New challenges, new priorities: analyzing ethical dilemmas from a stakeholder's perspective in the Netherlands

Abstract

This article aims to explore new directions in analyzing ethical problems as a subject of museological training. The regular updating of approaches toward applied theories and ethics should be an integral part of the professional self-definition of museum studies programs. This self-definition and its regular actualization serve as an answer to important changes that have been taking place in the heritage field and in society as a whole during the last decade. By using the controversy about the removal of some works of art by the Iranian born artist, Sooreh Hera, from an exhibition in the Municipal Museum of The Hague, the validity of an ethics model that is under construction at the Reinwardt Academy (Amsterdam) will be analyzed. The article emphasizes the position of the professional when confronted with controversies, rather than theorizing controversy as such. After a short introduction about ethics as a basis of professionalism, this article will develop an argument for a new professional ethics based on the new relationship between museums and society. The Sooreh Hera case study illustrates the complexity of this relationship and the need to apply adequate methods of analysis in the teaching of professional ethics.

Keywords:

• museum ethics
• professionalism
• stakeholders
• Netherlands
• Sooreh Hera
• social responsibility
• museum studies

Acknowledgements

This article is based on a paper presented at the Biennial Graduate Student Conference ‘New Directions in Museum Ethics’ on 14 November 2009 at Seton Hall University in South Orange, NJ, USA, together with my colleague Paula Assunção dos Santos. I thank her for her valuable input. I also thank the bachelor and master students of the Reinwardt Academy, who, by actively participating in ethics seminars, contributed to the refining of my ideas about the analysis model presented above. I especially thank Janneke Maiburg whose overview of the Sooreh Hera case was helpful in (re)constructing the controversy.

Photographs of the contested works of art by Sooreh Hera can be found on her Web site:www.soorehhera.com/gallery.html