Contemporary art museums and the model new citizen

The paper explores the role of contemporary art museums as new sites of social and democratic innovation—and new frameworks for citizenship education—where thresholds are negotiated, and new discourses and practices of democratic inclusion are outlined and developed. Artists and curators engage democratic publics and set special standards of sociability. So much so that museums are no longer sites of casual cultural enlightenment but rather experiential contexts in which democratic publics realize that social mores are transient phenomena. The paper speculates on the meaning of facts and events like Ai Weiwei’s attempt to reframe the image of the drowned Syrian child Alan Kurdi by portraying himself in the identical pose of Alan’s corpse on a shore, creating a copy of the original, but a quasi-identical copy with very special properties, namely, an object of aesthetic investigation that finds in contemporary art museums a public space where it could resonate. For the fate of the original image would have been different, it would have resonated in the formless ether of social media for one week or two and then die down in people’s transient private memories. Contemporary art museums have become, in fact, reserves of memory and moral insight, engaging and educating communities in sharing ideas and images, developing innovative processes aimed at negotiating the new perimeters of citizenship.