For the Love of Art? Contemporary European Museums Facing their Contradictions

Supervisor/s: Silvia Rodríguez Maeso and Marcus Verhagen

Doctoral Programme: Human Rights in Contemporary Societies

Funding: FCT

Exhibitions are what modern and contemporary art museums are publicly identified with. As common as this identification is, museums often do not operate according to the ethics of the art they display. Drawing upon a genealogy of modern museums as embedded in Western civilizational apparatuses within which "art" but also "human rights" are central categories, this study firstly identifies the role of the museum in the reproduction of a limited Eurocentric understanding of humanness. This "monohumanism" contained in the museum is key to understand the various historical processes of social differentiation that led to the paradoxical situation by which art museums champion the distancing of the production of social content from social consequences. Secondly, it examines tangible museological strategies that place social use at the center of their operation. These interrelated initiatives highlight the urgency of the transformation of the institutions' central values and operating modes and postulate that the friction between art and social utility confronts the structural contradictions evoked above. Challenging the myth of museums' neutrality, these initiatives arguably contribute to redefine the institutional practice of modern and contemporary art museums in the 21st century.