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and relationships between objects in foreground and background, as well as
objects placed alongside one another. The redesign took as a model George
Perec’s novel Life: A User’s Manual in which 99 interlinked parts piece together
the lives of the inhabitants of a Parisian apartment building. Perec’s novel tells
‘an infinite amount of stories brimming with detail within a tightly designed
space’, and offered a model for ‘the treatment of superabundance’, because its
‘open structure’ allows the book to be ‘read in countless different ways’ (Frans
Bevers and Steven Engelsman cited in Staal and de Rijk 2003: 60, 97).
This emphasis on interconnectedness and correspondences represents a
paradigm shift in the ways in which knowledge is structured and visitors
addressed, across a range of different kinds of museums. Such developments are
linked to changed understandings of the museum’s relationships with its
visitors. The director of the Louvre acknowledges this, asking:
How can we reconcile the new social and educational role of the museum
with our heritage sometimes heavy with styles of presentation that is based
on categories largely inherited from the 19th century and intended only for
the connoisseur and the art historian? We talk of comparisons, corres-
ponding echoes, parallels, cross-references, and yet we display our collec-
tions in departments, by techniques, by schools. At a time when much
thought is given to mondialisation, we are still constrained by the cultural
boundaries of the past. What is at stake is certainly the understanding by
the public of what it sees.
(Loyette cited in O’Neill 2004: 198)

Loyette associates historicism with the nineteenth-century museum. However,
Bann has pointed out that even modern art museums did not abandon the
historicist paradigm: ‘The Museum of Modern Art, in its original form and
until quite recently, simply enshrined the pantheon of great modern artists
and their works in due, historical succession’ (2003: 120). The desire to reach
and communicate with visitors had to be balanced against the role of the
museum in giving ‘historical and objective validity’ to the art objects in its
collection, and therefore suppressing the curious and subjective motivations
guiding collecting practices (Bann 2003: 126). Nor it is simply a case of choos-
ing between a return to curiosity, with its emphasis on interconnectedness and
diversity, and straightforward historicism. Bann mentions other rejections of
historicism introduced in the 1990s ‘with mixed results’. These have led to ‘a
more punctual, thematic, and often (it must be admitted) haphazard associ-
ation of ideas’ (2003: 120).
In the Tate Modern in London, the evolutionary paradigm for displaying
modern art – introduced in the 1930s by MoMA director Alfred H. Barr – has
been replaced with a thematic arrangement. The challenge the Tate Modern