As key players in the culture world, museums have never had an easy link with the market and the recent history gives meaningful examples of these tensions. The time when museums were able to exist under a protective State seems to have no return and the world is testing various ways to keep alive the institution.
An incontrovertible truth still stands: a museum cannot exist without resources and the coexistence of culture with the rough world of the economy becomes unavoidable. The question then is how to efficiently manage a museum today without in the process losing its institutional specificity. Trying to find a balance between what he calls the logic of “the all state” and that of “the all market”, dichotomy simplistic of the last decades, François Mairesse proposes a third way placed in the logic of “the gift”: giving, receiving, returning, a third way of symbolic exchange that has the advantage of feeding personal links and making the citizens accountable.
François Mairesse's thought stems from a delicate and disconcerting vision of museums. But, don’t we have to admit this discomfort to try to get out of the impasse in which the institution seems to be on a recurrent way? Without sharing the enthusiasm for the over-the-top export of major museums and either fully agree with the innovative boost of community museums, this book forces us to rethink the traditional museum and makes it possible to address the challenge of globalization with clarity and efficiency. The many ideas and management proposals it offers, place it as a unique piece in the current discussion on the future of museums.
Autores: François Mairesse teaches Economics of Culture and Museology at the University of Paris 3 (Sorbonne Nouvelle). He is part of the Centre de Recherche sur les Liens Sociaux (CERLIS, UMR 8070). He also teaches Museology at the École du Louvre. He directed the Royal Museum of Mariemont in Belgium between 2002 and 2010. He has published several articles and books on museology. The most recent are Le dictionnaire encyclopédique de muséologie (dir. with Desvallées André, 2011), L'inaliénabilité des collections de musées en question (ed., 2009), Pourquoi (ne pas) aller au musée (written in collaboration with Bernard Deloche, 2008), Mariemont, capitale du don: des Warocqué aux Amis de Mariemont (2007), Vers une redéfinition du musée? (dir. con André Desvallées, 2007); Le droit d’entrer au musée (2005).
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This publication was done thanks to the support of the Publishing Programs of the Institut Francais.
