Museum Exhibition as a Work of Art and a Subject of ‘Specific Aesthetics’

Abstract

The investigations on museum exhibition, if carried out in a traditional way, should be considered as another kind of descriptive science, dealing with purely factual material and having rather practical purposes. In fact, most of the works we usually find in museological literature have the character of more or less detailed reports on particular museum-exhibition solutions and deal mainly with technological problems. In the Cracow scientific centre, however, the same subject matter has acquired a different, purely theoretical shape, being developed in close relation to aesthetics, precisely to the theory of structure and theory of cognizance of the work of art (including painting, sculpture, architecture and literature), the sources of which have been found in the fundamental works by Roman Ingarden.¹ Hence, a new branch or trend in theoretical museology that has been proposed, became — to some extent — a continuation of Ingarden’s thought.² Having applied the essentials of In-garden’s aesthetics as a kind of ‘model investigation’, new theoretical museology became, in turn a contribution to Ingarden’s works, mainly by extending the original range of investigation into the field that has been left untouched by Ingarden himself.³