박물관 및 미술관 진흥법 개정 효과와 과제 = A Study on the Revision Effects and Tasks of the Museum and Art Gallery Support Act

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

The Museums Act was enacted as the first basic law on museums in 1984, but problems were raised concerning its lacking effectiveness as a organic law. Replacing it, the Museum and Art Gallery Support Act(hereinafter referred to as “the Act”) was enacted on November 30, 1991 and came into force on June 1, 1992. The Act has been revised 32 times in total so far. Going through those revisions, regulations on museum establishment and operation were eased and the number of museums has increased rapidly across the nation. The Act thus attained the goal of museum “promotion” in terms of quantity. There have been concerns raised, however, that the Act was enacted and have been revised without careful consideration to qualitative improvement of museums because it has been heavily concentrated on the quantitative expansion of them. Specifically, the Act has put art galleries in parallel with museums in its regulations since the enactment of it and thus become a factor inhibiting the work and policy efficiency of museums because of errors to the statistical data of museums, etc. The relaxed regulation of museum registration and the reinforced authority of local government resulted in the chaotic establishment of public museums. In addition, the undifferentiated museum manpower training system, which is only focused on curator training, makes it difficult to educate and place people specialized in various fields of museum. The study proposed a number of solutions to the problems raised above including enacting and revising the Framework Act on Museums to clearly define and put the position of art galleries as a subordinate concept of museums, making it compulsory to register a public museum, and introducing a professional qualification system divided according to the roles in museums.