Post-Modernism and the Three Generations of Museums

Abstract

Ten years ago visiting museums in Normandy I had an experience that keeps coming back. It was not just that the war museums in Calais and Caen were very different from each other. Rather, each seemed to represent an extreme version of how museums begin and eventually reach a sort of evolutionary peak. This difference comes to mind every time postmodern museum criticism tells me that old museums are keepers of (usually harmful) myth, and that new ones must therefore self-critically deconstruct nationalist beliefs and themselves promote humanitarian values and even repentance in general.