How Can We Define The “Greatness” of The Museum Today?
To start with, it can be helpful to think about the very beginning of the modern museum. In Korea, the year of 1969, the MMCA(the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art) opened. Since its opening, MMCA has been expanded as a four-museum system within which the four venues interact organically with one another while retaining their individual identities: MMCA Deoksugung as a museum specializing in extensive genres of Korean modern art including calligraphy and literature; MMCA Seoul as the face of Korean contemporary art and central exhibition space for the latest artworks; MMCA Gwacheon as research and family-oriented space with a children’s museum dedicated to broadening the terrain of art history to the fields of architecture, craft, print, and design; and MMCA Cheongju as a museum in charge of the circle of artworks’ life from collection and research to conservation and exhibition. It became a cultural institution representative of Korea.
And now Korea is on a museum building boom aiming to open 186 new museums by 2023. This increase will mean one museum for every 39,000 people, an improvement on the current ratio of one per 45,000 residents. The proposed expansion includes 46 art museums, adding to the country’s current total of 451 art institutions. And the total of museums would rise from 1,124 to 1,310 under the plan.
This ambitious new initiative seems quite natural when thinking about the very beginning of the art museum in Korea. It started without collections when it opened as an agency of the Minister of Culture with a role for conveying the national propaganda to the public. And now it has been changed a lot due to the effort of artists, activists who confronted towards freedom and democracy. But until a few years ago, the Korean government made a blacklist of cultural figures and barred them from government-controlled support programs. A 2015 version of the list included more than 9,000 people contained some of the most beloved filmmakers, actors, artists, and writers. Being on the list was even considered an honor. “It’s an honor to be on the list,” Ko Un, one of South Korea’s best-known poets said. Eventually, this cultural blacklist helps strengthen the impeachment charges against the president Ms.Park.
When something wasn’t right from the very beginning, how can we make it right? Is it possible?
The modern museum, as a secular space for public engagement and instruction through the presentation of objects, is strongly related to the colonial expansion in 18th and 19th-century Europe. As we know they need museums to show off their power by presenting stolen treasures from the colony. So, in that sense, museums are inherently colonial institutions. Is it possible to decolonize or de-politicizing the museum? even though it was born from colonization and politicization? To define the “Greatness” we might have to start from here.
Honggyun Mok
independent curator
* references
https://www.mmca.go.kr/eng/contents.do?menuId=5010011100
https://news.artnet.com/art-world/korea-embarks-on-museum-building-boom-1583464
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/12/world/asia/south-korea-president-park-blacklist-artists.html