Museologicalisation

The transformation of a living tradition into a museum piece, which deprives it of an active meaning or significance.

We are living a paradox: everywhere it’s claimed that ‘patrimony’ is a matter of utmost concern, but all the while it is being passionately destroyed. In making museum pieces out of traditions, in petrifying them, killing them, freezing them, their character as ‘tradition’ (as something transmitted and evolving) is eliminated, as they are rendered into objects of erudition or curiosity.

There’s no question that preserving the patrimony is fundamental, but in itself this is insufficient, because a patrimony is constructed every day and can’t, thus, be conserved in a museum.

Modern society is paradoxically ultra-conservative and museological, on the one hand, and, at the same time, hostile to the living traditions of identity; Western modernity has proven itself similarly incapable (especially in the arts) of producing new works in continuity with tradition. So-called ‘modern’ art or architecture hasn’t been modern for at least fifty years, it simply recycles the official academicism, which is nihilistic.

(see tradition)