Museums must confront the big issues

Title: Museums must confront the big issues
Author: Tristram Hunt
Media Outlet: The Art Newspaper
Publish Date: December 20, 2018

“(…) In an era of deepening nationalism and parochialism, where accounts of ethnic purity and manifest destiny abound, the ability of museums to tell complicated stories of hybridity and cosmopolitanism is vital. For all the contemporary criticism of so-called universal or encyclopaedic museums, the power of spaces such as Louvre Abu Dhabi and New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art to trace the mongrel lineages of global culture seems to me overwhelmingly important. As Edward Said has written, “partly because of empire, all cultures are involved in one another; none is single and pure, all are hybrid, heterogenous, extraordinarily differentiated and unmonolithic”.”