Are museums as trusted places on the line?
Many have written about who controls the narrative in the museum, and have also questioned the authenticity of the material evidence on which those narratives are based. Museums are, after all, highly selective repositories of such evidence.
Facts, as one sage observed, are like tesserae, capable of being assembled into any number of patterns. But when the authenticity of the coloured piece of ceramic is itself open to question, it ceases to be a ‘fact’ and any narrative edifice topples.
Can museums move fast enough and with enough assurance, to turn this splintering world of truth relativism to their advantage, by majoring on a USP of authenticity?
Tristram Besterman
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