6 - Conclusion

Summary

Abstract

This chapter discusses the different modes of museum circuit of the three museums, and draws out the implications of the findings and the possible agendas for future research in three main areas: firstly, the effects of regulation by the state and economic agents at national, local and international levels, and in the context of cultural economics; secondly, the constitution of museum intermediaries and the capacity of their museological approaches and agency to transform the museum or/and society, together with the museum's logic of cultural production, and cultural labour issues; thirdly, the main actors in the museum publics, the nature of their agency and its implications for cultural consumption.

Keywords: museum circuit, museum research, politics of signification, museum agency

The three detailed case studies in this book reflected a dynamic museum world in which multiple organizational and managerial approaches and different strategies of production coexist and respond differently to the state/government's regulations and their broader social and economic conditions. They represented the three different institutional frameworks of regulation, production, and consumption operating in each museum, and demonstrated the complex forces affecting cultural representation, including nationalism, globalization, local and regional mapping, and colonial legacies. They also showed how different segments of visitors, characterized by particular sociocultural orientations and positioning, could be observed. The main findings of the three case studies are summarized in the following paragraphs.

The first case, the He Xiangning Art Museum in Shenzhen, displayed a complex interplay between various actors, including the state's political and economic agents, cultural intermediaries (mainly museum curators and academic stakeholders), and the educated elites living in the city. This second national art museum represents the newly established combination of the legitimacy of Communist-party rule and China's economic and urban modernity. Through invited curatorship and collaboration with art scholars, the museum's intermediaries arguably act as reflexive producers, contributing to a public sphere which has links to Habermasian ‘communicative rationality’, and they play a role in negotiating meaning at the interface of expertise and official discourse. They have debunked the political myth of the leading communist figure, He Xiangning, and reinterpreted the figure from the perspective of national art history and disciplinary knowledge. In the ‘Cross-Strait Four-Regions’, they have tactically engaged in public diplomacy for a genuine platform for artistic and cultural exchange that helps to manage the geo-cultural politics between the regions across the Taiwan Straits.