Historical Museums as Flexible Cubes: Inherited Buildings and Curatorial Decisions

Abstract

If digital platforms present the same content as physical exhibition spaces, what distinguishes the experience of visiting a museum in person? This article argues that the distinction resides not in singular encounters with an object, but in the relation between an inherited building and the curators who stage successive exhibitions within it. This argument is developed through two temporary exhibitions held in the first-floor hall of the House of Histories—part of the National Museum of Lithuania—located in an eighteenth-century palace in Vilnius. The exhibition Riding the Wave of Paris Exhibitions guided visitors along a single chronological path, whereas History Wags Its Tail , presented in the same rooms six months earlier, dispersed visitors into selective pathways. The 2 × 3 room grid and arched openings remain untouched; the curatorial negotiations differed. The article names this condition the flexible cube, a framework that revises Brian O’Doherty’s white cube and Carol Duncan’s ritual script for the era of converted buildings. The comparison shows that the historical museum is neither neutral nor a fixed script, but a co-author whose contribution—familiar in principle, yet rarely isolated in practice—becomes visible only when successive exhibitions are compared within the same unaltered rooms.