Museum at crossroads: new challenges and prospects

The author explores phenomena that reveal the most important problems for the modern professional museum community, as well as interested public, taking into account such concepts as «museum», «cultural heritage», «cultural values». The museum is regarded as a social institution, is constantly experiencing increasing pressure from agents the leisure industry, as well as society wants to see in the museum a source of entertainment. The paper examines the process of introduction of modern information technologies in museums. The author criticizes the actions of the virtualization of the museum space, the event, to create digital copies with the aim of gradually blurring the boundaries between original and its reproduction. The democratization of the museum environment simplifies the process of attaching to the cultural heritage, but, however, leads to a reduction of the deep meanings of culture, its semiotic codes. The reason for the policy of simplification in the processes of museum communication, the author sees the mechanisms of the capitalist market, the desire of the ruling transnational bourgeois «elite» to redistribute public property in their favor to legalize the possession of genuine cultural heritage, concentrated in the hands of narrow social groups.