Building up an academic discipline on material assemblages: modern Europe's museum developments and 'museology'

At the turn of the century in which European colonialism was reaching its zenith and modernization was gathering speed, public museums were institutionalized. This paper looks into the part these European modern museums played in territorializing academic disciplines like anthropology and art history. The museums to deal with are the British Museum and the National Gallery in London, Mus?e du Louvre in Paris, and Museumsinsel in Berlin. Rather than in-depth detailed analysis of each museum, the aim is to explore the ways in which these museological institutions interacting with modern disciplines in the wider colonial context objectified other cultures and formulated a framework of the world through classification and comparison of material things, on the basis of the judgement of their artistic values. This exploration is also to rethink theoretical positions and perspectives on the museum in Korea. It is remarkable in Europe that such academic fields as history, art history, anthropology and cultural studies look for new possibilities of museology in conjunction with the recent proliferation of studies on the museum as a medium to construct and deconstruct knowledge. Meanwhile, the mammoth European museums which are often considered a stronghold of museology advocate the 'universal museum' themselves, quite the modern idea but in a revised rendering. Under these circumstances, this paper seeks to shed light on the definition of the museum as an arena in which scholarly discourses about art, culture and history can be created and contested, on the effectiveness of the museum as a communication medium in a postcolonial era, and on the need to pay trans-disciplinary attention to the museum in its broadest sense.