Prisoners of Museum

The museum is a typology long overdue for change. New museums proliferate, with sometimes spectacular innovations in form, but their underlying conceptual structures remain much as they have been for the past two hundred years. They are Faustian incarnations, young bodies with old and weary souls. In Guy Lafranchi?s view, the museum has become a prison, where critical ideas have been locked away from sight, without trial or appeal, by generations of directors, curators and scholars jealousy guarding a canonized version of the evolution of art. As severe a change as this is, it is only part of the story. The greater part, and by far the more serious, is the effect that the museum has on the production of art