ABSTRACT
Critical modernism and postmodernism have laid siege to history over the past two decades, exposing the epistemological fragility of modernist discourses and agendas, and driving reappraisals of longstanding tenets (e.g. the neutrality of archives and narratives), approaches (e.g. comparison, contextualization), concepts (e.g. memory), theories (e.g. the primacy of agency and structure) and sources (e.g. photographs, fi lms, texts).1 Museums have not escaped this scrutiny.2 Critical modernism and postmodernism challenge the ontology of modernist museums which present, contextualize and interpret collections of artifacts as celebrations of relatively unifi ed and fi xed cultural heritages. This challenge has particular relevance to sports museums which are dominated by modernist forms as illustrated by the likes of Australia’s National Sports Museum (Melbourne Cricket Ground, Melbourne), the British Golf Museum (St Andrews), the Gaelic Athletic Association Museum (Croke Park, Dublin), the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum (Cooperstown, New York) and the Olympic Museum (Lausanne). Critical modernism and postmodernism highlight their pretentiousness and the workings of power within their assumptions, alert us to their ideological functions, and conceptualize alternative forms.
