The article is devoted to the study of the problem of alienation of culture in a modern museum and the processes of actualization of objects and phenomena of history in the space of the paramuseum. In the center of the author’s attention is the theme of creating the illusion of existential comfort. It explores the contradiction between the need for museification of culture in order for a modern person to be able to appeal to it when building one’s own identity, and the constant desire to place the culture of the past on a safe reservation. The issue of aestheticization of cultural objects in the museum space and the role of a museum in interpreting, preserving and distorting their meaning is raised. The museum, created as a repository of antiquities, a collection of masterpieces, today has become the most sensitive system that responds to changes in the life of culture and society. An axiological analysis of modern museums shows their growing popularity as an element of the entertainment industry, while their aesthetic, analytical, and intellectual role is becoming obscure. Respect for the museum as a keeper of cultural memory, for the focus of scientific life is disappearing. Instead, a simplified “attraction museum” and paramuseum is coming to the fore, creating endless games with historical objects, reconstructions, visitors and interpretations of the events of history and culture. The authors of the article are among the first to turn to the concept of “paramuseum” and give it a comprehensive assessment. For the first time, a scientific classification of paramuseums (on the example of paramuseums of northwestern Russia) is proposed. Their main features and characteristics are identified. A synergistic approach to the processes of actualization and alienation of cultural objects in the museum environment made it possible to include the viewer, the recipient, as the third, necessary component of this system. This made it possible to conclude that museum values are alienated or updated not by themselves, but only in relation to the “person watching.” Thus, modern museums and paramuseums are a form of value-based self-consciousness of society, demonstrating the total stratification of post-culture society, its fragmentation into value clusters that can represent culture as a whole only in the process of analytical consciousness, but not in the collection of subject series.
Role of Museums in Education