Hedvig Győry: Mélanges offerts a Edith Varga „Le lotus qui sort de terre” (Bulletin du Musée Hongrois des Beaux-Arts Supplément 1. Budapest, 2001)

SAPHIN AZ-AMAL NAGUIB: Cultural Heritage and its Display

Picture 4. Displaying, interpreting and explaning. The curator s view and the polysemy of culture heritage. Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest, 1985. Photo by I. Ipach obtained in the form of captions where pictures and texts complement each other. This simplifies both research and dissemination procedures. Material culture is not fixed in one place but travels in cyberspace. That is a space freed from the constraints of physical boundaries, an open world of pure information where each and everyone are both a sender and a receiver, and where everybody is able to communicate with everybody. This ubiquity and reciprocity facilitates the creation of networks of specialists, the rapid exchange of news, points of views and inquiries. As nearness in cybcrculturc is not contingent of distance, scholarship is promoted in new ways. It is accessible and reaches a wide and varied audience. To meet and accommodate the demands and the trends of their time museums are developing new patterns of display and new methods of research and dissemination. However, scholarly work becomes vulnerable when challenged by what one may describe as the trivialization of culture or disneyfication. Disneyfication may be considered as a result of the globalisation process and an apparent effort to uniformize cultures. I have argued elsewhere that knowledge is no more the privilege of an elite, but has become a commodity, an