Abstract

The primacy of the traditional museum installation of more or less unmediated artifacts set within serried ranks of dusty vitrines has been challenged in recent years by an increasing range of alternative exhibition strategies aimed at reframing museum collections along more engaging and contemporary lines. Of particular interest in this respect has been the trend towards utilizing artist commissions or artistically inspired displays as a means of opening up contemporary museums to a more poetic or even mysteriously immersive museum visit. By focusing on a series of recent high profile ‘intervention’ case studies, the article will consider just what is at stake when visitors are presented with an innovative museum that acts, in effect, more like an individual artist in a contemporary art gallery than how a museum is (or perhaps we should now say was) supposed to act. How might contemporary museum visitors be expected to negotiate displays of these kinds with their attendant sense of risk, hybridity and challenge to traditional understandings of authenticity, knowledge and the objectivity of the museum’s institutional voice? In exploring these issues, the paper aims to highlight both the challenges as well as the opportunities created by this form of museum dialogue as it continues to evolve in often unexpected ways that both complicate as well as enrich the already charged experience of engaging with museums and art galleries today.