Preliminary Programme

This paper explores the idea of national art related to its geography, its ownership and the promotion of citizenship in some european national museums. Since the origins of museums, the question of an organisation according to national schools was an important incitation to compare talents, styles and sources of inspiration. From the revolutionary Louvre onwards, there was the idea of dividing the national collections into two parts, one part reserved for the national school, the other for foreign schools. This idea of division into two institutions is recurrent in the history of European museums and it has created a kind of scheme of « ourselves and the others » that is largely dominant up until some of the thematic rearrangements that have been undertaken in recent years. The legitimacy of a so-called national art resided on the long endurance and past of a sovereign, a community, a people attested through certain archaeological traces for example. Such a national conception of art - for example in the context of a desired renaissance of an art considered insignificant or relatively unimportant - helped to nourish the aspiration of comparing the artistic productions of other nations - in a competitive perspective. Nationalist constructions are based on categorisations, identifications and the adoption of values that constitute the specificity of national art, held as the expression of a community and a necessary accompaniement of a political project. The art museum plays an important, even an essential role in the type of project that founds the particular characteristics of a geographically defined art. (Show less)

This presentation aims to discuss the role of national museums in contemporary European society from the citizen’s perspective. Drawing on a large-scale research in different European countries, from the UK to Estonia and Latvia, Sweden and Germany to Italy and Greece, and using both qualitative and quantitative methodologies, we are going to record and understand various aspects of visitors’ experience, aiming to gain some understanding of the citizen’s values and perspectives. By these means we aspire to acquire a useful insight into the actual social relevance of, and possibilities for, representations of the past, the present and the future in museums. Some of the questions that will be discussed are the following: How do national museums today reflect the modern, diverse nation? How do individuals use national museums to construct themselves, their nationalism and their European identities? Do they understand how museums construct ‘Others’ in terms of ethnicity, social character, gender, age, etc.; and how this impacts upon their sense of community? How do European citizens use museums to develop a sense of their European selves and a shared view on the past, present and future of Europe? Visitors’ responses provide answers to some of these, but also new questions for research. (Show less)

National museums are in this project explored as processes of institutionalized negotiations where material collections and display make claims and are recognized as articulating and representing national values and realities. Many of the negotiations and conflicts behind the scene in the museums have long standing trajectories; they are indeed not mishaps but part of the value of the institutions in creating them as relevant cultural forces at play over the last two and a half centuries. We argue that the capacity of national representation as negotiated and carried by national museums have decisive power to shape political community following there fundamental property understood as knowledge based, and hence legitimate, factual representations of the world, presenting the role of the nation within a world system. The ambitions and function vary according to the character of state making. An empire, a stable small nation-state and those in the making through process of unification or devolution are not using national museums in the same way. The project will present comparative analyses based on material from all European nation states, quantitative series of data on both museum and state making, added with qualitative reflections on the dynamic interaction between culture, politics and knowledge in the particular space of national museums. (Show less)

Since 2006, the British Museum, the Musée du Louvre and the Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin (together with the Staatlichen Kunstsammlungen Dresden and the Bayerischen Staatsgemäldesammlungen München) have all sent major loan exhibitions to Beijing. This paper reflects on the use of culture in international relations, examines contemporary British, French and German cultural policy towards China, and, more specifically, compares and contrasts the aim, focus, scope and success of the exhibitions the three countries showed in Beijing. What is the potential, what are the limits of the museum as diplomat? (Show less)