MUSEUM OBJECTS, BETWEEN CLASSIFICATION AND THE BECOMING

The text introduces a reflection on the frameworks traditionally imposed to the museum objects questioning their empirical value in contemporary times. The life of the museum object that happens both inside and out of the formal institutions produces different classificatory and informational frames. The paper calls attention to a change of perception on the musealia due to two different phenomena, which are: (1) the new meaning attributed to the artistic object by contemporary art acting in the reorganization of the discourse on these objects and the value invested in them; and (2) the enterprise of ecomuseums, that put on the background of museum discourse the material objects prioritizing the musealization of the human relations with the social environment. In both cases, the classificatory categories inhabited by museum objects were disturbed, which leads to the conception of a new category of thought that we propose to call the object-becoming. This brief analysis of the museum field aims to discuss the specificity of the musealized objects and to understand, from the different thinking strands related to the theory of the object, how the processes of meaning and value production are conceived when an object enters the museological chain.