The Duality Of The Structure Of The Museum

Instead of being still, the world of museum is a community that contains several paradoxes, each of which includes factors growing and contrasting with each other, and owing to these conflicts and contradictions, it developed and evolved since it come into the world. The structure of museum contains a relationship of paradox------the dual nature, and most of all, the paradox of "elitism" and "populism", or the paradox of "elite culture" and "popular culture", in which each factor conflicts and combines with the other. Focused on the dual nature of art museum, this thesis reorganizes and analyzes the historical relationships between "elitism" and "populism", which includes compresence, crisscross, as well as competition. Through the study of academic treatises and other cases about art museums at home or abroad (e.g. British Museum, Brooklyn Museum, and National Art Museum of China, etc.), we introduce and conclude the dual nature of the museum structures, such as the dual nature of spatial structure, subjective structure, spreading structure, and so on.In this thesis, we proposed that the dual nature is not formed in certain era or in nertain society, and this dual nature based on the nature of the society. In essence, no matter how significantly the definition, conception or form of museum changes, the dual nature is always exist, which is a breakthrough point of further studies. We focused on fundamental research for the development of theory for museums in China, and exposed the further path for the domestic art museums.