Key Concepts of Museology - ICOM

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of a language of substitution. When
the exhibit replaces a real thing or
authentic object, through its function
or nature, the replacement is
called a substitute. It may be a photograph,
a drawing or a model of
the real thing. The substitute would
thus be said to be in confl ict with the
‘authentic’ object, even though it is
not exactly the same as a copy of the
original (such as the casts of a sculpture
or copy of a painting), in so far
as substitutes can be created directly
from an idea or a process and not just
by producing a perfect copy. According
to the form of the original and
the use that should be made of it,
the substitute can be two or threedimensional.
The idea of authenticity,
particularly important in fi ne
arts museums (masterpieces, copies
and fakes), infl uences the majority
of the questions attached to the status
and value of museum objects.
We must nonetheless note that there
are museums which have collections
made solely of substitutes, and that,
generally speaking, the policy of
substitutes (copies, plaster casts or
wax, models or digital images) opens
the fi eld of museum operations very
wide and leads us to question all the
present values of the museum from
the point of view of museal ethics.
Moreover, from the wider perspective
mentioned above, any object displayed
in a museum context must be
considered as a substitute for the reality
it represents because as a musealised
thing, the museum object is a
substitute for this thing (Deloche,
2001).
6. In the museological context,
especially in the fi elds of archaeology
and ethnology, specialists are accustomed
to invest the object with the
meaning they have developed from
their own research. But this raises
several problems. First of all, the
objects change their meaning in their
original environment at the whim of
each generation. Next, each visitor is
free to interpret them according to
his or her own culture. The result is
the relativism summarised by Jacques
Hainard in 1984 in a sentence which
has become famous: “The object
is not the truth of anything. Firstly
polyfunctional, then polysemic, it
takes on meaning only when placed
in context.” (Hainard, 1984)
CORRELATED: ARTEFACT, AUTHENTICITY,
COLLECTION, COPY, EXHIBIT, FETISH-OBJECT, REAL THING,
REPLICA, REPRODUCTION, SPECIMEN, SUBSTITUTE, THING,
TRANSITORY OBJECT, WITNESS-OBJECT, WORK OF ART.