A New Book Tackles the Hotly Debated Role of Encyclopedic Museums
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Debates about whether encyclopedic museums—institutions that collect and contextualize cultural artifacts across time and space—should act as more than mere repositories date back decades, but have taken on a new urgency as of late. Now, institutions are contemplating their futures while navigating critical questions about representation, diversity, and the decolonization of both their programming and collections. Scholar and critic Donatien Grau, the head of contemporary programs at Paris’s Musée d’Orsay (and the guest on Ep. 12 of our At a Distance podcast), tackled these topics through interviews with nearly 30 leaders, and compiled the conversations in a new book, Under Discussion: The Encyclopedic Museum (Getty Publications). We recently spoke with Grau about the future of institutions and the layered, ever-evolving narratives of the objects they contain.
What central issues do encyclopedic museums face today, and what prompted you to explore them?
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