The critique of ideology strikes at the very heart of the museum’s traditional function, its capacity, in Walter Benjamin’s words, to produce ‘an eternal image of the past.’ Consequently, proposals for what might be called critical exhibitions more or less inevitably meet with institutional resistance since they pose the threat of undermining the museum’s authority and thus adversely affecting the various elite, corporate, and government interests which that authority normally serves. The rise of critical and revisionist art histories has resulted in withering criticism of traditional museological approaches and has thus made it more difficult for museums to ignore the nature and effects of their habitual practices.
