There is No Essential Museum

Abstract

As a museologist, and having worked many years in museums of cultural history and on museum exhibitions, I always find it very inspiring and highly interesting to read well-thought-out texts about actual museum exhibitions, and Søren M. Sindbæk’s (2022) article ‘Pirates in the Age of Populism – New Viking Exhibitions in Stockholm and Copenhagen’ is no exception. Well written, and with a clear stance, Sindbæk gives us a vivid overview, and an engaged review, of two recently opened Scandinavian exhibitions about the Vikings. If museums and museum exhibitions are to have an opportunity to develop, feedback of this sort is highly valuable. Heritage exhibition reviews are – at least in a Swedish context, with the now well-established digital museum magazine Utställningskritik, Exhibition Critique, at the forefront – entering the realm of professional criticism where reviews of literature, art and music have for ages created discussion and sparked debate, and this is just amazing. Sindbæk guides us through the two exhibitions with wit and authority; I have no problem at all in relating to his feeling of ‘metal fatigue’, having seen exhibitions with way too many objects in that material category. Another, more heartbreaking, highlight is Sindbæk’s beautifully-captured reflection on the mounting of a block-lifted child’s grave, the Birka Girl, in the exhibition at the Swedish History Museum. The ‘star of the former exhibition’, Sindbæk (2022:13–14) writes, now seems a bit oddly placed: ‘She is waiting in the corridor as you leave the last room, penned in