Art and cultural institutions as social extensions of personal self-identity

The paper discusses artworks and artefacts considered as both cultural heritage and meaningful tokens for personal self-identity. The arguments come mostly from phenomenological understanding of self-identity and art, but the terminological toolkit comes mostly from the Extended Mind Thesis. While many museologists and theorists of culture argue that objects presented in a particular social context can shape group identity, I believe in taking this question to a lower, personal level. In this paper, I argue that we build our self-identity partially by anchoring our memories with significant art and heritage objects. I state that artworks, mediated by cultural context immersion of museums and galleries, serve as self-identity extensions. Since I find both self-identity and art structured as sets of cultural meanings wrapped in material scaffoldings, I draw a relation between those two, showing the crucial meaning of material cultural objects for the formation of our self-identity.