The modern museum is not only in the sphere of mass interests, but also serves as a reflection and expression of certain mass trends. While maintaining the status of a classical cultural institution, it was to a large extent precisely the museum that has become an arena of public discord on determining the strategies of cultural reproduction. This issue gains a pronouncedly contentious character due to the rapid development of information formats of traditional leisure now including interactive technologies, arbitrary historical reconstructions, elements of theatricalization. In “Escape from Amnesia” (A. Huyssen) the ‘society of total spectacle’ demands searching for new means, which often contribute to loss and substitution of values. The visitor’s interest towards the history of the quotidian greatly influences the dynamics of changing the creative potential of a museum, predominantly a memorial museum. Long-term practices of modeling the historical space reveal the internal form of the concept of ‘ex-position’. This is the natural cause of an internal conflict, when being ‘arranged in a straight line’ replaces the principles of accurate and documentally verified positioning of memorial objects. ‘Museumness’ should not supplant ‘the quotidian’, ‘the existential’; however, the functional principle of arranging the objects, their ‘pattern’ is often replaced by the composite approach, in which ‘decorative’ or ‘design’ solutions become dominant. This trend actively competes with the key theoretical foundations of museum source studies, and the traditional museum is increasingly transforming into a kind of parallel model of culture. The memorial object, as a fact of intellectual history, is significant within the material culture and spiritual heritage. At the same time, the alleged meanings and false semiotization often substitute the biographical realities, when ‘fit for exposition’ is everything that the mass museum visitor connects in his mind with his arbitrary understanding of the past. These are key aspects of the subject of modern museum criticism. This article discloses our understanding of the memorial exposition as a self-organizing system with a certain aesthetic code. Methodologically significant is the existential turn towards ‘evidence paradigm’ – giving up the impersonal demonstration of old things. This is a turn towards the model ‘things-speak’ (self-awareness, self-disclosure of things) – towards the structure that communicates ideas and life meanings. It is where the memorial object, understood as ‘message’, ‘material communication’, can disclose the fullness of its historical authenticity.
Technical aspects of the reconstruction of historic gardens