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Are exhibitions neutral containers that present art, or are they arguments in their own right—shaped by institutional priorities, economic pressures, and cultural assumptions? This question has driven the study of exhibition history since the 1970s, when scholars first began treating exhibitions not as transparent windows onto art but as objects of critical analysis in their own right. The frameworks that followed each offered a different answer, and their competition has transformed how we understand the politics of display.
The first systematic framework to emerge was the Museological Approach (1970–1985). Its practitioners treated the museum as an institutional context that could be studied through its visible infrastructure: floor plans, catalogue structures, installation photographs, and the physical arrangement of objects. By documenting how museums displayed their collections, this approach made visible the choices that shaped what audiences saw. Yet its descriptive focus had a clear limit: it could show what was displayed and where, but it struggled to explain why those choices were made or whose interests they served.
That explanatory gap was addressed by the Social History of Art (1970–2000), which brought the analytical tools of Marxist and feminist critique to bear on exhibition practices. Where the Museological Approach described institutional patterns, the Social History of Art asked how those patterns reflected class hierarchies, gender exclusions, and economic structures. A scholar working in this tradition might examine how a museum's acquisition policies privileged aristocratic portraits while ignoring working-class material culture, or how exhibition catalogues framed women artists as exceptions rather than participants. This framework persisted for three decades because it offered a powerful diagnostic: exhibitions were not just arrangements of objects but instruments of social reproduction. Over time, however, its broad claims about class and ideology were increasingly absorbed into more specialized frameworks that could address specific dimensions of power—race, colonialism, institutional economics—with greater precision.
Running alongside the Social History of Art, the New Museology (1980–2000) imported a different set of theoretical resources. Drawing on Michel Foucault's analysis of disciplinary institutions, Pierre Bourdieu's concept of cultural capital, and emerging postcolonial theory, New Museology reframed the museum itself as a knowledge-producing apparatus. Unlike the earlier Museological Approach, which had treated institutional context as a backdrop, New Museology argued that the museum actively constructed the categories—"art," "artifact," "primitive," "modern"—that it claimed merely to display. This was a shift from description to critique: the question was no longer just how museums displayed objects, but how they produced the very distinctions that made those objects meaningful. New Museology's reflexivity—its insistence that scholars examine their own position within the institutions they studied—became a lasting contribution that later frameworks would inherit.
The 1990s saw the emergence of three distinct frameworks, each responding to a different dimension of exhibition practice that earlier approaches had left underdeveloped.
Institutional Critique (1990–Present) grew out of an art-world practice rather than an academic theory. Artists such as Hans Haacke, Andrea Fraser, and Fred Wilson had already been producing works that exposed the economic networks, funding structures, and hidden labor behind museum displays. When scholars formalized this as a framework, they focused on the specific mechanisms—corporate sponsorship, board membership, real estate development—that shaped exhibition content. Unlike New Museology, which theorized museums as general knowledge systems, Institutional Critique traced concrete financial and organizational flows. It coexisted with the Social History of Art but narrowed its scope: where the older framework examined broad class structures, Institutional Critique followed the money into specific exhibition budgets and donor agreements.
The Global Turn (1990–Present) addressed a problem that the Social History of Art and New Museology had both neglected: the Eurocentric geography of exhibition history. Major survey exhibitions like "Magiciens de la Terre" (1989) had sparked debate about whether Western institutions could display non-Western art without reproducing colonial hierarchies. The Global Turn framework asked how exhibitions had historically constructed a center-periphery model of artistic value, and whether curatorial practices could be reformed to allow multiple modernities. It overlapped with the concerns of New Museology—both critiqued the museum's power to classify—but extended the analysis beyond the museum walls to the international exhibition circuit.
Biennial Studies (1990–Present) emerged as a format-specific subarea rather than a general theory. The explosive growth of biennials, triennials, and large-scale international exhibitions after 1990 created a new object of study distinct from the permanent museum collection. Biennial Studies examines how these temporary, often itinerant exhibitions generate different dynamics: they are more responsive to geopolitical shifts, more dependent on corporate and state sponsorship, and more likely to foreground contemporary art over historical collections. This framework is narrower in scope than the Global Turn—it focuses on a specific exhibition format rather than global art flows—but it shares the Global Turn's interest in how exhibitions map cultural power across national borders. The two frameworks often work in tandem: a scholar might use Biennial Studies to analyze the structure of the Venice Biennale and the Global Turn to critique its persistent Western gatekeeping.
The Decolonial Exhibition History (2000–Present) extends the Global Turn while fundamentally challenging its assumptions. Where the Global Turn sought to include non-Western art within existing exhibition structures, Decolonial Exhibition History argues that the structures themselves are products of colonial epistemology. Inclusion is not enough; what is needed is a transformation of the categories—"art," "museum," "exhibition"—that were imposed through colonial violence. This framework demands repatriation of looted objects, collaboration with source communities in curatorial decision-making, and recognition of Indigenous and non-Western knowledge systems as co-equal with Western art history. It has absorbed the reflexivity of New Museology—scholars must examine their own institutional positions—but pushes further by insisting that the museum's physical collections are themselves sites of ongoing colonial harm.
Decolonial Exhibition History is currently the most dynamic and contested framework in the subfield. Its proponents have driven major institutional changes, from the restitution debates in European museums to the rise of participatory curating in settler-colonial contexts. Its critics, including some working within the Global Turn, worry that its demands for structural transformation can become a new orthodoxy that forecloses other forms of critical practice.
Today, the frameworks that remain active—Biennial Studies, the Global Turn, Institutional Critique, and Decolonial Exhibition History—coexist in a productive tension. They agree on a core premise that the Museological Approach first articulated: exhibitions are not neutral. All four frameworks treat display as a site of power, knowledge production, and cultural negotiation. They disagree, however, on where the most urgent power lies. Institutional Critique points to economic networks and corporate influence. The Global Turn and Biennial Studies focus on geopolitical hierarchies and the uneven distribution of curatorial authority. Decolonial Exhibition History insists that the deepest structures are epistemological and that reform without epistemic transformation is complicity. The Social History of Art and New Museology have largely been absorbed into these later frameworks—their insights about class and institutional reflexivity are now taken for granted rather than argued for—while the Museological Approach survives mainly as a methodological toolkit for archival reconstruction. The next frontier, already visible in emerging scholarship, is the integration of digital methods: how do online exhibitions, virtual museums, and algorithmic curation reshape the questions that these frameworks were designed to answer?