ABSTRACT
Art museums today are at a crossroads. Traditionally upheld as venerable preservers of a nation’s culture, they are increasingly coming under pressure to acknowledge their contested histories and to reach out and engage with more diverse audiences. Since their establishment in the nineteenth-century, at least in Europe and North America, art museums have been understood as places for generating knowledge, as educational spaces. Yet the conventional understanding, whereby knowledge is held by designated experts and disseminated to others understood to be lacking in knowledge, no longer goes unquestioned. Debates are ongoing regarding the authority of such institutions (Fleming 2002; Marstine 2006; Black 2012) and the extent to which those working within them are best placed to tell the cultural stories that are needed in the twenty-first century.
