compensated to change. Should they? The status quo is the path already cleared. Many people on Twitter talked about how our actions as a field are a better definition of the future than any word salad a committee can produce.

But I'm curious: Who are we, museums? (As Sarah May said, we might ask, who is a museum? Who is it for?)

I'd love every answer and all answers. In many ways, our discussions are the most essential way to move forward. ICOM would be well-served by invited huge digital debate by museums folks and the folks who go to museums, by then inviting thinkers to synthesize these thoughts, and then use that to make something worth voting yes for.

I'll summarize your answers at the end of the month.

For your enjoyment, the ICOM definitionish:

Session 5 Doshisha University: Towards a new museum definition. Here is a chart as to how many times specific concepts appear in the 269 answers and are included in the new definition proposal #ICOMKyoto2019 #ICOFOM pic.twitter.com/eM25O6FDha

- Museum Studies Hel (@MusStudiesHel) September 5, 2019

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Also, I'll put in a plug for my Medium post this week. I don't write there often, just when something feels important. It's an ode to my colleagues.

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This month, I want to ask us this question. As a field, who are we? I have been thinking about this question at work for the past few weeks. I had started a rapid research experiment recently. I invite the whole staff to my office anytime between 2-3 on Tuesdays to answer one question.

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"A design recommendation for new museum definition (and vision)"

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This weekend during ICOM's general assembly in Japan, the much-anticipated discussion about a new museum definition both imploded and finally got properly underway. The assembly decided to postpone the vote on a rambling definition that was the result of a top-down, opaque design process. On social media and private discussion, this resulted in the highly-interesting global buzz that such discussion demands.

I do not want to add to that debate. What I'd like to do, however, is to make a design recommendation for the discussion that lays ahead. I want to call on ICOM to spend the extra time they obtained to design and execute a genuinely inclusive, global discussion about a new museum definition (or, as I will argue, vision).

First, let's separate the discussion about the definition from an implied parallel debate about a vision for the museum field. A vision is much more important than a definition. To draw a parallel to libraries: there is no central library definition, but there is a vision: to power literate, informed and participative societies.
Definitions are the domain of thinkers. Visions are the domain of doers.
Not too long ago, I read a book with over 100 definitions of culture. As the title included a gerund, I had hoped it would be a book with actionable ideas. It wasn't. The museum field is, without a doubt, a field of thinkers. It is or has become, also a field of doers, however. A discussion that is only about definitions will always disappoint the makers and shakers doing the hard work that is happening in the field.

If all ICOM wants is a new definition (full disclaimer: I think the current definition is fine), it may be best if they summarise the 250 submissions in an academic book and have leading thinkers contribute to this. This can be done top-down, in a committee, easily.

I believe, however, that ICOM is not looking for a new definition: they are looking for a vision for the field. They are looking for a raison d'être for museums in a rapidly developing world. They are looking for a statement that sets museums apart from all the world's other organizations and that convinces supporters that museums matter.

A vision is a conversation about the future. A vision tells a story about why museums exist and what the world would miss if there are no museums. Such a story is very different from a definition. It doesn't describe what a museum is, but outlines what a museum can be, can do, and can add to the world.

A vision is a conversation. Museums have become good at hosting conversations. Rallied by books such as The Participatory Museum and helped by tools such as the Digital Engagement Framework and Quantum Culture, thousands of museums have learned how to design and facilitate inclusive, bottom-up conversations about almost anything. I encourage ICOM to learn from these museums and ensure that the discussion about the new d̶e̶f̶i̶n̶i̶t̶i̶o̶n̶ vision is truly global in scope, inclusive of all voices in and around the sector, and respectfully participatory.

Most importantly (because part of the process to date paid lip-service to participation and co-creation), I recommend ICOM to ensure people are not merely enabled to participate but to invite all voices to the conversation. Reach out to underserved (museum) communities, especially outside of Europe, ensure maximum diversity of participants, and look for the dissenting voices and try to learn from them.

When IFLA set out to design their new vision two years ago, we set out to facilitate 10,000s of hours of conversation. When they launched their new strategy last month, close to 50,000 people from almost every corner of the world had participated in its creation.

Tens of thousands of people participating in a discussion means a wide variety of ideas, values, perspectives, and opinions will be shared. This diversity is the strength of the conversation. Instead of trying to limit it to what can reasonably be fitted in one definition, look for what is the shared purpose underlying all this diversity.

Postponing the vote on the new definition gives ICOM the time to design and facilitate a truly inclusive discussion. Let's use the experience from the librarians as guidance, and state that the renewed discussion should bring together 50,000 voices from all 195 countries in the world today. Let the focus of the discussion be a vision, a shared story for the future. Encourage the field's diversity to validate the conversation and give depth to the statement that will come out of it.

Any museum that in recent years has started on the participatory path can attest that this is not easy. Facilitating a global discussion across a wide range of languages is even harder. Fortunately, museum professionals are both smart enough to design such a process and doers enough to make it happen. A quick Twitter search will provide the first batch of museum leaders eager and willing to lead in this effort. And of course, I'm happy to help as well.

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A design recommendation for new museum definition (and vision)

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This weekend during ICOM's general assembly in Japan, the much-anticipated discussion about a new museum definition both imploded and finally got properly underway. The assembly decided to postpone the vote on a rambling definition that was the result of a top-down, opaque design process.

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Musing on Culture, by Maria Vlachou (PT)

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Musing on Culture, by Maria Vlachou (PT)

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"A new museum definition"

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"A museum is a non-profit, permanent institution in the service of society and its development, open to the public, which acquires, conserves, researches, communicates and exhibits the tangible and intangible heritage of humanity and its environment for the purposes of education, study and enjoyment."

The current museum definition of the International Council of Museums (ICOM) serves perfectly those museum professionals who know how to give meaning to expressions such as "at the service of society" and "for the purposes of education, study and enjoyment". It serves perfectly those museum professionals who not only know how to give meaning to these words, but also how to share this meaning with other citizens, non-specialists, through both their thinking and their practice.

The current ICOM museum definition, though, has not served the museum field, and society at large, for a long time now, as many museum professionals have failed to understand that "to acquire, conserve and research" is not an aim, a purpose in itself, bur rather a tool, in order to fulfil the purposes mentioned by the definition. Many museums around the world have failed to fulfil their mission (the majority has also failed to establish a concrete mission), as they are run by subject-matter specialists with a very limited knowledge of museology and an even more limited vision of why it is that museums exist and for whom. Back in 2015 I had the opportunity to share my views on the contradictions presented by many international competitions for museum directors (at that time, I reviewed the Italian case) when one sees the requisites announced and then the curriculum of the people chosen. I still strongly believe that a knowledge of museology should be a must and not an option (as it normally is) both for State organisations responsible for museums and for the competitions, but also for those who wish to direct institutions called "museums". Museums' current relationship and communication with citizens in general, and non-specialists in particular, has been greatly, and negatively, conditioned by the traditional, conservative and little inspiring views of many people working in the field and directing these institutions.

ICOM set up a committee with the aim to review the current museum definition. People from all over the world took part in this process with inspiringand beautiful ideas , many of which did not exactly constitute a definition but could help us all set a frame and think better.

Last month, we were presented with the proposal for a new museum definition . A vote will be included at the ICOM Extraordinary General Assembly, which will take place on 7 September in Kyoto, Japan. The proposal is the following:

"Museums are democratising, inclusive and polyphonic spaces for critical dialogue about the pasts and the futures. Acknowledging and addressing the conflicts and challenges of the present, they hold artefacts and specimens in trust for society, safeguard diverse memories for future generations and guarantee equal rights and equal access to heritage for all people.

Museums are not for profit. They are participatory and transparent, and work in active partnership with and for diverse communities to collect, preserve, research, interpret, exhibit, and enhance understandings of the world, aiming to contribute to human dignity and social justice, global equality and planetary wellbeing."

Based on my first reaction to the proposal and then some further thinking (also with the help of other colleagues who shared their views), I find the proposed new definition:

- Too long. Contrary to the "ingredients" of the current definition, nobody will be able to remember and use (and say) the many parts of the proposed new definition;

- Rather wishful thinking. More of "we dream of museums that" rather than "we expect museums to";

- Full of buzz words and repetitive. It's about everything and nothing. Thoughts should be better organised.

ICOM UK has launched a poll online and many museum professionals have reacted publicly to the proposal. At the same time, there is an intense discussion in many countries regarding the role of museums in society and an increasing scrutiny of what they do and why.

"The British Museum is not a good thing in and of itself. It is good only to the extent that its influence in the world is for the good. The collection is a starting point, an opportunity, an instrument. Will the museum use it to influence the future of the planet and its peoples? (...)"

How conscious is the British Museum, and all other museums, that they are not a good thing in themselves, as they might think? How conscious are we all that most museums are far from "democratising, inclusive and polyphonic spaces for critical dialogue", as the new definition suggests?

There is an urgent need to make a clear, updated, statement - aimed at both museum professionals and society at large - as to why museums exist and who for. There is also an urgent need to review the profile of museum directors. ICOM itself that the reason for reviewing the current definition were the continuously shifting points of intersection between museums and communities. The 21education, study and enjoyment". The 21admitted st century society is definitely not the 20 th or 19 th century society. The 21 st century society can only be served by 21 st century museums and by museum professionals who have a clear understanding of the meaning of expressions such as "at the service of society" and "for the purposes of st century society can only be served by a 21 st century commitment.

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"A museum is a non-profit, permanent institution in the service of society and its development, open to the public, which acquires, conserves, researches, communicates and exhibits the tangible and intangible heritage of humanity and its environment for the purposes of education, study and enjoyment."

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The slogan "I was there when the definition of museum was discussed in Kyoto" runs these days in social media. And newspapers around the world take up the topic, saying that this "there", the ICOM general assembly, was an intense, "deep and healthy" debate - or "a strange and untransparent descent into chaos," according to the president of the working group that originated the proposal for a new definition of museum. However, apart from adjectives, what was left was the postponement of any decision, taken by about 70% of the voters, and if this new proposal were really to vote, it would certainly reach 80% against, because several committees were against the postponement, yes, but because they wanted to reject it, right there.

What was in question in Kyoto, and what made museums around the world vibrate so much? Well, in essence, an opposition, which I am sure will be accentuated in the future, between a purely instrumental and aspirational vision of museums, which at the very least diminishes them by their assimilation to any other cultural institution or project animated by motivations and principles of social democracy, and another that, without rejecting such principles, seeks to fixate on what distinguishes museums, makes them unique and therefore magnifies them in their irreducible originality. The first perspective is best suited to "activists of all just causes"; the second is for museum professionals, ICOM being precisely their most worldwide representative NGO (over 44,000 worldwide), designed in a bottom-up sociological and juridical conception.

The proposal for consideration by the ICOM General Assembly resulted from the action taken in the last three years by a working group set up and made up at its discretion by the president of ICOM and subsequently validated by the Executive Board. During this period, this group promoted dozens, maybe more, of debates around the world, with very variable participation, both in quantitative terms (tens or hundreds of participants), as well as in qualitative terms (amalgam between mere "museums' lovers" and scholars or professionals, with limited and unregistered participation of ICOM members). I have personally been able to participate in several, both in Latin America and Europe, and I know what they were: nice and vivid assemblies, at best, but without any conditions to seriously think about what museums are or should be, in professional terms.

The group also collected 269 proposals for a new definition of museum (a number that may appear impressive, but it turns out to be modest, considering that the surveyed universe was potentially made up of all the inhabitants of the planet). Aligned anonymously (with indication only of the proponent's country of origin, which curiously shows that most of them were European or North American), it is worth noting that the largest of these definition proposals were "poetic hymns" (one of them, Italian, it simply proposed that museums be described as "places for distilling visions", period), in some cases reaching the level of manifestos. But it turns out that not even this bizarre collection was retained in the proposed definition. ICOM France has clearly demonstrated this: the proposed definition is anchored in terms that are not even mentioned by 1% of respondents ("polyphonic", "conflict", "social dignity" or "planetary welfare") and others by less than 5% ("challenges", "equal rights", "human dignity" or "global equity"). That is, a set of statements that wander between meritorious (who can oppose the defense of "social dignity"?) and the undecipherable (is not "global equity" a pleonasm in itself?), almost in the manner of "miss universe statement", but without really fulfilling what is required of an operational definition of a museum.

And is such a definition so important? Yes and no at the same time. Of course, as with whatever it is, the underlying content (real, desirable or even simply imagined) is much more important than the terms that, by trying to fix it, always reduce that essence. But definitions are still necessary, either in pure or applied science, as for the most in organizations that are guided by the empirical principle of effective intervention in life, aiming to establish boundaries allowing to define social and professional fields - and to defend them upon all possible interlocutors. Now, as ICOM Canada has shown, for example, ICOM's definition of a museum is now used in the national laws of many dozen countries and serves to preserve museums as "permanent institutions" (designation irresponsibly abandoned in the proposal), meaning, entities with some organizational autonomy vis-à-vis the political powers of the shift; and the emphasis putted on the technical specificities of the so-called "museums' functions" is also a recognized guarantee of the careers and independence of their professionals. Given these implications, it becomes easily understandable why so many extra-European committees, even more than European ones, had vehemently complained about the regression that the proposed new definition could constitute in their countries, where democratic practice is less rooted and the so-called "civil society" proves to be weaker.

In other words, perhaps inebriated by their inflamed discourses, closed-loop built, it happened to the most activist advocates of the new definition proposal, rudely rejected, which often happens to those who let themselves be detached from reality: they bumped into it, simply. The US example was in this particular paradigmatic: while the chair of his respective national committee of ICOM, known for its recognized debility, comparing to what ICOM national committees are in almost developed countries, was resolutely advocating in favor of the new proposed definition, the president of the American Museum Alliance, the true leader of museums in that country, recommended postponing the decision - which seems to have been shared by representatives of the rest of the world who decided as such, massively.

What will it happen from now on? Well, it is to expect that the discussion will be launched again in a future new extraordinary general assembly, maybe next year, in June, during the annual meetings of ICOM in Paris. But no one knows exactly which process will be followed in order to satisfy the criticisms raised by the vast majority of national and international committees who have defend postponement as a way to enlarge the discussion within ICOM and to finally get maybe several alternative proposals, aiming to be more consensual. The only guideline is what substantively was approved when postponing was voted: the EGA "takes note of all the contributions that have been made during the EGA for future debates on the Museum Definition."

The president of ICOM emitted, nevertheless, a note immediately after the postponing decision saying that: "The discussion continues, and MDPP will continue its work by interacting with all the National and International Committees, to talk about the implementation and assimilation of these new ideas as they will probably appear in the new definition that will be and amendment of the proposed one. This is not the end, this is just another beginning in this process of redefinition. I invite all members to participate in the discussions as they advance." And this note has comprehensibly generated great discomfort among the subscribers of the postponing proposal, ICOM Europe included. Firstly, to keep the MDPP is in itself doubtful: maybe it would be time now to clearly distinguish between "museum definition" and "prospects and potential". The last are surely important to consider, but could maybe advantageously be transferred to a sort of "mission statement" or "strategic goals" level, not integrating the definition itself, which has to be short, straight worded and centered in what really distinguish museums. Secondly, if really to keep the MDPP, then its composition has necessarily to be profoundly reviewed and strong, clear, links are to established with national and international committees, maybe throughout the Advisory Board or, as it seems more natural and wised, by attributing the centrality of the process to ICOFOM, which has not only the capacities but the organizational legitimacy to act as such.

Let's so hope that the process will not, from now on, repeat neither the methodology, nor the conceptual frame of these last three years. Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results is the Einstein's definition (here we are: definition...) for insanity - and we have necessarily to be concerned on what can it happen to ICOM if the next EGA is to be faced with basically the same conceptual proposal. Being optimistic, and most of all, having full confidence in ICOM capacity to regenerate, as it was eloquently proven in Kyoto, I dare to anticipate that the future museum definition, departing maybe from the current one as it has been done in the past, will reach wide consensus and will continuing to serve as powerful tool in order to defend and promote museums and museums professionals world around.

Luís Raposo

President of ICOM Europe Regional Alliance

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The slogan "I was there when the definition of museum was discussed in Kyoto" runs these days in social media. And newspapers around the world take up the topic, saying that this "there", the ICOM general assembly, was an intense, "deep and healthy" debate - or "a strange and untransparent descent into chaos," according to the president of the working group that originated the proposal for a new definition of museum.

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Il Comitato italiano dell'ICOM è contrario alla definizione di museo proposta all'approvazione dell'Assemblea generale straordinaria di Kyoto 2019.

ICOM Italia ritiene la formulazione inadeguata a definire il museo, che storicamente ha svolto il ruolo di istituto dedicato all'acquisizione, conservazione, documentazione, ricerca, comunicazione e esposizione di oggetti patrimoniali, i quali non sono solo oggetti materiali e mobili, ma vanno considerati come testimonianze dell'umanità e del suo ambiente. Come istituzione, i musei sono rivolti allo studio, all' educazione, al diletto e sono presidi e attori di primaria importanza culturale e sociale nelle società moderne e contemporanee di tutto il mondo.

La definizione proposta si ritiene non rispondente nella forma ai criteri minimi di una definizione che, nell'individuare il complesso degli elementi volti a caratterizzare e circoscrivere un'entità sul piano concettuale, deve essere chiara, breve e applicabile in tutti i contesti culturali e normativi interessati. La nuova definizione deve ribadire la necessità della conservazione della molteplicità delle esperienze dell'umanità e al contempo indicare una direzione di sviluppo, facendo dei musei strumenti di diffusione dei valori di libertà, uguaglianza e giustizia.

ICOM Italia esprime, inoltre, le proprie perplessità per il metodo con cui la nuova definizione di museo è stata posta all'ordine del giorno dell'Assemblea generale straordinaria ICOM, non tenendo in opportuna considerazione i principi di democrazia sottesi a garantire quel dibattito scientifico che ha caratterizzato ICOM dalla sua nascita ad oggi e che avrebbe dovuto portare a un coinvolgimento di tutti gli organi di ICOM - i Comitati nazionali e internazionali, le Regional Alliances e le Affiliated Organisations - prima della sua approvazione.

ICOM Italia aderisce all'invito di rimandare l'assemblea generale straordinaria di ICOM al fine di proseguire, con i comitati nazionali ed internazionali, la riflessione sulla nuova definizione di museo.

Un significativo numero di Comitati Nazionali ed Internazionali di ICOM, riportati di seguito, si sono mobilitati per esprimere le loro preoccupazioni relative alla proposta per una nuova Definizione di Museo che verrà discussa durante l'Assemblea Generale Straordinaria che si terrà il 7 settembre 2019 a Kyoto, in Giappone, durante la prossima Conferenza Generale di ICOM.

Il documento è stato sottoposto all'attenzione del Presidente ICOM Suay Aksoy, e, attraverso la sua intermediazione, all'Executive Board, al Presidente dell'Advisory Council, Regina Shulz, e al Direttore generale, Peter Keller.

"L'invito" si propone di rimandare l'Assemblea Generale Straordinaria prevista in modo da proseguire la riflessione di una nuova definizione di museo, con i comitati nazionali ed internazionali, con il coinvolgimento dell'Advisory Council, l'organo consultivo di ICOM formato dei Comitati Nazionali e Internazionali, le Regional Alliances e le Affiliated Organisations.

Nel documento viene riconosciuto il lavoro considerevole che è stato fatto nella direzione della nuova definizione, ma viene inoltre evidenziato che lo svolgimento di questa Assemblea Generale Straordinaria e il suo voto, potrebbero avere delle ripercussioni deleterie per ICOM, sia che la definizione venga adottata o no. ICOM Italia e i firmatari della mozione, credono che una nuova definizione di museo possa ancora essere proposta e discussa, ma che tale processo richieda del tempo per raggiungere un consenso globale - e questo può emergere solo dopo discussioni più approfondite e trasparenti che scaturiscano dalla struttura base di ICOM, ovvero dai comitati nazionali ed internazionali, dalle Regional Alliances e dalle Affiliated Organisations.

I firmatari mettono in evidenza che, per via del breve lasso di tempo dalla diffusione della proposta per una nuova Definizione di Museo adottata dall'Executive Board fino ad ora, in un periodo festivo, non tutti i comitati nazionali Europei, nondimeno i comitati Internazionali, sono stati contattati o hanno risposto in tempo. I contatti fuori dall'Europa sono stati a malapena occasionali (seppur inclusi). Per questo, altre approvazioni all'invito congiunto arriveranno sicuramente nelle prossime settimane.

Il TESTO dell'invito
I comitati nazionali e internazionali di ICOM firmatari del presente documento hanno preso nota della proposta di "nuova definizione di musei", preparata dalla Commissione per la definizione, le prospettive e le potenzialità del Museo (MDPP) e adottata dall'Executive Board di ICOM nella sua 139sima sessione tenuta a Parigi il 21 e 22 luglio 2019. Osservano che questa proposta non fa parte dei contributi presentati dai membri o dalle associazioni a ICOM. I termini impiegati nel testo proposto al voto non sono quelli usati dalla maggioranza dei membri. Il testo proposto dall' Executive Board è quindi elaborato senza che il lavoro approfondito sulla definizione, fatto dai numerosi comitati nazionali ed internazionali, sia preso significativamente in considerazione. Per questo motivo, Il metodo di elaborazione appare poco trasparente e mancante di un reale spazio di discussione. I comitati nazionali ed internazionali firmatari ci tengono a ricordare il carattere operativo della definizione di ICOM, la quale è integrata in diversi testi legislativi nazionali o internazionali, così come il suo ruolo nella selezione dei membri stessi. I termini utilizzati nella definizione dei Musei di ICOM devono valorizzare l'importanza delle funzioni del museo e il suo rapporto con il patrimonio materiale e immateriale, i quali costituiscono le sue caratteristiche distintive rispetto ad altre istituzioni culturali. Considerando lo spostamento considerevole fra questa nuova definizione e le definizioni successive del museo adottate da ICOM per più di 70 anni, e osservando il tono politico di questa proposta, i comitati nazionali ed internazionali firmatari pongono l'attenzione sui rischi di dissenso che potrebbero incombere e indebolire ICOM se dovesse essere approvata così come si presenta attualmente. Richiedono che l'Assemblea Generale Straordinaria chiamata a votare sulla proposta il 7 settembre 2019 sia rimandata di almeno un anno, in modo che una riflessione sia condotta in condizioni tranquille, sotto l'egida dell'Advisory Council di ICOM, per presentare una nuova proposta che raccolga il sostegno globale della comunità museale.
Di seguito l'elenco dei Comitati che hanno già sottoscritto il documento:
Comitati nazionali
Argentina | Armenia | Austria | Belgium | Bosnia and Herzegovina | Czech Republic | Croatia | France | Georgia | Germany | Greece | Italy | Iran | Ireland | Israel | Latvia | Lithuania | Poland | Portugal | Russia | Slovakia | Spain
Comitati internazionali
CECA | DEMHIST | UMAC | ICMAH | ICOFOM

Per maggiori informazioni, vi invitiamo a consultare il sito di ICOM Europe: http://network.icom.museum/europe

Per conoscere il percorso che ha portato all'elaborazione della nuova definizione di museo:

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La posizione di ICOM Italia in merito alla nuova definizione di museo - ICOM Italia

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Il Comitato italiano dell'ICOM è contrario alla definizione di museo proposta all'approvazione dell'Assemblea generale straordinaria di Kyoto 2019. ICOM Italia ritiene la formulazione inadeguata a definire il museo, che storicamente ha svolto il ruolo di istituto dedicato all'acquisizione, conservazione, documentazione, ricerca, comunicazione e esposizione di oggetti patrimoniali, i quali non sono solo oggetti materiali e mobili, ma vanno considerati come testimonianze dell'umanità e del suo ambiente.

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Corre por estes dias a frase "eu estava lá, quando a definição de museu foi discutida em Quioto". E os jornais de todo o mundo retomam o tema, dizendo que esse "lá", a assembleia geral do ICOM, constituiu um debate intenso, "profundo e saudável" - ou "uma estranha e opaca descida ao caos", na avaliação da presidente do grupo de trabalho que esteve na origem da proposta de nova definição de museu. Todavia, adjectivações à parte, o que ficou foi o adiamento de qualquer decisão, tomado por cerca de 70% dos votantes, sendo certo que se essa nova proposta fosse mesmo a votos teria certamente mais de 80% contra, porque vários comités se manifestaram contra o adiamento, sim, mas por quererem rejeitá-la logo ali.

O que esteve em causa em Quioto, e que tanto fez agitar os museus em todo o mundo? Bom, no essencial, uma oposição, que estou certo se irá acentuar no futuro, entre uma visão puramente instrumental e aspiracional dos museus, que no fundo os diminui pela sua assimilação a qualquer outra instituição ou projecto cultural animado por motivações e princípios de democracia social, e uma outra que, sem rejeitar tais princípios, procura fixar-se naquilo que distingue os museus, os torna únicos e por isso os engrandece na sua irredutível originalidade. A primeira perspectiva é mais própria de "activistas de todas as causas justas"; a segunda, de profissionais de museus, sendo o ICOM precisamente uma ONG dos mesmos (mais de 44 mil em todo o mundo), concebida "da base para o topo", ou seja, detida por mais de uma centena de comissões nacionais eleitas por voto secreto, por mais de três de dezenas de comités internacionais ou de especialidade e por oito alianças regionais, entre as quais a mais representativa (48 países aderentes e mais de 80% dos membros da organização), a do ICOM Europa.

A proposta colocada à consideração da assembleia geral do ICOM resultou da acção desenvolvida nos últimos três anos por um grupo de trabalho criado e composto discricionariamente pela presidente do ICOM. Neste período, o referido grupo promoveu largas dezenas de debates em todo o mundo, com participação muito variável, tanto em termos quantitativos (dezenas ou centenas de participantes), como em termos qualitativos (amálgama entre meros "amantes" de museus e estudiosos ou profissionais dos mesmos). Pude pessoalmente participar em vários, tanto na América Latina como na Europa, e sei bem o que foram: assembleias simpáticas e vivas, no melhor dos casos, mas sem quaisquer condições para pensar seriamente o que são ou deverão ser os museus.

Recolheu também o referido grupo de trabalho 269 propostas de nova definição de museu (número que pode impressionar, mas se revela afinal modesto, tendo em conta que o universo inquirido era, potencialmente, constituído por todos os habitantes do planeta). Alinhadas anonimamente (apenas com indicação do país de origem do proponente, o que curiosamente permite perceber que na sua maioria eram europeias ou norte americanas), verificou-se que a maior parte destas propostas de definição não passava de "hinos poéticos" (uma delas, italiana, propunha simplesmente que os museus fossem descritos como "locais para destilar visões", ponto final), atingindo em alguns casos o nível de manifestos. Acontece que nem mesmo esta colecção bizarra foi retida na proposta de definição apresentada. O ICOM França demonstrou-o com clareza: a definição proposta reteve termos que não chegam a ser referidos sequer por 1% dos respondentes ("polifónico", "conflitos", "dignidade social" ou "bem-estar planetário") e outros por menos de 5% ("desafios", "direitos iguais", "dignidade humana" ou "equidade global"). Ou seja, um conjunto de afirmações que vagueiam entre o meritório (quem se pode opor à defesa da "dignidade social"?) e o indecifrável (não será "equidade global" um pleonasmo em si mesmo?), quase à maneira de discurso de " miss universo", mas sem realmente cumprir aquilo que se exige de uma definição operacional de museu.

E será uma definição assim tão importante? Sim e não ao mesmo tempo. Claro que, como no que quer que seja, é muito mais importante o conteúdo subjacente (real, desejável ou até simplesmente imaginado) do que os termos que, procurando fixá-lo, reduzem sempre essa essência. Mas nem por isso as definições deixam de ser necessárias, seja em ciência pura ou aplicada, seja por maioria de razão em organizações que se guiam pelo princípio empírico da intervenção efectiva na vida. Ora, como bem demonstrou o ICOM Canadá, por exemplo, a definição de museu pelo ICOM é hoje usada nas legislações nacionais de muitas dezenas de países, servindo aí para preservar os museus enquanto "instituições permanentes" (designação irresponsavelmente abandonada na proposta apresentada) dotadas de alguma autonomia organizacional face aos poderes políticos de turno, constituindo a ênfase posta nas especificidades técnicas das chamadas "funções museais" igualmente uma garantia de reconhecimento das carreiras e da independência dos seus profissionais. Face a tais implicações, compreende-se bem que muitos comités extra-europeus, mais até do que os europeus, tivessem reclamado veementemente contra a regressão que a nova definição proposta poderia vir a constituir nos seus países, onde a prática democrática está menos enraizada e a chamada "sociedade civil" se revela mais débil.

Ou seja, e em conclusão: inebriados porventura pela inflamação do discurso, produzido em circuito fechado, aconteceu aos mais activistas defensores da nova proposta de definição de museu pelo ICOM, rotundamente chumbada, aquilo que frequentemente acontece àqueles que se deixam desligar da realidade: chocaram nela, simplesmente. O exemplo dos EUA foi neste particular paradigmático: enquanto o presidente do respectivo comité nacional do ICOM, conhecido pela sua quase irrelevância, defendia acrisoladamente, com o seu chapéu de cowboy texano enfiado na cabeça durante toda a assembleia geral, a proposta de nova definição, a presidente da Aliança Americana de Museus, a verdadeira líder dos museus naquele país, recomendava adiar a decisão - o que parece ter sido partilhado pelos representantes do resto do mundo, a começar pela parte daquele que se diz "em vias de", que lhe deram massivamente ouvidos.

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Afinal, o que é "ser museu" na definição do ICOM?

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O que esteve em causa em Quioto, e que tanto fez agitar os museus em todo o mundo? No essencial, uma oposição entre uma visão puramente instrumental e aspiracional dos museus, que os assimila a qualquer outra instituição animada por princípios de de

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Vue de la dernière assemblée générale de L'ICOM en 2016 à Milan.
Icom France.

Lors de sa 139 e session, fin juillet à Paris, l'ICOM (Conseil international des musées) a jeté un pavé dans la mare en proposant une nouvelle définition du musée. Malgré l'été, une levée de boucliers ne s'est pas fait attendre, semant le trouble dans l'organisation.

Il n'y aura plus d' " œuvres ", mais des " artefacts ". Plus d' " éducation " mais de l' " interprétation " pour améliorer les " compréhensions du monde ". Plus de " délectation " mais le " bien-être planétaire ". Fruit de la compilation de 285 propositions remontées par les 124 comités nationaux de l'ICOM depuis le début de l'année, la nouvelle définition du musée se devait de refléter, selon Jette Sandahl, présidente du comité permanent, " un langage du XXIe siècle ". Force est de constater que le défi est relevé haut la main. Il ne manque aux termes " polyphonique ", " inclusif ", ou " participatif " que l'adjectif " disruptif " pour achever la liste parfaite des mots utilisés à l'envi sans vraiment en connaître le sens. Édictée en 2007 après six premiers changements, la définition précédente avait pourtant le mérite de l'efficacité : " Un musée est une institution permanente sans but lucratif au service de la société et de son développement, ouverte au public, qui acquiert, conserve, étudie, expose et transmet le patrimoine matériel et immatériel de l'humanité et de son environnement à des fins d'études, d'éducation et de délectation. "

Une vision politique

" Cette définition est reprise partout dans le monde, pour l'ensemble des musées. Si une réactualisation est judicieuse au regard des nombreuses évolutions, elle se doit d'être claire,...

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Musée : tempête autour d'un mot - Le Quotidien de l'Art

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Lors de sa 139e session, fin juillet à Paris, l'ICOM (Conseil international des musées) a jeté un pavé dans la mare en proposant une nouvelle définition du musée. Malgré l'été, une levée de boucliers ne s'est pas fait attendre, semant le trouble dans l'organisation.

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Cento parole contenute in un documento potrebbero cambiare la definizione più recente di museo, entrata in vigore il 24 agosto 2007. Da "istituzione permanente, senza scopo di lucro" che "effettua ricerche sulle testimonianze materiali ed immateriali dell'uomo e del suo ambiente" a spazio "democratizzante, inclusivo e polifonico per un dialogo critico sul futuro".

La proposta arriva dalla curatrice danese Jette Sandahl, presidente del Comitato permanente per la definizione, le prospettive e i potenziali del museo, che ha presentato al Comitato esecutivo del Consiglio internazionale dei musei (Icom) un testo nel quale viene avanzata proprio la revisione della definizione corrente. La proposta è stata accettata il 22 luglio e verrà messa ai voti il 7 settembre in occasione dell'Assemblea generale di Icom, in programma dal 1° al 7 settembre a Kyoto, in Giappone.

Icom è formato da 119 comitati nazionali che rappresentano oltre 20 mila istituzioni di tutto il mondo. Nei giorni scorsi 24 comitati - tra cui quello italiano, quello francese, quello tedesco e quello canadese - hanno espresso la loro preoccupazione e chiesto il rinvio della votazione in attesa di una nuova proposta.

Secondo Sandahl, come riporta il mensile "The Art Newspaper", la vecchia definizione "non parla il linguaggio del XXI secolo" e "ignora le richieste della democrazia culturale". Nella nuova versione, si legge, i musei "lavorano in partnership attiva con le diverse comunità", "con lo scopo di contribuire alla giustizia sociale e alla dignità umana, all'eguaglianza globale e al bene del pianeta".

Proprio frasi come "giustizia sociale" e "dignità umana" hanno creato allarmismo e polemiche all'interno del comitato. Juliette Raoul-Duval, di Icom Francia, lamenta in particolare il tono politico di quello che definisce un "manifesto". Hugues de Varine, ex direttore di Icom, protesta contro il "preambolo ideologico", sostenendo che non si fa distinzione tra museo, biblioteca, centri culturali o laboratori.

Icom Italia fa sapere in una nota che "ritiene la formulazione inadeguata a definire il museo, che storicamente ha svolto il ruolo di istituto dedicato all'acquisizione, conservazione, documentazione, ricerca, comunicazione ed esposizione di oggetti patrimoniali", "i quali vanno considerati testimonianze dell'umanità e del suo ambiente. I musei sono rivolti allo studio, all'educazione, al diletto e sono attori di primaria importanza nelle società moderne e contemporanee".

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Un museo, che cos'è? La polemica sulla nuova definizione

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Cento parole contenute in un documento potrebbero cambiare la definizione più recente di museo, entrata in vigore il 24 agosto 2007. Da "istituzione permanente, senza scopo di lucro" che "effettua ricerche sulle testimonianze materiali ed immateriali dell'uomo e del suo ambiente" a spazio "democratizzante, inclusivo e polifonico per un dialogo critico sul futuro".

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Projet de nouvelle définition du musée proposée par ICOM | ICOM France

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In 1946 the International Council of Museums (ICOM) formulated the first museum definition and in 2007 the last change was made. A committee is now working on a new definition because the old one 'does not reflect and express adequately the complexities of the 21stcentury and the current responsibilities and commitments of museums, nor their challenges and visions for the future.'

Present Museumdefinition

It is quite a process to arrive at an internationally accepted museum definition, "the backbone" of the ICOM. Cultural legislation in many countries builds on this international museum definition, so the impact of a new definition is also (legally) globally important. More about the old and new definitions in this report and in the video with Jette Sandahl. Jette chairs the committee. She one of the most inspiring museum colleagues, who had an impressive museum career at the Museum of World Cultures in Gothenburg, Te Papa Museum in New Zealand and the Copenhagen City Museum. During the workshop of CAMOC, the ICOM committee of city museums in Lisbon (3-4 May 2019), she explained how the committee works: radically democratic. During various ICOM meetings there were round tables about the essential elements of a museum. All, more than 40,000, ICOM members can provide input. Anyone can upload a definition in their own language on the website.

There are now 219, with a few days left until the deadline on 20 May. The committee will formulate a new definition based on all this input. Voting will take place during the 25th General Conference (Kyoto, 1-7 September 2019).

CAMOC members on the roof of Roman Theatre Museum in Lisbon, may 2019

Activist Museums
"Now that I look back, the old definition seems actually rather naive," says Jette Sandahl, "Society is not as homogeneous and harmonious as it appeared in 2007." Many museums have since taken on more activist positions and feel (even) more responsible for the needs of society. There is also a greater awareness that museums are dependent on political decisions and are part of the ever-growing tourist market. Moreover, in recent years much more attention has been paid to the fact that many museums are a legacy of colonialism. Museums are not neutral, a text on my T-shirt, which is always a great success at conferences with museum colleagues. Sandahl notes that while many museums claim to be neutral, they float between the danger of being overly pronounced versus the danger of becoming irrelevant.
A space where objects speak
The definition committee has established a number of parameters: ideally the new definition is about values, purposes, functions, methods and modes and accountabilities. Although most of the entries are incomplete, they provide a lot of inspiration for Jette and her fellow definition-makers, including secretary Afsin Altayli who has made the website with contributions.

Definition #173 from Japan gives a poetic description of the museum: 'A space where objects are made to speak to human kind who long for story to be told. ' Some other examples: 'The museum is a walk-in library of our collective memory', 'Museums should be a mirror of the real world with comments'. '(The museum) treats subjects in a gender-sensitive way'. '... its focus is the Silence that resists to be represented', 'Guardian, trust holder and communicant of historical, ethnical and artistic memory.' The proposals come from all over the world, such #175 Azerbaijan: 'Each museum is the heir and guardian of a small collection of tangible and intangible human civilization which has been developing over the centuries of life on this planet with a variety of trial and errors as well as artistic creativities. Accordingly, the museum is where by recording, restoration, conservation, research and displaying these artefacts in different exhibitions tries to introduce the best of the past as an enlightened way forward for the future generations.'.
Anonymous
In Lisbon we also spoke about a definition for city museums, in addition to the general museum definition, but more about that another time. Inspired by the discussions, I attempted a definition. It will soon, anonymously as all other submissions, appear on the ICOM website and hopefully make a small contribution to this worldwide search for what museums are (striving to be):

A museum is a reliable, polyphonic, critical, transparent, inviting, exciting, attractive and informative institute that collects, preserves, displays, contextualises and critically examines material, immaterial and natural heritage, also in the light of the colonial origin of objects and the fact that histories of many social groups and communities are hidden or underexposed. A museum is a contact zone that stimulates empathy, encounters and curiosity and that encourages visitors to think about their place in the world and in history and their responsibility for the planet.

Dutch version of the blog here

First museum definition

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In 1946 the International Council of Museums (ICOM) formulated the first museum definition and in 2007 the last change was made. A committee is now working on a new definition because the old one 'does not reflect and express adequately the complexities of the 21stcentury and the current responsibilities and commitments of museums, nor their challenges and visions for the future.'

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But experts are divided on the proposed new definition

smithsonian.com

Come September, the official definition of a museum may change. For the last 50 years, the definition, as dictated by International Council of Museums (ICOM), a consortium of 40,000 professionals representing some 20,000 institutions-has revolved around acquiring, conserving, researching and exhibiting the "tangible and intangible heritage of humanity and its environment for the purposes of education, study and enjoyment."

Now, the ICOM's general assembly is scheduled to vote on a new definition, which expands museums' remit to emphasize inclusivity, democracy and critical dialogue that fosters "human dignity, ... social justice, global equality and planetary wellbeing." But a petition issued by 24 national branches of the global group may lead to a postponement and revision of the selected statement. According to Vincent Noce of the Art Newspaper, representatives from France, Italy, Spain, Germany, Canada, Russia and other member countries requested the delay. Predicting "major dissent" if the current definition is approved at the September 7 meeting in Kyoto, the petitioners have asked for extra time to deliver a "new proposal."

As Noce writes , proponents say the updated definition better reflects the demands of the 21st century, while critics argue it elevates ideology above such traditional values as research, preservation and education.

In full, the proposed redefinition reads:

Museums are democratizing, inclusive and polyphonic spaces for critical dialogue about the pasts and the futures. Acknowledging and addressing the conflicts and challenges of the present, they hold artifacts and specimens in trust for society, safeguard diverse memories for future generations and guarantee equal rights and equal access to heritage for all people.

Museums are not for profit. They are participatory and transparent, and work in active partnership with and for diverse communities to collect, preserve, research, interpret, exhibit, and enhance understandings of the world, aiming to contribute to human dignity and social justice, global equality and planetary wellbeing.

Speaking to the need for a redefinition, Jette Sandahl, the Danish curator who led the committee charged with writing a new definition, says the current phrasing ignores the demands of "cultural democracy" and "does not speak the language of the 21st century," as museums must reckon with colonial-era artifacts' provenance, funding sources, and the systemic under-representation of women and people of color. In an interview posted on YouTube, Sandahl adds, "It's not that it's wrong, [and] it's not that its incorrect. It's more that it's inadequate."

Klaus Staubermann, CEO of ICOM Germany, highlights specific concerns regarding the redefinition's language: Whereas the current phrasing uses keywords including "institution" and "education," the new version does not. "Both these words are very important, because their presence has a crucial effect on legislation in the German states," Staubermann tells artnet News' Kate Brown. However, he says that postponing the vote would be less about these smaller issues and "more about giving time to the discussion worldwide to address and accommodate everyone's concerns."

.@IcomOfficiel has unveiled its new museum definition after a worldwide consultation: https://t.co/AIdULFTix4

Do you think it captures what a museum is in the 21st century? #museums
- Museums Association (@MuseumsAssoc) August 1, 2019

François Mairesse, a professor at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle and chair of the International Committee of Museology, resigned from Sandahl's commission in June after deciding the proposal "did not reflect the discussions held over two years." In an interview with the Art Newspaper, he adds, "It would be hard for most French museums-starting with the Louvre-to correspond to this definition, considering themselves as 'polyphonic spaces.' The ramifications could be serious."

Per Hyperallergic's Zachary Small, social media users have also pointed out that the proposed definition does not mention museums' role as educational spaces. Responding to a poll posted by the London-based Museums Association, 62 percent of 226 respondents said they did not think the redefinition "captures what a museum is in the 21st century."

ICOM issued an open call for potential definitions and received more than 250 international submissions. One U.S. proposal calls museums "stewards of culture," while another from Poland suggests that such repositories protect "the material and intellectual life of the past in order to exist in the future." You can read all of the submissions for redefining what the museum means here.

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The Term 'Museum' May Be Getting Redefined

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smithsonian.com Come September, the official definition of a museum may change. For the last 50 years, the definition, as dictated by International Council of Museums (ICOM), a consortium of 40,000 professionals representing some 20,000 institutions-has revolved around acquiring, conserving, researching and exhibiting the "tangible and intangible heritage of humanity and its environment for the purposes of education, study and enjoyment."

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Article in Artnewspaper

What exactly is a museum? Icom comes to blows over new definition
As 50-year-old statement is overhauled, feuds over new description could „seriously weaken" the International Council of Museums Vincent Noce
"Major dissent" has been predicted if the proposed definition for museums is adopted at Icom's general assembly on 7 September. Photo: Scott Webb / Pexels

What exactly is a museum? If anyone knows, it should be the International Council of Museums (Icom), with its 40,000 members representing more than 20,000 museums. But that very question is, in fact, fuelling a bitter debate within the organisation and perhaps threatening its identity. On 12 August, 24 national branches-including those of France, Italy, Spain, Germany, Canada and Russia, along with five museums' international committees-requested the postponement of a vote on a revised definition of museums, in order to deliver a "new proposal".

The new definition was selected by Icom's executive board in Paris on 22 July, but the petition issued by the 24 national committees predicts "major dissent" if the proposal, which constitutes a "considerable shift", is adopted at its general assembly on 7 September in Kyoto.

For the past few decades, Icom has made only minor adjustments to its current statement defining the museum as "a non-profit institution" that "acquires, conserves, researches, communicates and exhibits the tangible and intangible heritage of humanity and its environment for the purposes of education, study and enjoyment." But some people, including the Danish curator Jette Sandahl, object saying "it does not speak the language of the 21st century" and that it does not reply to current demands of "cultural democracy".

Sandahl led the commission that put forward the new 100-word text, defining museums as "democratising, inclusive and polyphonic spaces for critical dialogue about the past and the future". It adds: "Addressing the conflicts and challenges of the present, they hold artefacts and specimens in trust for society, safeguard diverse memories for future generations and guarantee equal rights and equal access to heritage for all people." They are supposed to be "participatory and transparent", work "in active partnership with and for diverse communities" and "aiming to contribute to human dignity and social justice, global equality and planetary wellbeing".

"A definition is a simple and precise sentence characterising an object, and this is not a definition but a statement of fashionable values, much too complicated and partly aberrant." François Mairesse, a professor at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle

Juliette Raoul-Duval, who chairs Icom France, quickly denounced an "ideological" manifesto, "published without consulting" the national branches. "At first, I thought this was a joke," says Didier Rykner, the founder of the Tribune de l'art, attacking what he describes as an Orwellian newspeak that replaces art works with artefacts and specimens. "The definition should emphasise the importance of the museums' functions and its relationship to tangible and intangible heritage, which constitute its distinguishing characteristics from other cultural institutions," claim the national committees which asked to delay the vote, deploring the "political tone" of Sandahl's document.

A former director of Icom, and one of the founders of the concept of "new museology" in the 1970s, Hugues de Varine confesses that he was surprised by the "over inflated verbiage" of an "ideological preamble" which does not distinguish a museum from a cultural centre, a library or a laboratory.

The quarrel could be interpreted as a debate between the old guard and the younger generation, or between Latin tradition and the Anglo-Saxon move towards a more "inclusive" model. François Mairesse, a professor at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle and the chair of the International Committee of Museology, says the matter is more serious. He resigned in June from the commission headed by Sandahl, claiming the proposals "did not reflect the discussions held over two years".

"A definition is a simple and precise sentence characterising an object, and this is not a definition but a statement of fashionable values, much too complicated and partly aberrant," Mairesse says. „It would be hard for most French museums-starting with the Louvre-to correspond to this definition, considering themselves as 'polyphonic spaces'. The ramifications could be serious. Icom's statement can be included in national or international legislation and there is no way a jurist could reproduce this text."

Mairesse adds that „it does not take into account the extraordinary variety of museums. It would be disastrous to impose only one type of museum. If a vote breaks the consensus that has always governed Icom, it will seriously weaken the organisation."

Correction: This article formerly stated that Icom's current definition of a museum has been adhered to for the past 50 years. According to Icom's website it has undergone „minor adjustments over the past few decades".
http://theartnewspaper.com/news/what-exactly-is-a-museum-icom-comes-to-blows-over-new-definition

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ICOM MUSEUM DEFINITION - Embassy of Culture

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Article in Artnewspaper As 50-year-old statement is overhauled, feuds over new description could „seriously weaken" the International Council of Museums Vincent Noce "Major dissent" has been predicted if the proposed definition for museums is adopted at Icom's general assembly on 7 September. Photo: Scott Webb / Pexels What exactly is a museum?

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What is the definition of a museum? You might have thought it goes without saying but international experts have tied themselves up in knots over a proposed new definition, which will go to a vote on 7 September 2019.

For nearly 50 years, the International Council of Museums (ICOM) has subscribed to the definition of a museum as a " non-profit institution" that " acquires, conserves, researches, communicates and exhibits the tangible and intangible heritage of humanity and its environment for the purposes of education, study and enjoyment". In April 2019, ICOM invited proposals for a revised definition of the museum to ' reflect and express adequately the complexities of the 21st century and the current responsibilities and commitments of museums... their challenges and visions for the future '.

To date, ICOM has crowdsourced 269 proposed definitions, which it has published on its website. These include a submission from the United Kingdom, which defines museums as public institutions that ' collect, conserve, and communicate heritage through exhibitions and display. They... make cultural heritage present and accessible to all... are agents of education and recreation through research and display, with the power to lead social, cultural, and intellectual change for the benefit of human development '.

In spite of the crowdsourcing exercise, ICOM has sparked controversy over its decision to select a definition, which was not submitted as part of the public campaign. The definition that will go to a vote at ICOM's Extraordinary General Assembly in Kyoto, Japan, on 7 September was proposed internally by a commission led by Danish curator, Jette Sandahl. Suggesting that the current definition of the museum " does not speak the language of the 21st century" and ignores the demands of " cultural democracy ", Sandahl's commission proposes in part the following definition:

' Museums are democratizing, inclusive and polyphonic spaces for critical dialogue about the pasts and the futures. Acknowledging and addressing the conflicts and challenges of the present, they hold artifacts and specimens in trust for society, safeguard diverse memories for future generations and guarantee equal rights and equal access to heritage for all people '.

The proposed definition has deeply divided ICOM members including those who formed part of Sandahl's commission. Chair of the International Committee of Museology and professor at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, François Mairesse, was so perturbed by the " disastrous" proposal he resigned from Sandahl's commission in June. " This is not a definition but a statement of fashionable values", Mairesse said, He further added that " the ramifications could be serious. ICOM's statement can be included in national or international legislation and there is no way a jurist could reproduce this text ".

Chair of ICOM France, Juliette Raoul-Duval, criticised the " ideological" manifesto, which was " published without consulting" ICOM's national branches. Former director of ICOM and one of the founders of the 'new museology' movement in the 1970s, Hugues de Varine said he was surprised by the " over inflated verbiage " of the proposed definition.

Sandahl's proposal has even inspired a petition signed by 24 national branches of the council to postpone the 7 September vote in order to deliver a revised definition. It remains to be seen whether the petition will have the desired effect.

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What is the definition of a museum? You might have thought it goes without saying but international experts have tied themselves up in knots over a proposed new definition, which will go to a vote on 7 September 2019. For nearly 50 years, the International Council of Museums (ICOM) has subscribed to the definition of...

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You know that feeling you get when you listen to your favorite song? Or the feeling you get when somebody cancels a meeting? You'd probably categorize both as , but they're not exactly the same emotion. And, while there are plenty of English synonyms for happiness-such as joy, pleasure, cheer, glee, contentment -none of them really capture either feeling with much precision.

In his new book, Happiness-Found in Translation, psychologist Tim Lomas creates a road map for identifying various types of happiness, filled with words from other languages that don't necessarily have English equivalents. In addition to expanding your mental lexicon with beautiful vocabulary, Lomas argues that learning words to describe different feelings can actually magnify the feelings themselves. "Generally, the more awareness and understanding we have of our emotional lives, the greater our well-being," he writes.

Expand your emotional literacy with 11 of our favorite happiness terms below, complemented by illustrations from Annika Huett.

1. Shinrin-yoku (Japanese)

"Forest-bathing."

Going for a walk in the woods can sometimes clear your mind just as well as a good meditation session. There's no English term to capture the restorative effect of immersing yourself in nature, but the Japanese call it shinrin-yoku.

2. Charmolypi (Greek)

"Sweet, joy-making sorrow."

The best word we have to describe how you feel while celebrating the life of a loved one who recently died or waving goodbye to your toddler on their first day of school is probably bittersweet, but that doesn't convey the depth of that peculiar happy-sad emotion quite like charmolypi does.

3. Fjaka (Croatian)

"The sweetness of doing nothing."

In a society that champions the ability to multitask above all else, not trying to check the next item off your to-do list can seem overindulgent or even counterproductive. But if you do manage to surrender your whole mind and body to not doing anything at all, it can feel almost euphoric. Croatians call this all-encompassing relaxation fjaka.

4. Pretoogjes (Dutch)

"Fun eyes."

Have you ever met someone whose expression made you feel like you were in on a joke, without even knowing what the joke was? You might say they had a twinkle in their eye, which the Dutch call pretoogjes, or "fun eyes."

5. Sólarfrí (Icelandic)

"Sun holiday."

In Iceland, employees are sometimes granted an unexpected day off to enjoy a warm, sunny day. Though sun holidays might be uncommon in the U.S., we're well-acquainted with the nameless joy of unexpected freedom-many people experience it when their social plans get canceled.

6. Tarab (Arabic)

"Musically induced ecstasy or enchantment."

Though the specific songs, emotional reactions, and reasons behind those reactions may vary from person to person, being moved by music is a universal experience-even babies sometimes cry when they hear certain songs. In Arabic, this sense of losing yourself in the music is called tarab.

7. Sprezzatura (Italian)

"Nonchalant effortlessness."

Often, as in the case of a ballerina's grand jeté or Johnny Depp's unruly lock of hair in 1990's Cry-Baby, seemingly effortless grace is only achieved by years of practice (or gobs of hair gel). The ability to make something look so beautifully careless through careful study is known as sprezzatura in Italy.

8. Mamihlapinatapai (Yagán)

"A look between people that expresses unspoken but mutual desire."

A glance exchanged between two people who share a desire but are each hoping the other will make the first move is so full of nuance and complexity that we unsurprisingly haven't come up with an English word to describe it. The Yagán people of Tierra del Fuego in Argentina and Chile did not have a similar issue-they named it mamihlapinatapai.

9. Etterpåklokskap (Norwegian)

"After wisdom."

Mistakes, however dumb they may make us feel in the moment, are one of the best ways to learn and grow. Etterpåklokskap perfectly describes the grounded, enlightened feeling you get when you know exactly how to handle a situation because you've seen it (and screwed it up) before.

10. Engelengeduld (Dutch)

"Angelic patience."

The saint-like grace with which mothers react to just about everything that their kids do, from spitting up on their new blouses to throwing tornado-level temper tantrums in supermarkets, definitely deserves a special term. The Dutch call it engelengeduld.

11. Orka (Swedish)

"Requisite energy for a task."

Completing a task isn't always just about having enough physical energy for it-you also have to care enough to actually expend that energy. You might have orka to throw a surprise birthday party for your best friend, but you might not have orka to study for a quiz that probably won't affect your final grade.

Reprinted with permission from TarcherPerigee. Get a copy of Happiness-Lost in Translation for $13 from Amazon.
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The Definition of Museum Could Be Changing

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You know that feeling you get when you listen to your favorite song? Or the feeling you get when somebody cancels a meeting? You'd probably categorize both as , but they're not exactly the same emotion. And, while there are plenty of English synonyms for happiness-such as joy, pleasure, cheer, glee, contentment -none of them really capture either feeling with much precision.

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Museum directors and professionals from more than 100 countries have decided to postpone a decision whether to adopt a radical redefinition of the role of museums. After a week of debate in Kyoto, and pushback ahead of the International Council for Museums's annual conference in the historic Japanese city, delegates voted overwhelmingly against a contentious new definition that its critics argue is "too ideological."

The president of Paris-based ICOM, Suay Aksoy, stressed that the vote did not mean an end of the debate, rather a "new chapter" of the discussion about what a 21st-century museum should be.

In the vote at the global museum group's 2019 general conference, 70 percent voted in favor of postponing the vote, with 28 percent against the motion.

Aksoy stressed that ICOM was committed to updating its definition. "This is just another beginning in this process of redefinition," Aksoy said in a statement, adding that the committee working on a new definition will continue to meet. She said that new ideas "will probably appear in the new definition that will be an amendment of the proposed one."

Work on updating ICOM's museum definition began after its 2016 conference in Milan. The committee charged with coming up with a new wording that reflects contemporary challenges and environmental concerns was led by the Danish former museum director Jette Sandahl. The new definition, which emphasizes championing democratic values, social justice, and human dignity, was announced in July, causing consternation among more traditional members.

It was due to be put to the vote at ICOM's Kyoto conference, where 4,500 professionals from 120 countries met last week. Traditionalists were alarmed by the new definition, which declares that museums are "democratizing, inclusive, and polyphonic spaces for critical dialogue about the pasts and the futures." The new definition also stressed championing "human dignity and social justice, global equality, and planetary well being."

Ahead of the Kyoto conference, 24 national branches of ICOM, including France, Italy, Spain, and Germany, objected to the new definition, with some critics arguing it was "too ideological". Others worried that downplaying education in particular might have an unintended impact on public funding for institutions in some countries.

Rather than vote for or against the definition, the Kyoto conference voted to defer the decision. It looks as if until ICOM meets again in three years time, the definition of a museum remains as it has been since 2007, with the stress on institutions acquiring, conserving, and communicating cultural heritage "for the purposes of education, study, and enjoyment."

Speaking at the Kyoto conference, Sandahl said that ICOM received a total of 269 proposals from 69 countries submitted in 25 languages. Ahead of the conference, she had argued that being silent on issues of the environment and in denial of the legacies of inequality and asymmetry of power and wealth will no longer be sustainable for museums, if they want to stay relevant in the 21st century.

Some professionals in Kyoto questioned the decision to delay the decision. After the vote, Lonnie Bunch, the secretary of the Smithsonian, warned in a tweet: "We have to make sure that museums play a role in shaping a more inclusive future."

The president of the American Alliance of Museums, Laura Lott, tweeted in support of further debate. She warned that "it was easy for us in the US to say the global definition should change," but its impact for museums in other countries "has not been sufficiently studied."

Seema Rao, the author of Self Care for Museum Workers who works at the Akron Art Museum, was underwhelmed. She tweeted that the "whole definition thing feels farcical." Rao suggested that instead of having "arcane, esoteric conversations that just miss the point... [ICOM] should have asked visitors across the world what is a museum."

Want to stay ahead of the art world? Subscribe to our newsletter to get the breaking news, eye-opening interviews, and incisive critical takes that drive the conversation forward.

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Should Art Museums Be More or Less Ideological? After Pushback, a Gathering of Museum Leaders Refuses to Address the Question | artnet News

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Museum directors and professionals from more than 100 countries have decided to postpone a decision whether to adopt a radical redefinition of the role of museums. After a week of debate in Kyoto, and pushback ahead of the International Council for Museums's annual conference in the historic Japanese city, delegates voted overwhelmingly against a contentious new definition that its critics argue is "too ideological."

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The Museum Definition as the Backbone of ICOM

Preface

This document contains the recommendations and the report submitted by the Committee for Museum Definition, Prospects and Potentials (MDPP), according to its mandate, to the ICOM Executive Board regarding the needs for a potential revision of the museum definition. The ICOM Executive Board unanimously accepted the report and adopted the recommendations in December 2018.

Recommendations adopted by the Executive Board

ICOM should initiate a process of reinterpretation, revision, rewriting, and reformulation of the current museum definition to be proposed for debate and decision at the ICOM General Conference in Kyoto in September 2019.

This process should start immediately at the beginning of 2019, ensuring that there is time for a broad and global anchoring and involvement of the membership as a whole.

The MDPP is asked to initiate and organise this, in the first part of 2019, as a participatory process through structured dialogic methods.

The process may result in a number of different proposals to be brought to the Executive Board in June 2019, and one or more proposals to be brought to the General Conference in September 2019.

The following parameters are set for proposals for a new definition:

The museum definition should be clear on the purposes of museums, and on the value base from which museums meet their sustainable, ethical, political, social and cultural challenges and responsibilities in the 21st century.

The museum definition should retain-even if current terminology may vary-the unique, defining and essential unity in museums of the functions of collecting, preserving, documenting, researching, exhibiting and in other ways communicating the collections or other evidence of cultural heritage.

The museum definition should acknowledge the urgency of the crises in nature and the imperative to develop and implement sustainable solutions.

The museum definition should acknowledge and recognise with respect and consideration the vastly different world views, conditions and traditions under which museums work across the globe.

The museum definition should acknowledge and recognise with concern the legacies and continuous presence of deep societal inequalities and asymmetries of power and wealth-across the globe as well as nationally, regionally and locally.

The museum definition should express the unity of the expert role of museums with the collaboration and shared commitment, responsibility and authority in relation to their communities.

The museum definition should express the commitment of museums to be meaningful meeting places and open and diverse platforms for learning and exchange.

The museum definition should express the accountability and transparency under which museums are expected to acquire and use their material, financial, social and intellectual resources.

Report for the ICOM Executive Board, December 2018

I. The Museum Definition as the Backbone of ICOM

Founded in 1946, ICOM is the global organisation of museums and museum professionals, with 40,000 members from 140 countries from all continents. ICOM provides a shared ethical framework for museums, a forum for professional discussions, and a platform for questioning and celebrating heritage and collections in museums and cultural institutions.

As a backbone for this global organisation sits a shared definition of what museums are and what they do. The latest version is from 2007:

The museum is a non-profit, permanent institution in the service of society and its development, open to the public, which acquires, conserves, researches, communicates and exhibits the tangible and intangible heritage of humanity and its environment for the purposes of education, study and enjoyment.

While this definition is meant to define the essence of what constitutes a museum, it is also understood as an ideal, which is interpreted somewhat differently by museums, and ICOM recognises as members also institutions which only partially or to varying degrees fulfil all the criteria or functions.

Over the decades minor adjustments have been made to this definition. In December 2018 the ICOM Executive Board has decided that it is time to develop an alternative definition which will be more relevant and appropriate for museums in the 21st century and future museum landscapes. It should be a definition which recognises the dissimilar conditions and practices of museums in diverse and rapidly changing societies, and supports museums in developing and adopting new scientific paradigms and addressing more adequately the complexities of the 21st century.

The museum definition is a core document in ICOM's relationships with partner organisations and in the museum legislation of several countries, and all deliberations of changing it must include carefully weighing and balancing the gains of a revision against the complications of a change. However, the costs of not revising should also be considered, not least in the ways museums are perceived to be bound by their allegiances to former centuries.

Following exploratory work by a Working Group of around 25 ICOM members during 2015 and 2016, in 2017 a new Standing Committee, the Museum Definition, Prospects and Potentials committee (MDPP) was appointed by the Executive Board of ICOM. No clear consensus had emerged in the working group as to whether the definition should remain as is, change in limited ways, or change radically, in substance. But the initial discussions, supplemented by a survey which did a word to word, phrase by phrase analysis, illuminated core challenges in the current definition. The MDPP has included these analyses, as well as the extensive debates around a new museum definition during 2003-2004 in its work.

The MDPP differs categorically from these previous discussions of the museum definition in ICOM, in its formal dual mandate, on one level to document and analyse prevalent societal trends and how these impact museums, how museums anticipate them, resist them, and adapt to them, and, on another level, on this background to make recommendations to the Executive Board and Advisory Council of ICOM about the potential needs for a revision of the current definition.

The Committee for Museum Definition, Prospects and Potentials explores the shared but also the profoundly dissimilar conditions, values and practices of museums in diverse and rapidly changing societies. Combining broad dialogue across the membership with dedicated expert fora, the committee will address the ambiguous and often contradictory trends in society, and the subsequent new conditions, obligations and possibilities for museums, and advise the Executive Board and Advisory Council on these issues.
Approaching the ICOM General Conference in 2019 on the background of information gathered, new trends observed and documented, and discussions conducted through its various working groups, the committee will advise the Executive Board and the Advisory Council on museological and epistemological problem areas in the existing museum definition. It will make recommendations regarding the potential gains as well as the complication in revising the definition, as a shared, international framework, to reflect and include more current conditions, potentials and priorities for museums.

II. Working Methods for the MDPP

A fundamental challenge for ICOM, as for other organisations aiming for a global presence, is to counter the systemic European and Western dominance in the development of its strategies and policies, and to create and ensure a real global representation and participation in its central strategic processes.

A discussion of the definition of museums inevitably involves a set of assumptions and projections about the future of museums and of museums in different and rapidly changing societies. To adequately reflect not just the shared, but also the profound differences in the conditions and the purposes of museums, important discussions must, in basic ways, reflect the breadth of the ICOM member countries.

That there should be or could be a shared definition for museums across the world can in no way be taken for granted, desirable as it may be from a professional point of view. Universalising can serve to hide and obfuscate differences, as also the recent ICOFOM conferences on the museum definition have accentuated, and, if at all possible, any attempts at universalism must be carefully negotiated or earned.

At the centre of the MDPP committee is a core coordinating group, with representation from all continents, which sets the direction for and coordinates the work in the Committee, and around which circle a series of thematic working groups, with different content and somewhat different approaches, but all attempting a global participation.

Jette Sandahl chairs the committee

Richard West leads the theme of 'changing epistemologies, world views and museum typologies'

Margaret Anderson leads the theme of 'cultural democracy and cultural participation'

Kenson Kwok leads the theme of 'new trends in museum partnerships, ownership and governance'

George Abungu leads the theme of 'geopolitics, migration and decolonisation'

David Fleming leads a theme of 'global trends'

Lauran Bonilla-Merchav leads the area of the roundtables on challenges for societies and for museums

Francois Mairesse bridges to the discussion in ICOFOM on the museum definition

Alberto Garlandini has participated from the ICOM Executive Board

Afşin Altayli participates from the ICOM Secretariat

The core group of the MDPP met in Paris in June 2017 and June 2018, although not in full. None of the working groups have had the opportunity to meet in person, but they have communicated and functioned digitally only. Around 50 people have been involved in close consultations.

The MDPP has presented its work and timelines to the Executive Board in December 2016, in June 2017 and June 2018, and to the Advisory Council in June 2017 and June 2018 as well as in a number of national and international committees. Through the roundtables conducted by the MDPP, an additional estimated 850 ICOM members and other museum professionals from across the world have been involved in the discussions of the committee. The ICOFOM conferences on the museum definition have drawn close to 1,000 participants, also spanning different continents. There is clearly a great interest among ICOM members and in the ICOM committees in discussing new societal trends and challenges, the future of museums and the definition of museums.

The MDPP has approached the subject of the museum definition from the outside in. Attempting to sidestep the given mould, there has been less focus on critiquing and revising words or paragraphs in the current definition, and more on historicising and contextualising it, on denaturalising and decolonising it, and on anchoring the discussion of museums and the futures of museums in a larger framework of general societal trends and issues of the 21st century.

The MDPP reports and gives its recommendations to the ICOM Executive Board in December 2018, in time for involving and engaging the membership in preparing proposals for a revision or new definition for Kyoto 2019.

Whatever the final result of this process will be, reassessing the museum definition has proven to be an important occasion to re-examine the core values, the priorities and actual practices of the sector and see whether, how or to what extent they align.

III. Values and Purposes

A definition of museums should be clear and easy to understand, and should convey the spirit, the essence, the overall purposes of museums, as well as the values from which they operate.

A definition obviously cannot name and list all aspects of the wide and complex field of museums. However, it should be kept in mind that absences in core areas and on core subject matters in the definition, will leave these voids to be filled with the values of the status quo and the powers-that-be. Identifying and locating what is silent in the current definition and assessing the impact of this silence are part of the preparation for a revision, as are uncovering and interpreting the values embedded in or behind the choice of words.

As an organisational tool, for ICOM, its partners and for museums, the ICOM museum definition is inevitably both descriptive and prescriptive.

The museum definition delineates the purposes, responsibilities and functions of museums-the 'why' and 'what' of museums-and is supplemented and supported by the ICOM Code of Ethics in a description of the standards under which these responsibilities should be carried out-the 'how' of museums.

The current definition contains different, and unmediated, levels of purposes: museums should be 'in the service of society and its development', and fulfil its specific functions ' for the purposes of education, study and enjoyment '.

While in 1974 the immensely significant insertion of ' in service of society and its development ' was contentious and considered an inappropriate politisation of the purpose of museums by sections of the museum community, at the current point of time there is a need for a critical appraisal of the lack of specificity and the almost naive singularity of the term 'society' as well as of the questionable ambiguity of the term 'development'.

While the intended content of the phrase remains essential for current museum analysis and policy development, its openness signals an easy homogeneity, harmony and stability within and between the two terms 'museum' and 'society'. Societies, however, are ever changing, conflicted and contested contexts within which museums live and act, and which need to be explored in dynamic terms, to understand the diverse and contradictory developmental trends.

The ICOM museum definition and the Code of Ethics offer scant support for museums in understanding or defining their ethical, social or political place in relation to their close communities or the world at large, leaving individual museums to seek guidance outside the museum field, in other global organisations and documents like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and UNESCO's Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity to embed the museum in a clear set of values and system of ethical accountability.

Through ICOM's relationship with UNESCO, and documents like the UNESCO Recommendation concerning the Protection and Promotion of Museums and Collections, their Diversity and their Role in Society, ICOM is included in a world view and values of justice, liberty and peace, of solidarity, social integration and cohesion, sustainable development-reflecting, as it is, major concerns and priorities of the present time.

It seems, however, untenable in a contemporary and future context for ICOM to uphold this ethical vacuum or void in its own definition of museums. While ICOM has, for decades, assumed a position of advocacy around museum collections, historic monuments and even cultural landscapes, there seems to be a need for a framework of value-based advocacy or activist positions relative to people, to human rights and social justice, as well as to nature as the-increasingly threatened-source of life.

Furthermore, also absent from the definition is any reference to the accountability of museums towards the societies and the communities, which they serve, and to the means by which societal needs are reflected in museum strategies and policies, in core museum functions of research, collecting, preservation and exhibition.

Museums are not freestanding, sovereign, unfettered institutions, but are shaped by and deeply embedded in multiple economic and political intentions, in nation-building and the shaping of national identities, in regional and municipal revitalisation, regeneration, urban renewal-and of course, these days, significantly in the tourism market. There needs to be much more extensive accountability and transparency than the simple term ' non-profit ', to clarify how museums address their purpose, define and adhere to their principles, and acquire and use the material, financial, social and intellectual resources at their disposal.

When asked, in the roundtables of the MDPP about the most important contributions museums could make to society, the responses by museum professionals, while containing the purposes and functions of the current museum definition, went way beyond those into a strong and impassioned commitment to the broader and deeper, social and humanitarian potential of museums. These included bringing people together in purposeful convening, to exchange ideas, to create a sense of belonging and identity, to build empathy, understanding and sensitivity towards differences, to promote reflection and critical thinking, and to create spaces for reconciliation. To improve quality of life. Improve health.

It seems essential that a museum definition should contain this commitment as an overarching frame of values and purpose.

IV. Global Trends and their Reflection in Museums

Museums grow and multiply, significantly, across the world. Current trends and changes in societies directly and indirectly impact, frame and affect museums and museum work. In adapting to the new conditions and new possibilities museums stretch, bend and reinvent the known institutional formats of what a museum is thought to be. If the concept of ' permanence ' is relevant in a museum definition, it should be in relation to the life of collections as such, rather than to the specific institutional or organisational forms around them which are continuously changing.

Societal changes are complex, contradictory and uneven. However, major global surveys and analytical forecasts seem to point to some pressing issues and vital concerns facing the world today and in the near future, which, with some regional and other demographic variations, are broadly shared across the world. These include climate change and the destruction of nature, inequality, lack of economic opportunities, migration, discrimination, large scale conflicts and wars, government transparency and accountability.

Observing societal trends like these can provide useful tools for navigating and charting the potential relevance for the sector, for organisations like ICOM as well as for individual museums.

Museum professionals in the MDPP roundtables voiced very similar concerns to those of respondents to global surveys. They also identified some of the challenges, which these issues pose to museums, and which underline the importance of developing more inclusive methods, open to the involvement and participation of communities, and addressing themes of inequality and human rights, globalisation and migration, climate change.

While new museums, specialist museums and museum-like initiatives are created specifically to address some of the contentious issues of ethnicity, human rights, gender, sustainability or even the future, in response to expressed societal, governmental and community needs, there remains a gap between these core concerns and the themes dominating the research, the collecting, the exhibitions and events in traditional, mainstream museums.

As each year there are palpable increases in, for instance, the extinction of species and the permanent disappearance of arable soil, in the inequalities in class-based life expectancies and in the millions of people displaced by conflicts and wars, for museums to claim neutrality in relation to urgent societal issues is increasingly perceived, by both museum professionals themselves and by the wider society, as an abnegation of societal responsibilities. It is not a question of whether, but rather a question of which values and which world views museums reflect or represent, and how transparent they are about acknowledging them.

While there are obviously places in the world, where actively addressing contentious issues is highly risky for a museum, in other parts of the world the dangers of being too outspoken should be measured and balanced against the dangers of museums being perceived as irrelevant, by their communities as well as by their funding authorities.

The disconnect, the hesitancy and reticence with which museums stay away from societal conflicts, contentious content and contemporary dilemmas, even when these relate closely to their defining subject matter, seem rooted both in the epistemological traditions and the historic positions museums have held within the power structures of their societies.

V. Epistemologies, World Views and Museum Typologies

Intuitively, the word 'museum' is easily understood in its manifold complexity, with a stable core concept of a collection, of objects bearing information and transmitting emotions, memory and knowledge to those who view, contemplate and connect with them.

But it takes little unpacking or scratching beneath the surface of the museum definition for the scientific, social and political roots in the value systems and systems of thought of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries to emerge.

From the logics of the earliest, private Wunder and Kunstkammers through the development and consolidation of the binary hierarchies of Western rationalism, museums represent tangible evidence of how societies in different historical periods organise their knowledge and the principles behind this knowledge. Gradually, over the centuries, museums have been shaped by the splitting of culture and nature, of art and culture, of art and ethnography, of history and technology and art, into discrete departments in larger museums, and into the formation of scores of new, single-disciplinary museums in the late 19th century.

As the detrimental, long-term, in some cases irreversible, consequences of the so-called scientific revolution and interventionist philosophies of nature become increasingly tangible in the 21st century, the problematic character of the 20th century language of ' humanity and its environment' of the museum definition-as is the case with ' in the service of society and its development '-is equally manifest.

The isolation and elevation of humans from the rest of nature and the corresponding reduction of nature to being part of humanity's environment, in the current museum definition, leave no conceptual or principal place for the important natural history museums collections. And conversely, cultural history collections are divorced from responsibilities relative to nature. The museum definition thus provides no ethical or intellectual guidance or support for museums trying to address the multipronged current crises in the bifurcated relationship of humans in nature, and for museums trying to contribute to a critical exploration of sustainability with the level of authority, the collections could actually merit.

New museums, often driven by strong indigenous presences, in particularly the Americas, the Pacific and now also the African continent, are developing inter-, trans-, and multidisciplinary, holistic approaches and methods, and embracing world views, cosmologies and epistemologies, which understand and interpret objects and collections within a framework of a fundamental connectivity and interrelatedness of all things, all beings. These paradigms provide powerful alternatives for museums, when they, faced with the complexities of the 21st century, re-examine their lockdown in the single disciplinary methods and approaches.

A museum definition should be rooted in a plurality of world views and systems of knowledge, rather than in a single, Western scientific tradition.

Knowledge is, to an important extent, situated. Increasingly museums come to realise, often under pressure from people whose points of view and experiences are underrepresented, that the demographic composition of staff impact the kind of knowledge and perspectives the museum can create, and its ability-or inability-to meet the different, and often conflicted, gender, class, ethnic, or racial perspectives of its communities. A major shift in the 20th century was the recognition, not least in countries with strong indigenous voices, of the needs and rights of a primary setting to interpret its culture and objects.

A museum definition should speak from a position of respect for this basic principle of self-representation.

Throughout the history of museums, their unique and defining quality lies in uniting functions and dimensions, which are most often split in institutional settings-in bringing together research and ideas with material evidence and culture, ideas with physical Gestaltung, scientific knowledge production with the general public, documentation with communication.

The fundamental and inbuilt educational and social purpose of museums is well documented through museum history. The relationship between collections and people is the constituent one, when collections make the leap from private passion to public museum.

It seems essential, at a time of reassessing the basic definition of museums and at a time when the sector is often restructured, to never lose sight of or let go of this fundamental unity and interconnectivity of the various functions of a museum, the ' acquires, conserves, researches, communicates and exhibits ' of the museum definition-even if the language for and around the functions may need to be updated. These functions and their integrated whole remain principally and categorically essential for the museum field and for a museum definition.

However, how these basic museum functions enter into a closer, more accountable relationship with the general public, with communities and stakeholders represents a new challenge, as the expectations towards cultural participation take hold and spread in the 21st century.

VI. Power, Ethics and Cultural Rights

The global geopolitical context, conflicts and balances of the 21st century differ categorically from the centuries in which the museum as a paradigm and institutional model was formed. They also vary greatly from the 20th century in which the ICOM museum definition was developed.

Museums as institutions were shaped at the intersection of a spirited quest for knowledge and new scientific paradigms with the extreme violence employed by European powers in the colonisation of the Americas, in the enslavement of populations in Africa, in religious persecutions and expulsions within Europe. They were also shaped within and at the time of a paradigm which defined rights through ownership, thus denying the full humanity of large populations, globally and locally, and excluding them from citizenship.

Absent, however, from the current museum definition is any reference to colonial or other legacies of power and wealth, which have been constitutive for the principles of how Western museum collections were formed, with ethnographic collections shaped through the notion of hierarchies of civilisation and (racial) inferiority, and national collection shaped through the hierarchies of property and wealth, class, ethnicity and gender.

The museum definition thus, again, leaves an ethical vacuum as the legitimacy of the amassing of cultural property from other continents in European museums is persistently and more widely interrogated in a contemporary geopolitical context, and as museums on all continents engage in the fraught, political, intellectual and emotional processes of decolonisation, be it in terms of processes of repatriation, of recontextualising collections, of developing methods of cooperation and consultations, or in ensuring the diversity of staff and in governance.

Critiquing and protesting the way museums, monuments and sites perpetuate traditions of power is not an attempt to rewrite history, but a demand, in the present time, to right historic wrongs.

The absent thematisation, in the museum definition, of the asymmetries of power and wealth leaves museums without an ethical framework within which to explore and expand the unique potential-and obligations-of museums relative to current societal issues of mass displacement and migration. As a global professional organisation ICOM needs to provide points of reference, which can name, contain and provide guidance in the conflicts between what is currently often called the Global South and Global North, and make 'decolonisation', in the widest sense of the word, a mutual and shared need and commitment.

Likewise, a definition of museums needs to recognise the general, national and local issues of privilege and inequality, which mar most or all countries and cultures, and be sensitive and open to the emergence of new museum paradigms which do not mirror the traditional mould.

Museums try, some would even claim that they do their best, to direct their resources towards the needs of the people they serve. However, even the most basic audience research will show the uneven pattern of museum audiences, least pronounced in natural history museums, most pronounced in contemporary art museums. Museums tend to serve the well-educated audiences far more than other demographic groups. And this does not begin to address the questions of how privilege manifests itself behind the scenes of museums, in the prioritising of themes, methods, content, or in recruitment and governance.

The high visitor figures in museums are put in perspective by this skewed composition towards privilege, and by the failure to provide equal and real access for all, even in countries where legislation, a broad political will and public funding support this. Taking a commitment to equal rights to culture seriously, transcending the economic, social and cultural barriers of power and privilege and bridging the sense of disconnect, requires more than the mere being ' open to the public ' of the current museum definition indicates. It requires a proactive engagement with and responsiveness to the diverse needs of diverse constituents.

VII. Cultural Democracies and Cultural Participation

In the broadest meaning of the word, as the possibility for people, as individuals or collectives, to participate in the planning, steering, and governing of their own lives, democracy is a concept of hope, of aspiration, of striving, never complete, never fully realised.

The history and processes of democracy have always been defined as much through what and who they exclude as by what and who they include. The 19th and 20th centuries saw fierce and successful struggles to expand who-in terms of class, gender and race-was to be enfranchised and included in the processes of governing societies. The 21st century is marked by important expansions in what is included-which areas of life are to be considered part of a political realm and included in shared public decision making. At the same time, in the Global North and West, neo-liberalist economic developments of the 21st century are narrowing and restricting the areas within which government and general society can actually exert real control.

Formal representative democracy is increasingly supplemented by informal local processes to shape and govern everyday quality of life, in neighbourhoods, at work, in places of education, in city development and planning. In museums, likewise, the expectations for influence, participation and direct involvement are growing amongst constituents. The ' education, study and enjoyment', which is allocated to ' the public' in the current museum definition, wants to blend into the active verbs of ' acquires, conserves, researches, communicates and exhibits ', which have been hitherto reserved for the museum itself.

Learning is increasingly understood as active, self-directing and self-selecting processes, in which knowledge, aided also by digital technologies, is discovered, developed, and constructed. Public expectations of participation, collaborative processes and cocreation begin to reach behind the traditional public scenes of exhibitions, education and events, into the back-of-house functions of collecting, documentation, research and general policy making. Across the world, museums are experimenting with expanding their realms and methods to include and support new paradigms of public participation, in a positive, productive tension between being both an expert institution and a community platform.

A museum definition needs to recognise these paradigmatic shifts towards a relational framework, in a conceptual language of involvement, of mutuality and reciprocity, exchange, equal partnership, outreach and inreach, cooperation, collaboration, shared responsibility, shared purposes and collective authority.

Democracy-if that word or concept will survive much longer in the 21st century-is ideally about empowerment of individuals and communities as well as about processes for peacefully negotiating and mediating differences and divergent points of view. The last quarter of the 20th century saw the emergence of a new generation of museums defining themselves as places, where a plurality of voices can speak, and where strangers can safely interact.

In the MDPP roundtables the democratic functions and purposes of museums were given a primary importance. Creating museums, as they say. as places for critical thought and pluralist views in an increasingly polarised world, calls for methods that strengthen community participation and access to heritage for all citizens.

While a language that transcends the binary hierarchy between the museum and its constituents, communities or audiences is not readily at hand, a future museum definition must, inevitably, define, reflect and support these broad democratic purposes as an overarching framework for museums, their purposes and functions as well as for their professions and governance.

Jette Sandahl
Jette Sandahl was the founding director of the pioneering Museum of World Cultures in Sweden and the Women's Museum of Denmark. She served as Director Experience at National Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa and as Director of Exhibitions and Public Programs at the National Museum of Denmark. Most recently, she was director of the Museum of Copenhagen. She attended the Getty Museum Management Institute and has held a number of elected and appointed posts in the national and international museum world. She currently chairs the ICOM Standing Committee for the Museum Definition, Prospects and Potentials (MDPP) as well as the European Museum Forum. She publishes within the broad museological field.

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The Museum Definition as the Backbone of ICOM

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The Museum Definition as the Backbone of ICOM This document contains the recommendations and the report submitted by the Committee for Museum Definition, Prospects and Potentials (MDPP), according to its mandate, to the ICOM Executive Board regarding the needs for a potential revision of the museum definition.

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 International Committee for Museums and Collections of Modern Art - CIMAM

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 International Committee for Museums and Collections of Modern Art - CIMAM

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ICOM is leading and will continue to lead the conversation about what a museum is.

After a profound and healthy debate among ICOM members, the Extraordinary General Assembly has decided to postpone the vote on the new museum definition. The decision gathered 70,41% votes in favour.

"This has been one of the most democratic processes in the history of ICOM", said Suay Aksoy, President of ICOM. "The discussion continues, and MDPP will continue its work by interacting with all the National and International Committees, to talk about the implementation and assimilation of these new ideas as they will probably appear in the new definition that will be and amendement of the proposed one. This is not the end, this is just another beginning in this process of redefinition. I invite all members to participate in the discussions as they advance."

Since ICOM's creation in 1946, the ICOM definition played a central role for museums and museum professionnals and became a reference in the international museum community.

According to the ICOM Statutes, adopted by the 22nd General Assembly in Vienna, Austria, on 24 August, 2007:
"A museum is a non-profit, permanent institution in the service of society and its development, open to the public, which acquires, conserves, researches, communicates and exhibits the tangible and intangible heritage of humanity and its environment for the purposes of education, study and enjoyment."
In the aftermath of the 2016 ICOM General Conference in Milan, a new Standing Committee has been appointed to study the current definition. The Committee on Museum Definition, Prospects and Potentials (MDPP, 2017-2019) explores the shared but also the profoundly dissimilar conditions, values and practices of museums in diverse and rapidly changing societies. Combining broad dialogue across the membership with dedicated expert fora, the committee is addressing the ambiguous and often contradictory trends in society, and the subsequent new conditions, obligations and possibilities for museums.
ICOM News 7 September 2019

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ICOM postpones the vote on a new museum definition

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ICOM is leading and will continue to lead the conversation about what a museum is. After a profound and healthy debate among ICOM members, the Extraordinary General Assembly has decided to postpone the vote on the new museum definition. The decision gathered 70,41% votes in favour.

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A closer look at the International Committee of Museums' proposal

'The Scholar' by Bill Gekas

A few weeks ago, following months of research and public consultation, the International Committee of Museums (ICOM) launched the proposed new double-barrel museum definition. This time around, ICOM went for a major overhaul rather than a cyclical review happening every so often. The discussion on the proposed definition has been, since then, rather intense and described as a hotly contested debate by international press such as The Art Newspaper. A handful of national branches have asked ICOM to postpone the official vote scheduled for early September in order to deliver a "new proposal." So what is this new museum definition all about and why has it stirred so much controversy?

Let's start with the first thing that comes to mind ... and that, to me, might sound like a very obvious question. Why was there the need to change the current museum definition in the first place?

The need seems to have long been felt, also in view of the sector's significant developments and the rapid changes that contemporary societies have witnessed over the past decade. Way back in 2014, I did comment, along with others, that the current definition was becoming reduntant in the face of an ever-growing need to decisively relocate the public to the centre of the museum experience and to humanise the museum, particularly the art museum institution ...

The definition of museums promoted by the International Committee of Museums describes the museum institution as a 'non-profit institution at the service of society'. This is a general requirement for museums but rather than being a static and un-reflexive upholder of a tightly bound culture [the humanist museum should aim] to build on the potential synergies and constant interface with the community.'

What I claim here is that museums and their corresponding communities have oftentimes ran adrift. Just being 'at the service of society' implies a passive role which does not address the current needs and aspirations of contemporary societies more keen on participatory and engaging access.

Maria Vlachou, Executive Director of Portughese Organisation Acesso Cultura, has recently pointed out, that the current definition

'... has not served the museum field, and society at large, for a long time now, as many museum professionals have failed to understand that "to acquire, conserve and research" is not an aim, a purpose in itself, bur rather a tool, in order to fulfil the purposes mentioned by the definition.'

Vlachou's comments refer to collections as a resource and a means to an end rather than an end in itself. In short, putting together a collection and ensuring access over time should not and is not the main objective and mission of museums. Rather, it is the public, its needs and aspirations that collections should be there for, a resource rather than an art history book on display.

Jette Sandahl, chair of the ICOM standing committee for the new museum definition, feels that the current definition is more inadequate rather than wrong. In Sandahl's own words ...

"The museum definition thus seems to need to be historicised, contextualised, de-naturalised and de-colonialised."

Let us turn to the proposed double-barrel definition. The phrasing used and the key words that can be underpinned can provide us with insight as to whether this definition speaks for where the museum landscape stands today or whether this is more akin to an ambition. The first part reads eloquently well.

"Museums are democratising, inclusive and polyphonic spaces for critical dialogue about the pasts and the futures. Acknowledging and addressing the conflicts and challenges of the present, they hold artefacts and specimens in trust for society, safeguard diverse memories for future generations and guarantee equal rights and equal access to heritage for all people."

1. '... democratising, inclusive and polyphonic'

This I consider to be very much in line with the ambition of a human-experience or human centred museum or, better still, a museum at the service of humanity. I particularly like the word polyphonic, which reminds me of an orchestra with its various components playing a given repertoire. The individual components may just be playing a script, somewhat boring or perhaps incomprehensible when hear in isolation, but harmonious and inspiring when heard together. Questions nonetheless beckon. How much are today's museums inclusive and polyphonic not only in their programming and events but also in the collections they develop or get entrusted with? How much is the art museum representative of the polyphony of cultures that constitute a given community?

2. '... spaces for critical dialogue about past and futures.'

Yet again, this is about the ways and means how museums can and should should aspire to become cultural spaces where publics meet collections and material culture on display. It is within these spaces, at the intersection of these encounters, that new ideas and thoughts about our past and futures are incubated. Sadly, however, this is not so common as one might expect. More often than not, it is the token visit that counts for millions of visitors to museums, and that special encounter with a masterpiece that is oftentimes on a tick-box list of to do's.

3. '... safeguard diverse memories ...'

This too is something that museums struggle to engage with. It is a fact that the vast majority of museums, particulary those with national status, strive to safeguard the official memory of the state rather than the polyphonic narratives of a history that should by now be read beyond the victor-victim paradigm. Indeed, when will the memory of the vanquised and that of the victor be celebrated within the same cultural space that is the 21st century museum?

4. '... guarantee equal rights ...'

I think museums at large are still far from universally acknowledging this valie and giving such a guarantee. Equal rights ambitions have so far revolved around such things as bespoke programming for 'special needs' visitors and minority communities. Such guarantees would eventually need to inform what is collected and goes on display, which in the case of national museums is oftentimes in response to the endorsed and institutionalised narrative of the state. Indeed, equal rights would concern not only access but also representation and display. Are museums doing so universally? I doubt it.

The second part of the proposed double-barrel statement is even more ambitious and equally vision-driven.

"Museums are not for profit. They are participatory and transparent, and work in active partnership with and for diverse communities to collect, preserve, research, interpret, exhibit, and enhance understandings of the world, aiming to contribute to human dignity and social justice, global equality and planetary wellbeing."

5. 'They are participatory ...'

The participatory museum is certainly gaining traction and has been doing so for well over a decade. The European Union has also legislated on Participatory Governance of Cultural Heritage. Indeed, this ambition seems to have much more institutional clout than most of what has been featured in the double-barrel definition. Notwithstanding this endorsement, the level and extent of participatory practice remains uneven across the global museum landscape.

6. '...work in active partnerships with and for communities...'

This may be that part of the double-barrel definition which is most tangibly relevant. The vast majority of museums have, indeed, forged partnerships across the cultural spectrum, be they financial, programming or outreach related, educational or otherwise. How much and to what extent these partnerships with and for communities are effective and relevant is a different matter altogether.

7. '...contribute to human dignity and social justice, ...'

That this part of the definition is politically loaded seems to be immediately self-evident. Human dignity is, indeed, about a person's intrinsic worth and value within a given society ... about being human. This reminds me very much of Neil Postman 's statement

'As I see it a museum is an answer to a fundamental question... what does it mean to be a human being?'

Social justice is a much more challenging statement for museums, particularly those that are not within full-democracies or instituted by authoritarian governments.

'Maid it' by Bill Gekas

The question beckons ... is ICOM's double-barrel proposal really a possible definition, a declared ambition or a proposed vision?
Our blog posts shall, from now onwards, be intermittently featuring works of art in varied media. The choice of pictures featured here is by Australian photographer Bill Gekas. We thank him for his consent to be part of the Humanist Museum Project.

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A closer look at the International Committee of Museums' proposal A few weeks ago, following months of research and public consultation, the International Committee of Museums (ICOM) launched the proposed new double-barrel museum definition. This time around, ICOM went for a major overhaul rather than a cyclical review happening every so often.

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The slogan "I was there when the definition of museum was discussed in Kyoto" runs these days in social media. And newspapers around the world take up the topic, saying that this "there", the ICOM general assembly, was an intense, "deep and healthy" debate - or "a strange and untransparent descent into chaos," according to the president of the working group that originated the proposal for a new definition of museum. However, apart from adjectives, what was left was the postponement of any decision, taken by about 70% of the voters, and if this new proposal were really to vote, it would certainly reach 80% against, because several committees were against the postponement, yes, but because they wanted to reject it, right there.

What was in question in Kyoto, and what made museums around the world vibrate so much? Well, in essence, an opposition, which I am sure will be accentuated in the future, between a purely instrumental and aspirational vision of museums, which at the very least diminishes them by their assimilation to any other cultural institution or project animated by motivations and principles of social democracy, and another that, without rejecting such principles, seeks to fixate on what distinguishes museums, makes them unique and therefore magnifies them in their irreducible originality. The first perspective is best suited to "activists of all just causes"; the second is for museum professionals, ICOM being precisely their most worldwide representative NGO (over 44,000 worldwide), designed in a bottom-up sociological and juridical conception.

The proposal for consideration by the ICOM General Assembly resulted from the action taken in the last three years by a working group set up and made up at its discretion by the president of ICOM and subsequently validated by the Executive Board. During this period, this group promoted dozens, maybe more, of debates around the world, with very variable participation, both in quantitative terms (tens or hundreds of participants), as well as in qualitative terms (amalgam between mere "museums' lovers" and scholars or professionals, with limited and unregistered participation of ICOM members). I have personally been able to participate in several, both in Latin America and Europe, and I know what they were: nice and vivid assemblies, at best, but without any conditions to seriously think about what museums are or should be, in professional terms.

The group also collected 269 proposals for a new definition of museum (a number that may appear impressive, but it turns out to be modest, considering that the surveyed universe was potentially made up of all the inhabitants of the planet). Aligned anonymously (with indication only of the proponent's country of origin, which curiously shows that most of them were European or North American), it is worth noting that the largest of these definition proposals were "poetic hymns" (one of them, Italian, it simply proposed that museums be described as "places for distilling visions", period), in some cases reaching the level of manifestos. But it turns out that not even this bizarre collection was retained in the proposed definition. ICOM France has clearly demonstrated this: the proposed definition is anchored in terms that are not even mentioned by 1% of respondents ("polyphonic", "conflict", "social dignity" or "planetary welfare") and others by less than 5% ("challenges", "equal rights", "human dignity" or "global equity"). That is, a set of statements that wander between meritorious (who can oppose the defense of "social dignity"?) and the undecipherable (is not "global equity" a pleonasm in itself?), almost in the manner of "miss universe statement", but without really fulfilling what is required of an operational definition of a museum.

And is such a definition so important? Yes and no at the same time. Of course, as with whatever it is, the underlying content (real, desirable or even simply imagined) is much more important than the terms that, by trying to fix it, always reduce that essence. But definitions are still necessary, either in pure or applied science, as for the most in organizations that are guided by the empirical principle of effective intervention in life, aiming to establish boundaries allowing to define social and professional fields - and to defend them upon all possible interlocutors. Now, as ICOM Canada has shown, for example, ICOM's definition of a museum is now used in the national laws of many dozen countries and serves to preserve museums as "permanent institutions" (designation irresponsibly abandoned in the proposal), meaning, entities with some organizational autonomy vis-à-vis the political powers of the shift; and the emphasis putted on the technical specificities of the so-called "museums' functions" is also a recognized guarantee of the careers and independence of their professionals. Given these implications, it becomes easily understandable why so many extra-European committees, even more than European ones, had vehemently complained about the regression that the proposed new definition could constitute in their countries, where democratic practice is less rooted and the so-called "civil society" proves to be weaker.

In other words, perhaps inebriated by their inflamed discourses, closed-loop built, it happened to the most activist advocates of the new definition proposal, rudely rejected, which often happens to those who let themselves be detached from reality: they bumped into it, simply. The US example was in this particular paradigmatic: while the chair of his respective national committee of ICOM, known for its near weakness, comparing to what ICOM national committees are in almost developed countries, was resolutely advocating in favour of the new proposed definition, the president of the American Museum Alliance, the true leader of museums in that country, recommended postponing the decision - which seems to have been shared by representatives of the rest of the world who decided as such, massively.

What will it happen from now on? Well, it is to expect that the discussion will be launched again in a future new extraordinary general assembly, maybe next year, in June, during the annual meetings of ICOM in Paris. But no one knows exactly which process will be followed in order to satisfy the criticisms raised by the vast majority of national and international committees who have defend postponement as a way to enlarge the discussion within ICOM and to finally get maybe several alternative proposals, aiming to be more consensual. The only guideline is what substantively was approved when postponing was voted: the EGA "takes note of all the contributions that have been made during the EGA for future debates on the Museum Definition."

The president of ICOM emitted, nevertheless, a note immediately after the postponing decision saying that: "The discussion continues, and MDPP will continue its work by interacting with all the National and International Committees, to talk about the implementation and assimilation of these new ideas as they will probably appear in the new definition that will be and amendment of the proposed one. This is not the end, this is just another beginning in this process of redefinition. I invite all members to participate in the discussions as they advance." And this note has comprehensibly generated great discomfort among the subscribers of the postponing proposal, ICOM Europe included. Firstly, to keep the MDPP is in itself doubtful: maybe it would be time now to clearly distinguish between "museum definition" and "prospects and potential". The last are surely important to consider, but could maybe advantageously be transferred to a sort of "mission statement" or "strategic goals" level, not integrating the definition itself, which has to be short, straight worded and centered in what really distinguish museums. Secondly, if really to keep the MDPP, then its composition has necessarily to be profoundly reviewed and strong, clear, links are to established with national and international committees, maybe throughout the Advisory Board or, as it seems more natural and wised, by attributing the centrality of the process to ICOFOM, which has not only the capacities but the organizational legitimacy to act as such.

Let's so hope that the process will not, from now on, repeat neither the methodology, nor the conceptual frame of these last three years. Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results is the Einstein's definition (here we are: definition...) for insanity - and we have necessarily to be concerned on what can it happen to ICOM if the next EGA is to be faced with basically the same conceptual proposal. Being optimistic, and most of all, having full confidence in ICOM capacity to regenerate, as it was eloquently proven in Kyoto, I dare to anticipate that the future museum definition, departing maybe from the current one as it has been done in the past, will reach wide consensus and will continuing to serve as powerful tool in order to defend and promote museums and museums professionals world around.

President of ICOM Europe Regional Alliance

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The slogan "I was there when the definition of museum was discussed in Kyoto" runs these days in social media. And newspapers around the world take up the topic, saying that this "there", the ICOM general assembly, was an intense, "deep and healthy" debate - or "a strange and untransparent descent into chaos," according to the president of the working group that originated the proposal for a new definition of museum.

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L'Icom discute una nuova definizione, contestata però da molti Comitati nazionali

Kyoto (Giappone). Il museo contemporaneo mostra volti sempre diversi ma, nel mutamento, ciò che sembra emergere oggi è come sia diversa l'aspettativa che in tutto il mondo si ha per il museo. Senza dubbio un fenomeno culturale di vasta portata: in crescita esponenziale il numero dei musei (nonostante le mille difficoltà di gestione di quelli esistenti) e in aumento il dibattito che li riguarda.

Per l'Icom (l'International Council of Museums che associa circa 40mila iscritti tra musei e professionisti) l'impegno costante per una definizione riconosciuta a livello mondiale esplicita la volontà di confrontarsi e condividere una visione di pace attraverso la custodia del patrimonio culturale mondiale. Definizione di museo e Codice etico sono i fondamenti di un network museale mondiale che si riconosce in principi comuni che sono sempre andati oltre le ideologie e le normative nazionali.

La definizione di museo nelle sue varianti, l'ultima è del 2007, è sempre stata il risultato di un processo puntuale di revisione e aggiornamento. Non è espressione di mode temporanee, quanto piuttosto formulazione di prospettive future di lavoro. Naturale la necessità di una revisione a distanza di 12 anni, e in questa complessa congiuntura storica. La sollecitazione per una rivisitazione è stata quindi colta in molte parti del mondo con entusiasmo come importante momento di riflessione sul ruolo del museo oggi.

In Italia il percorso di revisione è stato avviato con il presupposto di mantenere le funzioni proprie del museo per approfondire le finalità che il museo ha oggi con la propria azione culturale. Il confronto nel gruppo di lavoro, coordinamenti, soci e direttivo allargato ha definito il museo come " istituzione permanente, senza scopo di lucro, accessibile, che opera in un sistema di relazioni al servizio della società e del suo sviluppo sostenibile. Effettua ricerche sulle testimonianze dell'umanità e dei suoi paesaggi culturali, le acquisisce, le conserva, le comunica e le espone per promuovere la conoscenza, il pensiero critico, la partecipazione e il benessere della comunità".

La proposta è il risultato di una mediazione interna che riconosce sempre il valore del museo come istituzione autorevole per individuare una direzione di sviluppo anche in considerazione della complessità professionale che il museo in quanto istituzione richiede.

Un approccio dunque che fa apparire la proposta internazionale inaccettabile: " Museums are democratising, inclusive and polyphonic spaces for critical dialogue about the pasts and the futures. Acknowledging and addressing the conflicts and challenges of the present, they hold artefacts and specimens in trust for society, safeguard diverse memories for future generations and guarantee equal rights and equal access to heritage for all people. Museums are not for profit. They are participatory and transparent, and work in active partnership with and for diverse communities to collect, preserve, research, interpret, exhibit, and enhance understandings of the world, aiming to contribute to human dignity and social justice, global equality and planetary wellbeing".

Oltre l'esagerata lunghezza, che oltretutto non riesce a circoscrivere un'entità sul piano concettuale, si ritiene la definizione vaga. Attraverso degli slogan si esprime più ideologia che prospettiva di lavoro. Ancora più grave appare l'intraducibilità di alcuni termini come " democratising, inclusive and polyphonic spaces". Un aspetto da non sottovalutare per una definizione che deve riuscire a esprimere la forza del suo significato in molte lingue oltre le tre di Icom.

In Italia ancora oggi, ad esempio, con difficoltà si coglie il significato del " non profit" senza alcuna distinzione a volte tra l'importanza di avere risorse da reinvestire e l'inammissibilità che vi siano utili da ripartire. Così come per il " diletto", banalizzato troppo spesso nel gioco e non inteso come godimento nel vivere l'esperienza culturale.

In questa vicenda va colto però l'aspetto più interessante. Pur destando perplessità il metodo di raccolta anonimo che non distingue il lavoro di approfondimento e mediazione di alcuni Comitati nazionali e internazionali, e le intuizioni, per quanto intriganti, del singolo proponente, le circa 280 proposte fatte nella piattaforma online consentono di avere uno straordinario spaccato culturale internazionale. Un patrimonio da analizzare per capire che cosa sta accadendo nel mondo e la percezione che si ha del museo.

Questo dovrebbe considerarsi un punto di partenza e non di arrivo. All'Advisory Council nell'incontro di Kyoto verrà quindi chiesto di posticipare di un anno l'approvazione di una nuova proposta di definizione per lavorare quest'anno a un ben più interessante confronto internazionale recuperando anche il dibattito scientifico che ha caratterizzato l'Icom dalla sua nascita a oggi e che avrebbe dovuto portare a un coinvolgimento di tutti i suoi organi (i Comitati nazionali e internazionali, le Regional Alliances e le Affiliated Organisations) prima della sua approvazione.

L'autrice dell'articolo, Tiziana Maffei, è presidente di Icom Italia e direttrice della Reggia di Caserta

TIziana Maffei, da Il Giornale dell'Arte numero 400, settembre 2019

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arte architettura mostre mostra eventi notizie notizia restauro archeologia documenti aste fotografia libri opinioni

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Che Cos'È Un Museo? È Ora Di Cambiare Idea

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Kyoto (Giappone). Il museo contemporaneo mostra volti sempre diversi ma, nel mutamento, ciò che sembra emergere oggi è come sia diversa l'aspettativa che in tutto il mondo si ha per il museo. Senza dubbio un fenomeno culturale di vasta portata: in crescita esponenziale il numero dei musei (nonostante le mille difficoltà di gestione di quelli esistenti) e in aumento il dibattito che li riguarda.

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La decisione sulla nuova definizione del termine "museo", che doveva essere discussa lo scorso 7 settembre a Kyoto, nel corso dell'Assemblea Generale Straordinaria dell' ICOM (International Council of Museums, il principale ente internazionale che rappresenta i musei, fondato nel 1946), è stata rinviata. Il disaccordo sulla nuova definizione e le troppe differenze tra le varie anime dell'ICOM hanno infatti reso necessario un posticipo del voto: "questa comunque non è la fine", ha dichiarato il presidente dell'ICOM, Suay Aksoy, alla fine della riunione, "ma è soltanto un altro inizio del processo di ridefinizione". Aksoy ha poi aggiunto che "si è trattato di uno dei processi più democratici della storia dell'ICOM".

La riunione ha visto partecipanti da oltre 100 paesi, che però non sono riusciti a trovare un accordo dopo una settimana di dibattito a Kyoto: il 70% dei votanti si è dichiarato favorevole al rinvio della decisione. La nuova definizione della parola "museo", il cui percorso è cominciato in una conferenza tenutasi a Milano nel 2016, e che è stata elaborata dal Comitato ICOM per la definizione, le prospettive e il potenziale del museo, presieduto dalla museologa Jette Sandahl, ha scaldato gli animi perché da molti è stata ritenuta troppo ideologica. L'ICOM Italia, invece, l'ha semplicemente definita "inadeguata a definire il museo, che storicamente ha svolto il ruolo di istituto dedicato all'acquisizione, conservazione, documentazione, ricerca, comunicazione e esposizione di oggetti patrimoniali, i quali non sono solo oggetti materiali e mobili, ma vanno considerati come testimonianze dell'umanità e del suo ambiente".

Di seguito la definizione che è stata oggetto di discussione: "Museums are democratising, inclusive and polyphonic spaces for critical dialogue about the pasts and the futures. Acknowledging and addressing the conflicts and challenges of the present, they hold artefacts and specimens in trust for society, safeguard diverse memories for future generations and guarantee equal rights and equal access to heritage for all people. Museums are not for profit. They are participatory and transparent, and work in active partnership with and for diverse communities to collect, preserve, research, interpret, exhibit, and enhance understandings of the world, aiming to contribute to human dignity and social justice, global equality and planetary wellbeing" ("I musei sono spazi democratizzati, inclusivi e polifonici per il dialogo critico sui passati e sui futuri. Riconoscendo e affrontando i conflitti e le sfide del presente, conservano reperti ed esemplari in custodia per la società, salvaguardano diversi ricordi per le generazioni future e garantiscono pari diritti e pari accesso al patrimonio per tutte le persone. I musei non hanno scopo di lucro. Sono partecipativi e trasparenti e lavorano in collaborazione attiva con e per le diverse comunità per raccogliere, conservare, ricercare, interpretare, esporre e migliorare la comprensione del mondo, puntando a contribuire alla dignità umana e alla giustizia sociale, all'uguaglianza globale e al benessere planetario").

Non c'è stata solo l'Italia a schierarsi contro la nuova definizione: obiezioni sono state sollevate anche dalle delegazioni di Francia, Spagna e Germania. Al momento, pertanto, la definizione di "museo" rimane ancora quella decretata nel 2007: "il museo è un'istituzione permanente, senza scopo di lucro, al servizio della società, e del suo sviluppo, aperta al pubblico, che effettua ricerche sulle testimonianze materiali ed immateriali dell'uomo e del suo ambiente, le acquisisce, le conserva, e le comunica e specificatamente le espone per scopi di studio, educazione e diletto" (questa definizione in Italia è stata recepita nel 2014).

Jette Sandahl, nel corso del suo intervento all'assemblea di Kyoto, ha fatto sapere che l'ICOM ha ricevuto 269 proposte da 69 nazioni, presentate in 25 lingue diverse. La presidente Aksoy ha concluso ribadendo che "la discussione continua" e che l'ICOM continuerà a lavorare assieme a tutti i comitati nazionali e internazionali "per parlare dell'implementazione e dell'assimilazione delle nuove idee che probabilmente faranno la loro comparsa in una nuova definizione, che rappresenterà una modifica di quella che è appena stata proposta". Aksoy ha poi invitato tutti i membri dell'ICOM a partecipare attivamente alla discussione.

Nell'immagine: l'assemblea dell'ICOM a Kyoto.

Nuova definizione della parola "museo": disaccordo nell'ICOM e decisione rinviata

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Nuova definizione della parola "museo": disaccordo nell'ICOM e decisione rinviata

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La decisione sulla nuova definizione del termine "museo", che doveva essere discussa lo scorso 7 settembre a Kyoto, nel corso dell'Assemblea Generale Straordinaria dell' ICOM (International Council of Museums, il principale ente internazionale che rappresenta i musei, fondato nel 1946), è stata rinviata.

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Durante l'assemblea internazionale ICOM del 7 agosto a Kyoto sarà votata la nuova definizione di museo

"I musei sono spazi democratizzanti, inclusivi e polifonici per il dialogo critico sul passato e sul futuro. Riconoscendo e affrontando i conflitti e le sfide del presente, conservano reperti ed esemplari in custodia per la società, salvaguardano ricordi diversi per le generazioni future e garantiscono pari diritti e pari accesso al patrimonio per tutte le persone."

Con queste parole ICOM, la principale organizzazione internazionale che rappresenta i musei e i suoi professionisti, annuncia la volontà di ridefinire il suo statuto approvato nel 2007, che definisce il museo nel seguente modo:

"Il museo è un'istituzione permanente, senza scopo di lucro, al servizio della società, e del suo sviluppo, aperta al pubblico, che effettua ricerche sulle testimonianze materiali ed immateriali dell'uomo e del suo ambiente, le acquisisce, le conserva, e le comunica e specificatamente le espone per scopi di studio, educazione e diletto."

ICOM Italia ha partecipato all call del MDPP (Standing Committee on Museum Definition, Prospects and Potentials) proponendo una sua definizione di museo:

"Il Museo è un'istituzione permanente, senza scopo di lucro, accessibile, che opera in un sistema di relazioni al servizio della società e del suo sviluppo sostenibile. Effettua ricerche sulle testimonianze dell'umanità e dei suoi paesaggi culturali, le acquisisce, le conserva, le comunica e le espone per promuovere la conoscenza, il pensiero critico, la partecipazione e il benessere della comunità."

Fonte: agcult.it

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ICOM annuncia una nuova definizione di museo

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"I musei sono spazi democratizzanti, inclusivi e polifonici per il dialogo critico sul passato e sul futuro. Riconoscendo e affrontando i conflitti e le sfide del presente, conservano reperti ed esemplari in custodia per la società, salvaguardano ricordi diversi per le generazioni future e garantiscono pari diritti e pari accesso al patrimonio per tutte le persone."

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What is a museum and how can its exhibits, which often include the world's most important cultural properties, be protected from natural disasters, including earthquakes?

Those questions formed the basis of much discussion at the Kyoto assembly of the International Council of Museums, or ICOM, last week. Over 4,000 museum directors, curators, archeologists, historians, anthropologists, art historians and others from around the globe gathered for the weeklong meeting.

The main agenda item was reaching an agreement on what, exactly, a museum is - in order to distinguish such facilities from those designed solely for entertainment or propaganda purposes. The question sounds simple, but reaching agreement on an answer proved difficult.

At the heart of the debate is determining the role museums should play in the 21st century, and the extent to which they should engage the public. Should museums primarily be devoted to historical and archeological research, and physical preservation? Should public exhibits of artifacts be conducted under conditions set entirely by the museum, which in some cases may have changed little in half a century? Or, should there be more engagement with the public in all decisions, including what kinds of exhibits should be financed and shown?

In 2007, ICOM had defined a museum as a "non-profit, permanent institution in the service of society and its development, open to the public, which acquires, conserves, researches, communicates and exhibits the tangible and intangible heritage of humanity and its environment for the purposes of education, study and enjoyment."

Before the Kyoto conference, council members were presented with the following proposed revision:

"Museums are democratising, inclusive and polyphonic spaces for critical dialogue about the pasts and the futures. Acknowledging and addressing the conflicts and challenges of the present, they hold artefacts and specimens in trust for society, safeguard diverse memories for future generations and guarantee equal rights and equal access to heritage for all people.

"Museums are not for profit. They are participatory and transparent, and work in active partnership with and for diverse communities to collect, preserve, research, interpret, exhibit, and enhance understandings of the world, aiming to contribute to human dignity and social justice, global equality and planetary well-being."

In the end, however, differences over whether the new definition was appropriate led members to postpone a vote.

"This is not the end, this is just another beginning in this process of redefinition," said Suay Aksoy, ICOM president, at the conclusion of the meeting on Sept. 7.

Such arguments might seem merely academic. But reaching an internationally agreed definition of a museum has practical economic effects, ranging from what kinds of academic research grants and cooperation from other museums are available, to an institution's reputation nationally and abroad. Reputation, in turn, can influence government funding and public support for exhibits.

Outside the meeting hall, another area of concern was practical and future-oriented. Preserving valuable artifacts in the event of an earthquake or other natural disaster is a major concern for all museums. The Kyoto meeting included an exhibit by Tokyo-based THK Co. Ltd. that drew much attention from the attendees.

The company displayed its seismic isolation technology, including rolling display stands and adjustable seismic isolation platforms that can house, or be placed under, statues and other cultural properties inside a museum. When an earthquake hits, the rolling motion of the stand or platform deflects quake tremors away from the object. THK's technology is currently being used in the Nara National Museum, the Seikado Bunko Art Museum in Tokyo and at Ganjojuin temple in Shizuoka Prefecture. It's also being used at the Museo Pieta Rondanini in Milan.

"Japanese regulations emphasize shoring up buildings as a whole against earthquakes. But in the case of museums, it's also necessary to consider how to protect individual displays and exhibits from seismic damage," explained Atsuhiro Yoshinaka, a THK spokesman who attended the exhibition.

Preserving cultural properties in times of natural disaster is also the job of the National Task Force for the Cultural Heritage Disaster Risk Mitigation Network. The network was set up under the Cultural Affairs Agency in July 2014, following efforts to rescue, preserve, and restore cultural artifacts after the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake. Today, the network includes 24 museums, libraries, academic associations and other organizations.

Under a nationally approved disaster countermeasures act, each prefecture draws up disaster mitigation plans for cultural properties. But the network notes that these plans vary from prefecture to prefecture, and are often not fully implemented. The network is involved with helping local governments affected by a natural disasters find temporary storage facilities for their artifacts, including specialized freezers and vacuum freezer dryers for salvaged cultural properties salvaged.

"This network is sorely needed, as Japan is hit over and over again by natural disasters that bring great urgency to the effort to protect and salvage our invaluable cultural heritage," wrote Keiji Matsumura, chair of the task force and president of the National Institutes for Cultural Heritage, in a pamphlet about the network that was given to ICOM attendees prior to the meeting.

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At meeting in Kyoto, global body debates how to define and protect museums | The Japan Times

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What is a museum and how can its exhibits, which often include the world's most important cultural properties, be protected from natural disasters, including earthquakes? Those questions formed the basis of much discussion at the Kyoto assembly of the International Council of Museums, or ICOM, last week.

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Why a Plan to Redefine the Meaning of 'Museum' Is Stirring Up Controversy

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As institutions try to figure out their roles in a changing world, a vote on the meaning of "museum" has led to controversy in the industry

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Updated version incorporates references to 'human dignity and social justice'

The International Council of Museums (Icom) has proposed a new museum definition following a worldwide consultation.

The updated definition is intended to recognise how museums have radically transformed in recent years.

It aims to retain the "unique, defining and essential unity" of museums in terms of caring for cultural heritage, while recognising the need for them to adapt their values to the challenges of the 21st century, incorporate different world views, address deep societal inequalities, and acknowledge the crises in nature.

The new definition states: "Museums are democratising, inclusive and polyphonic spaces for critical dialogue about the pasts and the futures. Acknowledging and addressing the conflicts and challenges of the present, they hold artefacts and specimens in trust for society, safeguard diverse memories for future generations and guarantee equal rights and equal access to heritage for all people.

"Museums are not for profit. They are participatory and transparent, and work in active partnership with and for diverse communities to collect, preserve, research, interpret, exhibit, and enhance understandings of the world, aiming to contribute to human dignity and social justice, global equality and planetary wellbeing."

The definition will be voted on at the organisation's Extraordinary General Assembly in Kyoto on 7 September.
Do you agree with Icom's new museum definition? Vote in our poll

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Icom unveils new museum definition | Museums Association

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Updated version incorporates references to 'human dignity and social justice' The International Council of Museums (Icom) has proposed a new museum definition following a worldwide consultation. The updated definition is intended to recognise how museums have radically transformed in recent years.

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After a long and divisive debate, the 25th General Assembly of the International Council of Museums (Icom) decided to postpone a vote on a new definition for museums. The decision was approved on 7 September in Kyoto by 70,4% of participants, serving a severe blow to the NGO's leadership.

Aside from minor changes, Icom's definition of a museum for around 50 years has been: a "non-profit institution" that "acquires, conserves, researches, communicates and exhibits the tangible and intangible heritage of humanity and its environment for the purposes of education, study and enjoyment." A lengthy new statement was supposed to be adopted in Japan last week changing the definition to "democratising, inclusive and polyphonic spaces for critical dialogue about the past and the future".

France led the revolt against this "ideological text", which it says was launched "without consultation of the national committees" and, along with 28 other national branches or international committees of Icom, requested that the vote be postponed. After four hours of bitter and somewhat confused deliberation, France won the support of 88 out of the 125 national and regional delegations.

The proposed new definition was strongly supported by the US, Australia and Denmark. However, Europe, Italy, Spain, Germany, Canada, Iran, Israel (which said, "this might well be the first time Israel agrees with Iran" to applause), Brazil, Peru and Argentina saw in it a fuzzy collection of political correctness and trendy posturing that would have little legal value. The debate at the general assembly therefore focused on the lack of consultation and respect for procedures as well as the widely criticised wording, rather than the ethical values behind the new definition.

Icom's president, Suay Aksoy, eventually agreed that a "new definition" must now be sought, although no date has been fixed for a new vote. "This is not the end, this is the beginning of the process," she said.

In her opening speech on 1 September, Aksoy carefully skipped any mention of the dispute, but instead called on museums to "take the lead in these times of profound societal changes" and debates during the week focused on such topics as "sustainability", "fostering human rights" and "empowering communities through arts and education".

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Vote on Icom's new museum definition postponed

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After a long and divisive debate, the 25th General Assembly of the International Council of Museums (Icom) decided to postpone a vote on a new definition for museums. The decision was approved on 7 September in Kyoto by 70,4% of participants, serving a severe blow to the NGO's leadership.

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What exactly is a museum? If anyone knows, it should be the International Council of Museums (Icom), with its 40,000 members representing more than 20,000 museums. But that very question is, in fact, fuelling a bitter debate within the organisation and perhaps threatening its identity. On 12 August, 24 national branches-including those of France, Italy, Spain, Germany, Canada and Russia, along with five museums' international committees-requested the postponement of a vote on a revised definition of museums, in order to deliver a "new proposal".

The new definition was selected by Icom's executive board in Paris on 22 July, but the petition issued by the 24 national committees predicts "major dissent" if the proposal, which constitutes a "considerable shift", is adopted at its general assembly on 7 September in Kyoto.

For the past few decades, Icom has made only minor adjustments to its current statement defining the museum as "a non-profit institution" that "acquires, conserves, researches, communicates and exhibits the tangible and intangible heritage of humanity and its environment for the purposes of education, study and enjoyment." But some people, including the Danish curator Jette Sandahl, object saying "it does not speak the language of the 21st century" and that it does not reply to current demands of "cultural democracy".

Sandahl led the commission that put forward the new 100-word text, defining museums as "democratising, inclusive and polyphonic spaces for critical dialogue about the past and the future". It adds: "Addressing the conflicts and challenges of the present, they hold artefacts and specimens in trust for society, safeguard diverse memories for future generations and guarantee equal rights and equal access to heritage for all people." They are supposed to be "participatory and transparent", work "in active partnership with and for diverse communities" and "aiming to contribute to human dignity and social justice, global equality and planetary wellbeing".

"A definition is a simple and precise sentence characterising an object, and this is not a definition but a statement of fashionable values, much too complicated and partly aberrant." François Mairesse, a professor at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle

Juliette Raoul-Duval, who chairs Icom France, quickly denounced an "ideological" manifesto, "published without consulting" the national branches. "At first, I thought this was a joke," says Didier Rykner, the founder of the Tribune de l'art, attacking what he describes as an Orwellian newspeak that replaces art works with artefacts and specimens. "The definition should emphasise the importance of the museums' functions and its relationship to tangible and intangible heritage, which constitute its distinguishing characteristics from other cultural institutions," claim the national committees which asked to delay the vote, deploring the "political tone" of Sandahl's document.

A former director of Icom, and one of the founders of the concept of "new museology" in the 1970s, Hugues de Varine confesses that he was surprised by the "over inflated verbiage" of an "ideological preamble" which does not distinguish a museum from a cultural centre, a library or a laboratory.

The quarrel could be interpreted as a debate between the old guard and the younger generation, or between Latin tradition and the Anglo-Saxon move towards a more "inclusive" model. François Mairesse, a professor at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle and the chair of the International Committee of Museology, says the matter is more serious. He resigned in June from the commission headed by Sandahl, claiming the proposals "did not reflect the discussions held over two years".

"A definition is a simple and precise sentence characterising an object, and this is not a definition but a statement of fashionable values, much too complicated and partly aberrant," Mairesse says. "It would be hard for most French museums-starting with the Louvre-to correspond to this definition, considering themselves as 'polyphonic spaces'. The ramifications could be serious. Icom's statement can be included in national or international legislation and there is no way a jurist could reproduce this text."

Mairesse adds that "it does not take into account the extraordinary variety of museums. It would be disastrous to impose only one type of museum. If a vote breaks the consensus that has always governed Icom, it will seriously weaken the organisation."

Correction: This article formerly stated that Icom's current definition of a museum has been adhered to for the past 50 years. According to Icom's website it has undergone "minor adjustments over the past few decades".

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What exactly is a museum? Icom comes to blows over new definition

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What exactly is a museum? If anyone knows, it should be the International Council of Museums (Icom), with its 40,000 members representing more than 20,000 museums. But that very question is, in fact, fuelling a bitter debate within the organisation and perhaps threatening its identity.

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Should museums' core mission be preserving the world's cultural heritage, or should they use their collections to promote human dignity, social justice, global equality, and planetary well-being? That is the question facing the international museum community as it wrestles with bringing its definition of what a museum should be into the 21st century.

Next month, thousands of members of the International Council of Museums (ICOM), which represents 20,000 institutions worldwide, are due to meet in Japan to formally ratify a new definition of what makes a museum a museum. The radical new definition, which was accepted by ICOM's board in July, has divided its national members, some of whom are lobbying to get the vote postponed to avoid a possible rift. Critics fear it is too "ideological," while others are concerned that traditional values of research and education are being downgraded.

For the past half century, ICOM's definition has remained the same while the world in which they operate has changed. The current definition states that a museum is: "A nonprofit institution" that "acquires, conserves, researches, communicates, and exhibits the tangible and intangible heritage of humanity and its environment for the purposes of education, study, and enjoyment."

The new definition finalized in July declares: "Museums are democratizing, inclusive, and polyphonic spaces for critical dialogue about the pasts and the futures." The new wording stresses the importance of championing human justice, equality, and the wellbeing of the planet. It also suggests that museums acknowledge and address the conflicts and challenges of the present, while "[guaranteeing] equal rights and equal access to heritage for all people."

A Problem for Museums Like the Louvre?

Last week, some 24 national branches of ICOM issued a petition to postpone the vote. Countries that have voiced "concerns" include France, Italy, Spain, Germany, Canada, and Russia.

Juliette Raoul-Duval, the chair of ICOM France, told The Art Newspaper the new definition on the table is an "ideological" manifesto. François Mairesse, a professor at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle who resigned from the ICOM committee that drew up the new definition, fears it will cause a rift in the organization. He called the new definition "a statement of fashionable values, much too complicated, and partly aberrant." He added that it would be a problem for most French museums, including the Louvre, to embrace the new definition.

Meanwhile, Klaus Staubermann, the CEO of ICOM Germany, which also wants the vote postponed, tells artnet News that he had specific concerns about words that have been omitted. "The previous definition had keywords like 'institution' and 'education,' which the new version does not carry. Both these words are very important, because their presence has a crucial effect on legislation in the German states," he explained. Still, Staubermann says that postponing the decision is less about those specific concerns "and more about giving time to the discussion worldwide to address and accommodate everyone's concerns."

What is at stake at the Kyoto meeting on September 7 is more than a battle over terminology. It reflects a debate that has been taking place for the past four decades around whether museums can ever be ideologically neutral spaces. It also reflects a desire since at least the 1980s for museums to be meeting places where ideas can be discussed, turning the museum from a traditional "temple" to a more democratic "forum." The debate has been given added urgency as institutions in the West face increasing pressure over their colonial-era collections, sources of funding, and historic under-representation of women's history in particular.

Jette Sandhal, the Danish curator who has led the committee drawing up the new ICOM definition, comes from the radical end of the profession. The founding director the Women's Museum of Denmark, she turned the ethnological collections of Gothenburg in Sweden into the Museum of World Cultures. Its inaugural exhibitions included an installation by the US artist Fred Wilson and a show about responses to the AIDS/HIV epidemic around the globe.

Sandhal posted a video in March in which she compared the new definition to a "backbone" that would give institutions strength while maintaining room for flexibility. She predicted that if a new definition is not agreed, the conversation will continue as it has for the past "20 years."

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Are Art Institutions Becoming Too 'Ideological'? The International Council of Museums Is Divided Over Politics in the Galleries

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Should museums' core mission be preserving the world's cultural heritage, or should they use their collections to promote human dignity, social justice, global equality, and planetary well-being? That is the question facing the international museum community as it wrestles with bringing its definition of what a museum should be into the 21st century.

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The International Council of Museums will vote on a new definition of museums in September. The proposed change includes language about "social justice, global equality and planetary wellbeing." Critics say the text is too political for most museums to employ.

For almost 50 years, the International Council of Museums (ICOM) has defined the museum as "a nonprofit institution" that "acquires, conserves, researches, communicates, and exhibits the tangible and intangible heritage of humanity and its environment for the purposes of education, study, and enjoyment."

But an updated version of the definition would incorporate mention of "human dignity and social justice," references which have split the consortium's 40,000 professionals representing 20,000 museums across ideological lines. And last week, 24 national branches of the council - including those of France, Italy, Spain, Germany, Canada, and Russia - requested a postponement of the revision's official vote in order to deliver a "new proposal."

Jette Sandahl is the Danish curator who lead ICOM's commission on the new definition, suggesting that the current one "does not speak the language of the 21st century" by ignoring demands of "cultural democracy." Her amended conceptualization of the museum reads:

Museums are democratizing, inclusive and polyphonic spaces for critical dialogue about the pasts and the futures. Acknowledging and addressing the conflicts and challenges of the present, they hold artifacts and specimens in trust for society, safeguard diverse memories for future generations and guarantee equal rights and equal access to heritage for all people.

Museums are not for profit. They are participatory and transparent, and work in active partnership with and for diverse communities to collect, preserve, research, interpret, exhibit, and enhance understandings of the world, aiming to contribute to human dignity and social justice, global equality and planetary wellbeing.

Backlash to Sandahl's suggestion came quickly. Juliette Raoul-Duval, who chairs ICOM France, soon denounced it as an "ideological" manifesto, "published without consulting" the national branches. Even Hugues de Varine, a former director of ICOM and an early proponent of the "new museology" movement in the 1970s, found the definition effuse. The Art Newspaper reports that he was surprised by the "over inflated verbiage" of an "ideological preamble," which does not distinguish a museum from a cultural center, library, or laboratory.

Evidence suggests that the feud between different interests in ICOM began as early as June. It was then that François Mairesse, a professor at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle and the chair of the International Committee of Museology, resigned from Sandhal's commission believing that it contradicted two years worth of past discussions.

"A definition is a simple and precise sentence characterizing an object, and this is not a definition but a statement of fashionable values, much too complicated and partly aberrant," Mairesse told the Art Newspaper. "It would be hard for most French museums - starting with the Louvre - to correspond to this definition, considering themselves as 'polyphonic spaces.' The ramifications could be serious. ICOM's statement can be included in national or international legislation and there is no way a jurist could reproduce this text."

Many critics agree with Mairesse, judging the new definition as too political and too vague for defining museums. And despite the description's broadness, social media users responding to the proposed ICOM text have noted that it omits specific mention of the museum as an educational space. Releasing a poll on Twitter asking users if the new definition captures what a museum is in the 21st century, 62% of 226 respondents said no.

In April, ICOM began publishing a crowdsourced list of new museum definitions from around the world. Currently, there are 269 entries on their website from countries including Spain, France, Japan, Cameroon, and Iran. The proposed definition, however, was not chosen from any of these submissions but was picked internally by Sandhal's commission. Voting for the new definition will be held at the organization's Extraordinary General Assembly in Kyoto, Japan, on September 7.

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A New Definition of "Museum" Sparks International Debate

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The International Council of Museums will vote on a new definition of museums in September. The proposed change includes language about "social justice, global equality and planetary wellbeing." Critics say the text is too political for most museums to employ.

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National committees ask for vote on new wording to be postponed

The International Council of Museum's (Icom) new museum definition has exposed ideological faultlines in the global museum community.

Published in July, the new wording defines museums as "democratising, inclusive and polyphonic spaces", and says they should aim to contribute to "human dignity and social justice, global equality and planetary wellbeing" (see full definition below).

According to the Art Newspaper, 24 national branches of Icom have asked the council to postpone a vote to adopt the new wording, due to be held on 7 September at Icom's general assembly in Kyoto. The committees calling for a delay include France, Italy, Spain, Germany, Canada and Russia, along with the international committees of five museums.

The chair of Icom France, Juliette Raoul-Duval, told the newspaper that the new definition was an "ideological" manifesto that had been "published without consulting".

The first hint of a rift behind the scenes came when François Mairesse, a member of the committee tasked with rewriting the definition, resigned from the board in July.

Mairesse, who is a professor at the Sorbonne University in Paris and also sits on Icom's museology committee, told the Art Newspaper: "A definition is a simple and precise sentence characterising an object, and this is not a definition but a statement of fashionable values, much too complicated and partly aberrant."

The head of Icom Germany, Klaus Staubermann, expressed concern that the new definition did not contain key words such as "education" and "institution", which he said would have an impact on legislation in Germany. But he told the Artnet news site that his call for postponing the decision was less about those specific concerns and more about giving time to "address and accommodate everyone's concerns".

The disagreement is part of wider battle between the traditionalist and progressive wings of Icom, according to several people with knowledge of the situation.

According to one source who spoke to Museums Journal, a previous Icom group had been working on the definition but was stood down over concerns that it was too eurocentric and not representative of the worldwide museum community. The new committee was formed with the intention of being "more global and representative of progressive museum thinking".

The source believes the current controversy was planned in response to this change, saying that the council's "traditionalists" saw the rewriting of the definition as an "encroachment on their territory".

The rift also comes amid wider divisions among the museum sector in France, where there has been a backlash against president Emmanuel Macron's support for the restitution of colonial-era artefacts. "Some people feel under threat from new thinking and the new definition is alarming them," said the source.

Another sector professional said they felt Jette Sandahl, the Danish curator who led the definition committee, had been "hung out to dry", adding that the new wording had been fully consulted on and signed off before it was published.

The new definition has met a mixed reaction from museum professionals in the UK. A recent Museums Journal poll found that 62% of 226 respondents did not believe it captured what a museum is in the 21st century, although many expressed concern over the statement's inaccessible wording rather than the ideological shift it represents.

The Museums Association's director Sharon Heal said: "Full credit to Icom for reviewing its definition of a museum - it's interesting that there has been a backlash against the new wording. The existing definition is over 50 years old and I think we need to pause and reflect on how much society has changed in those 50 years. Are we really saying that definition and purpose of museums remains the same?

"Over the past decade there has been a transformation in how museums and museum workers respond to the big changes in society. Co-production, participation and socially engaged practice are just some of the ways that we connect to communities and enable the telling and sharing of many varied stories and voices. The big issues in society, from homelessness and poverty and to decolonisation and climate crisis, need to be reflected in our museums and in our definition of what a museum is.

"If we are to be relevant to diverse, multi-layered, socially connected communities we need to constantly review and refresh our definitions and our ways of working based on our values and the challenges that we face."

Icom has been contacted for comment.
What is a museum?
The proposed definition: "Museums are democratising, inclusive and polyphonic spaces for critical dialogue about the pasts and the futures. Acknowledging and addressing the conflicts and challenges of the present, they hold artefacts and specimens in trust for society, safeguard diverse memories for future generations and guarantee equal rights and equal access to heritage for all people.

"Museums are not for profit. They are participatory and transparent, and work in active partnership with and for diverse communities to collect, preserve, research, interpret, exhibit, and enhance understandings of the world, aiming to contribute to human dignity and social justice, global equality and planetary wellbeing."

The current definition: "A museum is a non-profit, permanent institution in the service of society and its development, open to the public, which acquires, conserves, researches, communicates and exhibits the tangible and intangible heritage of humanity and its environment for the purposes of education, study and enjoyment."

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Rift emerges over Icom's proposed museum definition | Museums Association

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National committees ask for vote on new wording to be postponed The International Council of Museum's (Icom) new museum definition has exposed ideological faultlines in the global museum community. Published in July, the new wording defines museums as "democratising, inclusive and polyphonic spaces", and says they should aim to contribute to "human dignity and social justice, global equality and planetary wellbeing" (see full definition below).