Abstract
The popularization of the internet, with all its potentials for interaction and participation fed into the cultural democratization argument, combined with the belief that these changes were new. This claim for novelty is highly problematic, as it tends to ignore the history of cultural participation, which stretches out much further than utopian ICT theories want us to believe.
There is also a tendency towards an individualized interpretation of the social, which leads to a downplaying of societal structures, including the importance of organisational structures in providing cultural elites with safe havens, and the importance of discursive structures like professional identities and audience identities. This texts combines both critiques, by looking at the 20th century history of participation within the cultural realm.
Arguably, the arts played a significant role in producing these cultural-democratic discourses and practices, and for that reason this article will first discuss this history, only to move towards the debates on museums and participation afterwards. This historical overview shows that one should be careful with launching claims of novelty when discussing cultural participation.
It also allows me to emphasize the importance of discursive structures as conditions of possibility for the organization of participation.