Topic

The trend of making museums has lasted for a quarter-century. Not only new museums are being established but also many objects and realms are pursuing the state of museumization. However, museums are not neutral realms; in the enthusiastic and global course of making museums, the increase in quantity leads to a change in quality. Though museums carry a good name, it also faces stigmatization. Especially when it comes to the differences in ethnic culture and social classes, the visualization of making museum cannot be taken for granted.

The process of making museums presents a poetic performance on the one hand but also reveals the administrative complexity and the intense political conflicts on the other hand. The architectures of museums, as social objects, are often exceedingly magnificent and gorgeous and create flowing spatiality across places. Their predominance even overwhelms the originally irreplaceable value of the collections. However, most of the work in museums still relies on the conversation with the past; the gate of museums is still open to natural resources and cultural heritages. The functions of museums nowadays are also increasingly complex; they may serve as the generators of cultural and creative industries, local and national identity, scientific and cultural developments, leisure, tourism and entertainment industries, and life-long learning systems.

Is the undertaking of museum a vocation, a discipline, or an industry? It could be all or none. The ‘museoscapes’, shaped under the global influence of financescapes, etnoscapes, and ideoscapes, are more like “mestizos of mixed undertaking.” The developmental factors of museums involve complex “non-museological factors.” In Taiwan, the development of museums slavishly imitates different systems,losing its originality, while interpretations of museums are conflicting between the state and the local society, and between capitalists and laborers; each group has its own stance on museums and is persistently opposed to each other most of the time.

Subthemes

1. The internal making of different types of museums, and the museum’s articulation with other specific social organizations (institutions).

2. Museum professionalism and the relationship between the construction of time and space of the museum.

3. The operation management and cultural governance of museums.

4. Dialectics of the derivation of object knowledge and cultural heritage context, and the border of museums.