Law of Bronze, from Régis Michel's "Alibi?" in the introduction to Julia Kristeva's The Severed Head

It has already been a long time since museums entered the mechanized age of the culture industry. And analysis has lost none of its relevance. In fact, it is more topical than ever. One is tempted to believe that the end of the century resolved to illustrate these theses with renewed care. Because mass culture had devastating effects on the institution. It seems as if renovating its walls was inversely proportionate to renovating its ideas. Under the polished molding and the pompous paneling, it's the same scene repeated ad nauseam: it's the same idiom that pervades throughout like a learned esperanto. This repressive language, in which the angular myths of bourgeois identity thrive—nineteenth-century ideology: artists as subject (master), work as causality (linear), and history as origin (archeological)—accommodates no dissonance, no dissidence, no difference: it became the natural language (some would say the jargon) of the institution. By adopting the history of art as the universal vulgate—this universality understood of course by one class or caste—museums condemned themselves to authoritarian sermonizing on repetitive values. To the bronze law of the culture industry: the triumph of the identical. Thus they bear a manifest responsibility in this unforeseen process of the reduction of meaning (and the sterilization of works). One would expect them to be, above all else, places of freedom, diversity, and alterity. But, regrettably, that isn't the case. The very discourse of history, which is a discourse of truth, where, in its obsolete form, one ignores the linguistic turn, forbids them to be pluralist. And the hierarchical constraints of the government, which is not really made to manage intellectual products, impose on them the yoke of uniformity. Which brings us back to the ideological role (see Althusser) of the workings of the state. Here the culture industry takes up the regrettable task of training minds that Nietzsche mocked. Grand exhibitions, which are, for the most part, monographs, adhere to the intangible paradigm of mural biography, or the Vasariism of picture molding. And the economic stakes, which never cease to grow, promote the profitable development of an advertising ideal that changes the artists on display into human sandwiches. It is not at all a question of stimulating the eye of the spectator. Very much the opposite: taming his gaze. With the help of a monist credo meant to determine how the works are to be glossed. Museums are thus becoming a crucial mechanism in the standardization of prefixed knowledge: of a culture in pieces.