I
Der Ausdruck ‘museal’ hat im Deutschen unfreundliche Farbe. Er bezeichnet Gegenstande, zu denen der Betrachter nicht mehr lebendig sich verhält und die selber absterben. Sie werden mehr aus historischer Rücksicht aufbewahrt als aus gegenwärtigem Bedürfnis. Museum und Mausoleum verbindet nicht bloß die phonetische Assoziation. Museen sind wie Erbbegräbnisse von Kunstwerken. Sie bezeugen die Neutralisierung der Kultur. Kunstschätze sind in ihnen an- gehortet: der Marktwert verdrängt das Glück der Betrachtung.

Theodor W. Adorno: Erbbegräbnis

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II
”The German word museal (museumlike) has unpleasant overtones. It describes objects to which the observer no longer has a vital relationship and which are in the process of dying. They owe their preservation more to historical respect than the needs of the present. Museum and mausoleum are connected by more than phonetic association. Museums are the family sepulchers of works of art. In this short quotation from Theodor Adorno’s article, „Valéry Proust Museum“, is embedded a set of ideas which until recently provided one definition of the museum, in an intellectual tradition which reaches back to Quatremere de Quincy and forward to Theodor Adorno and more recently Douglas Crimp (Sherman 1994). It is a tradition which links the museum with the more stultifying aspects of modernity. As Andreas Huyssen describes it, the battle against the museum by those on the left and in the avant-garde movement has been a long one. For them, museums have „stood in the dead eye of the storm of progress serving as a catalyst for the articulations of tradition and nation, heritage and canon, and has provided the master maps for the construction of cultural legitimacy in both a national and a universalist sense.“

Andrea Witcomb: Museums and the Web

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