纽约州立大学水牛城分校

The Department of Art offers an MA in Critical Museum Studies; a two-year, 36-credit program of study conceived according to a more traditional pedagogical model, with a broad distribution of courses across a wide geographical and chronological span. Less modern and contemporary in focus than our visual studies degrees, the MA in Critical Museum Studies is ideal either as a stepping-stone to a doctoral program in art history or as a credential degree for a museum/gallery career.

The museum world is in the midst of new pressures and is struggling with shifting paradigms, attempting to negotiate perhaps the most seismic changes since its 19th century origins. Today, as museums negotiate a digital shift in a newly globalized museum world, a host of new pressures have arisen. The demands of social media and edutainment as well as digital heritage and repatriation are among only the most visible of these rapidly shifting paradigms. As private capital increasingly pours into the new genre of the private or single benefactor museums, traditional city museums are correspondingly impoverished. A series of recent “culture wars” turned on museum exhibitions, making the museum not only the newly politicized arbiter of official culture, but placing it in the cross hairs of as yet unresolved cultural skirmishes. Adding to these woes, newly vocal populations are beginning to question their invisibility within traditional museums, even as new “identity” oriented museums continue to develop.

A newly emerged for-profit museum model, with vastly different standards of educational import, and even historical accuracy, is drawing visitors who view the museum exclusively in terms of entertainment. Even some non-profit museums have begun to operate as entertainment complexes. Increasingly communities view museums as an integral part of the local economy, a reliable generator of tourist dollars, increasing the pressure on museums to be more widely popular and less the preserve of the specialist. Yet even as new museums proliferate, these pressures go largely unaddressed.

The MA in Critical Museums Studies, a new museum studies degree for the 21st Century, will instead place these issues front and center.