Key Concepts of Museology - ICOM

a chair in a museum of decorative
arts, which supposes an established
distinction between the functional
chair and the chair-object. Their
function has been removed and they
have been ‘decontextualised’, which
means that from now on they will no
longer serve their original purpose
but have entered a symbolic order
which gives them new meaning, leading
Krzysztof Pomian to call such
objects semiophores (“carriers of
signifi cance”) and to attribute a new
value to them – which is fi rst of all
purely a museal value but which can
become an economic value. They
thus become sacred (consecrated)
evidence of culture.
4. Exhibitions refl ect these choices.
For semiologists like Jean Davallon
“Musealia can be considered less
as things (from the point of view of
their physical reality) than as language
beings (they are defi ned, recognized
as worthy of being safeguarded and
displayed) and as supports of social
practices (they are collected, catalogued,
displayed etc.)” (Davallon,
1992). Objects can thus be used
as signs, just like words in speech,
when they are used in an exhibition.
But objects are not just signs, since
by their presence alone they can be
directly perceived by our senses.
For this reason the term real thing
is often used to indicate a museum
object exhibited because of its power
of “authentic presence”, that is “The
real things of the museum language
are those things which we present as
what they are, not as models or ima-
ges or representations of something
else.” (Cameron, 1968). For various
reasons (sentimental, aesthetic, etc.)
we have an intuitive relationship with
that which is displayed. The noun
exhibit refers to a real thing which is
displayed, but also to anything displayable
(a sound, photographic or
fi lm document, a hologram, a reproduction,
a model, an installation or
a conceptual model) (see Exhibition).
5. A certain tension exists between
the real thing and its substitute.
Regarding this we must note that for
some people the semiophore object
is only a carrier of meaning when
it is presented for itself, and not
through a substitute. Wide as it may
seem, this purely reist concept does
not take account of either the origins
of museums in the Renaissance
(see Museum) or the development
and diversity reached by museology
during the 19 th century. Nor does
it allow us to take into account the
work of a number of museums whose
activities are essentially on other
support systems such as the internet
or duplicated media, or more
generally all the museums made
of substitutes such as museums of
casts (gypsotheques), collections of
models, collections of wax reproductions
(ceratheques), or science
centres which display mostly models.
Since these objects were considered
as elements of a language, they can
be used to create lecture exhibitions,
but they are not always adequate to
sustain the entire lecture. We must
therefore envisage other elements
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