The virtual museum is not simply a museum in virtual space

• The sequencing the visitor’s experience in virtual space will thus inevitably reflect the topology not only of the collection, but also of the catalog and of the web itself.
• And this topography brings a new feature to the foreground: linkage. The links between items themselves begin to assume considerable esthetic importance.
• The museum and the library can no longer be separated, since their contents are intermingled: and the result is that the virtual museum, like the cathedral before it, becomes a speculum mundi or”mirror of the world”.

We live in secular times, and the museum is our cathedral.

• This could mean, minimally, that the museum has replaced the cathedral as the central space where people congregate in a culturally rich environment. Maximally, and thus potentially, it means that whatever the cathedral was for us — master artwork of combined artworks in many media, ritual space, hub of the city, mirror of worlds — the museum can be.
• The secular does not lack for a sacred dimension, but offers access to it in a manner that does not demand a specific, local belief or practice.
• The virtual museum as secular cathedral is the place where all the world’s imaginal trasures come together as offerings, and from which all the world departs imaginally enriched.
• The museum is thus heir to the phenomenology of shamans, saints and mystics, as well as of artists and their patrons, teachers and students — for it is visited by crowds in which each individual carries a different cultural inheritance, now Italian, now Congolese, now Navaho, now Santeria…

The test of the museum is its cathedral-effectiveness: its capacity to invoke wonder.

• The virtual museum is thus a special case of the “art form” described by Hermann Hesse in his novel The Glass Bead Game:
• The elevation of the virtual museum is a sacramental elevation.

Page 3 of 3 | Previous page