Cultural Patrimony and Variables of Emotionality

Museums and Processes of Identification of Objectual Memory

Abstract

After establishing two classifications regarding the public that visits museums and citizens’ attitudes towards them —potential and real in the first case; hostile, indifferent and favorable, in the second— this essay begins by assuming the “freezing” implicit in exhibiting objects in museums, with the resulting loss of the emotionality that results from pieces being decontextualized from the place to which they pertain through subjection to certain supposed criteria of rationality and objectivity dictated by specialists. On the one hand, the
latter are entrusted with the task of deciding what patrimony (heritage) is, what items should be conserved and exhibited, and how they should be socialized, from an attitude towards the citizenry that is by no means free of paternalism. On the other, museums echo the new aesthetics by exhibiting all kinds of objects, while simultaneously being transformed into galleries of consumption. In this way, a new vision of museums is imposed, in which the voice and opinion of the citizenry are heard during the conception and negotiations, while their active participation brings the cultural patrimony to life, so that people can feel it as their own.