Abstract:Museums take “authenticity preservation” as their core mission, making authenticity the logical starting point for objects to enter their collections. However, once objects are admitted, they are continuously reconstructed through the successive operations of collection, knowledge production, and digital translation as times change, leading their authenticity into a threefold paradox of promise, reconstruction, and suspension. Throughout the entire life history of museum objects, the collection stage establishes the material promise of authenticity at the cost of decontex-tualization; the knowledge production stage, through professional discourse, achieves the meaning reconstruction of authenticity while reducing it to operable authentication standards and internalizable cultural capital; the digital translation stage, through technological reconstruction, tends toward the suspension and “hauntologization” of authenticity, giving rise to a new form in which the physical and the virtual are deeply intertwined. This evolution reveals a fundamental dilemma: museums commit themselves to “authenticity preservation”, yet in their own operations continuously undermine the certainty of authenticity. The paradox of museum object authenticity is not a simple dissolution of traditional authenticity, but rather the result of the mutual penetration and interplay of museum practices, cultural governance, and technological logic. It pushes authenticity studies beyond the static dichotomies of the physical and the simulacrum, the material and the informational, presence and absence, redirecting attention to the constitutive, processual, and relational dimensions of “objects” in the process of musealization, thereby providing a key perspective and necessary theoretical reference for grasping the ethical dilemmas and cultural mission of contemporary museums.
宋厚鹏. 从收藏到知识生产:博物馆物的本真性悖论[J]. 《深圳大学学报》(人文社科版), 2026, 43(4): 60-69.
SONG Hou-peng. From Collection to Knowledge Production: The Authenticity Paradox of Museum Objects. , 2026, 43(4): 60-69.
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