The new muses and their house: Some comments about museographic and digital contaminations

Abstract

When in 18th Century, the modern museum was born, the enlightenment imprinting was consecrating the intersubjective connection of the society with its own memory. Not by chance, the metaphoric inhabitants of this building, the Muses, are daughters of Zeus and the Memory. The phenomenon of collecting (born some centuries before of the modern museum) asked to settle the accumulation of the objects according to thematic arrangements, that allowed a transversal possibility for artworks to be read according to cross-reading possibilities. Today these formalities are progressively changed, thanks to the role of the digital technologies that implicate the redistribution of the task of the support, of the medium and of the device in the aesthetical fruition. From the scientific point of view, both cataloguing and maintenance surely benefit so much of this process. The digitization allows moreover the virtual diffusion of the museum, overcoming the geographical barriers. Currently it is therefore necessary: (1)to define a new aesthetics scenario for the artistic image, from the moment in which the application of the digital technology to the museum interior takes hold.(2)to verify if it is possible to compare the aesthetical dialectics between spectator and past artwork with the contemporary (and possibly future) one.(3)to show a reasonable scenery for the museography, not only upgrading some scientific definitions, but also redefining the notion of masterwork.