So, we can but wonder why does The Romanian Peasant Museum seem to escape all these classifications and definitions? Why is it so hard to place this "traditional man" among the eponymous characters of the museums? Maybe because "traditional man," as imagined by Bernea, does not actually exist, while the Romanian Peasant Museum isn't actually a museum! Bernea's construction does not reproduce any social world and not even evokes it in any way; it only invokes an ideal world in which he believes and which he loves. The museum does not exhibit traditional man, but it produces traditional gestures. It doesn't refer to the order outside the museum, but it rebuilds it from inside.[5] Authenticity does not refer to the exhibits, but to the action of exhibiting in itself, as the museum rather exists through the gestures of its creators, gestures that "experiment something old," that freely arrange objects, within the limits of ranged objects, of the rules themselves. As Gerard Lenclud mentions, "everything happens as if tradition would not lie in ideas, but directly in practices, as if this would be less a thinking system, and more manners to do things" (Lenclud, 1987).

Bernea should have confessed to this, probably, while paraphrasing Flaubert: l'homme traditionel, c'est moi!

The policy of authenticity: a healing museum

Therefore, no wonder the Romanian Peasant Museum is hard to place in the alternative: "community museum versus art museum." Although it uses both dimensions, the Romanian Peasant Museum does stage neither the truth of ethnographical museums, nor the beautiful of art museums, but, in a certain sense, the good.[6] Therefore, what the museum invokes is ultimately Authentic Man, that is, the deep and unseen significance assigned to "traditional man." This significance expresses the hidden messianic dimension of the museum. It is, in fact, the one which stirred the admiration and adversity with which the museum was seen from its very beginning and we cannot understand its statute in Romanian society, without a detailed analysis of this dimensions.

When wittingly asked by Gabriel Liiceanu if the Romanian Peasant Museum was (...) "not only a gesture of memory, but also one of a fighting spirit," "a polemic gesture oriented towards the present days," Bernea admits: "It is. Why not admit so? I see the state we're in now, so I admit it is true." It is not by chance that the museum was perceived and presented once too often, both by its creators and by its many admirers, as a "rebirth". And no one referred only to the strict existence of the old Museum by the avenue: in a secular, material world, which nevertheless needs a rebirth more than ever," says Horia Bernea at the opening of the museum. In her turn, Irina Nicolau is as explicit as she can be: ?In my opinion, Romanian society at the end of this century needs a healing museum dealing with its diseased present (Nicolau, 1997)?.

[5] Horia Patapievici guesses a part of this dimension when, in a documentary dedicated to the museum, he states that such a museum "would prevail or fall according to its capacity to gather around it, at certain dates, people able to reproduce objects in it."  Patapievici was actually referring to the craftsmen's fairs, but he was intending to state much more. The museum is what it is through the authenticity of its exhibits--in other words, through the conformity with the traditional origin and function of the peasant objects of its collections. But this authenticity must be reproduced outside the museum, in the real world, so that the museum may last and preserve its sense and function. Therefore, should the museum give life (and probably revive) and maintain "an authentic world," beyond its museographic world?

[6]Relevantly enough, Andrei Pleşu ends the film dedicated to the Romanian Peasant Museum, confessing that, to him, entering the Museum evokes every time the embodiment of the laws of the city, from Plato's dialogue.