Constructing the Public

This seminar will provide a critical analysis of the models for the tasks of education and mediation in museums, in particular the obligation to adopt marketing strategies to which the cultural institutions are subject today. In the debates the speakers will question the dominant concept in cultural policies which liken the cultural experience to the tourist consumption model, a concept which can trivialise and neutralise the critical potential of culture. The aim is to suggest alternatives designed to create emancipated spaces, and to do so it is necessary to question the technocratic depoliticisation of the concept of "cultural management" and replace it with "cultural politics". That gesture acknowledges the inadequacies of an abstract, universalist conception of the public as a premise. What we have to recognise is the inherent political character of the construction of subjectivities and social identities and therefore develop a pluralistic understanding of the public. That involves rethinking the educational policies of the museum (understood as methods of mediation and negotiation) in a broader and more complex sense so that instead of neutralising the critical and subversive potential of the cultural sphere, they encourage it. They must contribute to new forms of circulation, advertising and political action that will begin to take shape in the face of the current crisis of the traditional models of political representation.