Moroccan museums do not exist. Moroccan museums are failed institutions. These two statements are the most common responses that Moroccan artists, curators, and academics initially give when asked to talk about museums in Morocco. The museums that they refer to are the national museums, and their critique of the institution is ultimately a critique of state support for arts infrastructures. National museums do not respond to local needs; there is no developed arts education in primary and high schools, there are no art departments in Moroccan universities, there is no national inventory of sites of patrimony, and ministerial politics reward...

Although the cultural elite has lamented the lack of meaningful national museums in Morocco since the postindependence period, local markets and corporate marketplaces have reinterpreted the museum for their own purposes and profit. Whether through small medina businesses that advertise themselves as museums or large corporations and financial institutions that create museums and galleries of modern art, the Moroccan marketplace has fully embraced the idea of the museum as a way to generate income, investment, and prestige. In contrast to national museums, which appear as outdated and unsuccessful symbolic models from modernization politics of the 1960s, for better or for...

Where do objects of outrageous memory go? What place is there in national museums and corporate collections for the curious and the historically bizarre? In 1979 art historian E. H. Gombrich bemoaned the scientific didacticism and lack of creativity of the modern museum:

I have a gloomy vision of a future museum in which the contents of Aladdin’s cave will have been removed to the storeroom and all that will be left will be an authentic lamp from the period of the Arabian nights with a large diagram at its side explaining how oil lamps worked, where the wick was...

What would it mean to create a museum of art that houses discourse rather than objects? And positions on art and the modern rather than modern art itself? For many in the museum world, this would be the ultimate travesty, the betrayal of the object, and the end of art as Hegel predicted. In the Discursive Museum, a 2001 symposium held in Vienna, artists, museum curators, and scholars discussed the future of art in a context in which the material object is rapidly vanishing and being replaced by installations that are ephemeral or cannot “endure the test of time,” in...

Every summer, cultural festivals take place all over Morocco. From June through August 2006, more than fifteen festivals of art, music, and cinema were staged in beachside towns and large urban areas. With displays and performances that mix elements of folklore, technology, the “traditional,” and the “modern,” the streets of Moroccan towns and cities become an animated scene for the articulation of Moroccan contemporary culture. So animated, heterogeneous, and pluralistic has this festival scene become that the semiofficial newspaper for the Islamist PJD (Justice and Development) party has called these street festivals “vectors of decadence,” and, ironically, certain Moroccan artists...