This article reflects on the project of creating multicultural inclusive museums. By definition, an inclusive museum honors the cultural constituencies it is paid to serve. Yet in reality, cultural sensitivity is one thing and education another. Blurring the distinction risks sacrificing education, a moral mandate, to the ideal of equality. My article points to examples where, for fear of offending, a museum betrays its educational mission. I trace the affinity between inclusive museum politics and consumerist culture and consider the case of the Creation Museum-a museum that, as per the multicultural ideal, tailors science to the sensibility of its customer base, in this instance the sensibility of American biblical literalists.

This article is an assessment of the moral problems that beset cultural relativism, that is, the belief that the nature of human existence and value is strictly dependent on, and therefore autonomously proper to, each particular culture. According to this view, the human experience never transcends its native ground. It is, hence, no use judging one form of the human experience against another since no universal non-local yardstick exists to measure them by. After exposing the flaws and contradictions inherent in this view, the author draws a picture of the consequences of upholding cultural relativism, particularly as it shapes the moral self-understanding of its followers in this instance and, for illustrative purpose, Richard Rorty. Finally, the article sketches an argument for a humanistic understanding of culture, a theory that allows us to hold that human existence does vary according to local and historical communities, and yet holds to a moral centre valid across all human culture.

Pictures and tears: A history of people who have cried in front of paintings, London, Routledge, 2004. 3 Chief among the anti-psychological school of portrait criticism, see Ernst van de Wetering, 'The multiple functions of Rembrandt's self portraits', in Christopher White and Quentin Buvelot (eds),

No abstract

No abstract